Crimes and punishments in India and UK

Screaming newspaper headlines in the UK last week greeted a measurable decline in crime in England and Wales during 2012. According to a report by the Office of National Statistics (ONS) there was a drop of 9 per cent in 2012 over the previous year. More importantly, from a total of 6 million cases reported a decade ago, the figures for all forms of crime plummeted to a 3.7 million.

Unlike in India, there is no major distrust of crime statistics in that country. This is not because the police there are more honest. The opportunity in UK for suppressing crime — a specialised skill of our policemen — is limited, if not wholly absent. One contributing factor is the British Crime Survey (BCS) that records the views of crime victims and others and extrapolates them into
comprehensible percentages. However, there is now a political angle to policing.

The Conservative government has claimed that the 20 per cent reduction in police staff ushered  in by them in the 43 police forces for financial reasons has not affected police efficiency. Whether the Conservatives have spoken too early, one will have to wait for next year’s statistics.

I cannot resist the temptation to compare UK with India. In India, cynicism about police integrity and their inability to handle crime is deep-rooted. It is appalling that crime statistics receive little or no attention, especially from our law makers.

Despite the politics of it, prime minister David Cameron went public a few days ago to greet the news of a decline in crime. How nice it woulda be if Manmohan Singh were to take cognizance of the annual National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) report and say a few things about the crime scene! It would send the right signal to those who lead state police forces.

This brings us to the NCRB’s latest report (Crime in India 2012) which claims a 3.4 per cent fall in all crimes over the previous year, both under the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and Special & Local Laws (SLL). The drop is too small to make any impact on the average citizen. Moreover, there has been an increase in crimes against women, which showed a 6 per cent rise during 2012. Rapes alone accounted for nearly 25,000 of the cases (about 1,000 more than in 2011), with a conviction rate standing at a miserable 24 per cent.

A poor conviction rate promotes crime and encourages the predator. Nirbhaya is, undoubtedly, a watershed in the history of crime in our country, and it ruined an already poor reputation of India to being one of the world’s most unsafe countries for women.

Is there any hope for the future? I do not see any. When you use a busy thoroughfare, that too during the day, you can perhaps expect the police to give you a modicum of protection. Beyond that you will have to fend for yourself. This is why the theory of ‘target hardening’ articulated by some criminologists is important. You will have to make your houses more impregnable.

As for security of women, there is a lot that activists can do to enhance current levels of circumspection among women citizens, particularly those in our workforce. My stand is that a majority of policemen in the country are either clueless or too uncaring to respond to the cries of a hapless woman who finds herself at the wrong place and at wrong time. This is the tragedy of the Indian police.

The author is a former joint director of IB and a former CBI director.