Why police should be less creative to be more efficient

A 17-year-old girl in Thanjavur died last Wednesday, 10 days after she ate rat poison. In her statement to police, the girl said she tried to kill herself unable to bear the torture and humiliation by her school hostel warden who made her clean rooms. The BJP and some other right wing groups alleged that the girl was forced by the school authorities to convert from Hinduism to Christianity. Surprising was police’s insistence – without investigating the allegation – that there was no attempt at religious conversion.

Police might have been right when they said neither the girl nor her parents had made such an allegation while the FIR was being prepared. But that doesn’t rule out a conversion attempt. Soon emerged a video in which the girl spoke about a nun pressuring her parents two years ago to convert her. While the parents later came out with the conversion charges, police were in a hurry to book the person who took the girl’s video. Finally, the Madurai bench of the Madras high court had to tell police what they should be doing: Investigate the reasons for the suicide instead of harassing the person who shot the video (the propriety of that action is a different debate).

Merits of the case aside, this episode exposes an inherent flaw in the way our police approach an investigation, to prove or disprove something rather than to find the truth. My favourite quote on criminal investigation is not of a detective, but an American actor-director. “Nothing matters but the facts,” said Blake Edwards. “Without them, the science of criminal investigation is nothing more than a guessing game.” And some of our policemen – and policewomen – are good at adding colour to their guesses. If the preliminary investigation in the Thanjavur case was arguably one of omission, routine criminal investigations in our cities are replete with contrived, even imagined, details.

Moving to Chennai in the late 1990s after working in two other cities, I was amused by the FIRs here. Going by these police reports, many people killed themselves because they suffered from stomach pain, and cases of food poisoning at noon meal centres were often caused by dead house lizards (they are no more poisonous than fish). While the curious cases of stomach aches seem to have been solved, cases of men killing their wives and mothers over culinary preferences continue. A report said the man asked for dosa and the wife served idli, and the man dropped a grinding stone on her head. When it came to ‘passion crimes’, some of the FIRs spice it up with details of multi-cornered ‘illicit relationships’ involving ‘paramours’ and ‘seductresses’.

Some of these details are sometimes relevant to the crime, but I wondered why an FIR should be voyeuristic. A ‘police writer’ quenched my curiosity when he explained that “giving the reasons and circumstances made the FIR complete”. There was the culprit — the urge to produce a “complete FIR”. Let’s be clear: An FIR, as the name suggests, is the first information report; there can be an additional FIR or the chargesheet can correct the flaws in it. While the criminal procedure code (CrPC) says an FIR merely sets the criminal law in motion (meaning it doesn’t have to be a ‘full story’), FIR writers tend to fill in the blanks, including not just the victims, suspects and circumstances, but the motive too. And the alleged motive, once part of the FIR, becomes an obligation of sorts for police to prove.

The truth, meanwhile, waits endlessly to be discovered and marched into a court of law.