Harini Calamur: What criminal type are you?

Go to any large city in India, and you will see the same picture.

Traffic snarls, motorists breaking traffic signals, pavements taken over by shops and vendors, squatters, potholes, delayed construction and general inconvenience for citizens. Most of this inconvenience arises because there are people who break the law or break rules.

Most of us, if not all of us, personally know people who break the law without a second thought. We all know vehicles must be stopped before a pedestrian crossing. We all know a red light means that a vehicle comes to a full stop. We know that talking on the mobile phone while driving is not allowed. We know that drinking and driving is illegal. Yet we see people break these rules on a daily basis. We know that we shouldn’t give false claims for medical or LTA.

We all know that when we go to a shop we ask for a bill, yet for a few rupees less or to save a minute or two, we don’t ask for the bill. A legitimate bill allows the government to collect taxes. No bill means no tax. Most of this kind of behaviour for many of us is justifiable. After all, why should you follow traffic rules, no one else does. Similarly, why pay taxes? Why not save that money?

After all, we know that the political class is going to eat up that money.

Take this behaviour one step ahead. We all know people who have given or taken dowry. We know people who beat their wives. We have heard, in hushed voices of, people who have chosen to selectively terminate pregnancy because they don’t want a girl child. We also know of people who bribe; those who give bribes and those who take bribes. In all, most of us know a lot of people who indulge in criminal behaviour. And most likely, none of them is a politician or a goon. In most cases they are people like us.
Educated, middleclass, upper middle-class. They are professionals. Lawyers, chartered accountants, media professionals, doctors, MBAs. All break rules, break the law and get away with it.

We can turn around and justify this behaviour, and all of us know most of the justifications. These range from ‘everyone does it’ to ‘it is none of my business’. But, what most of us do not realise is that we too are indulging in criminal behaviour. There are three levels of crime. There is the criminal: the person who commits the crime. There is the person who knows in advance that a crime is going to be committed, but keeps quiet. Then there is the person who knows about a crime after it has been committed and keeps quiet. Both these can be termed accomplices.

And all are equally guilty. Breaking traffic signals or not paying tax may not be considered a major crime by most of us, but what they do reflect is an underlying malaise, which is a breakdown in the social contract. As we see more people around us breaking rules, more of us break the rules. It becomes a vicious cycle.

Amongst the more interesting theories in sociology — criminology to be precise — is the ‘Broken Windows’ theory. James Q Wilson and George Kelling observed criminal behaviour in the United States in the 1980s and observed that urban crime tends to occur more in areas with a broken windows — a result of burglary — because it indicates that people get away with crime. They also believed that it leads not to copycat crime but to the breaking of other laws or norms of acceptable behaviour.

Kelling and Wilson correlated the maintenance of order with crime prevention. Therefore if you need to control large-scale crime — and the sort of corruption stories that have been coming out are large scale crime — you need to ensure that small disorder we all see on a daily basis needs to be not only stopped, but also seen to be stopped.

In the US, the first step to checking crime was not to go after the violent criminal or burglar, but to address a simpler issue. They worked on the issue of ticketless travel in the metro system — catching the middle class, and the stopping of graffiti. Seeing the law in action led to a reduction in overall crime.

Metropolitan India needs a similar fix. It may be difficult to check all the big crime overnight. But, the reason the big crime happens is possibly people think they can get away with it. And the reason they come to hold this belief is because all around them is the visible evidence of people breaking the law without any penalties. Start penalising the middle class for all the laws they break.

For example confiscate their vehicle instead of their license for breaking a signal or driving without a helmet and you will see the knock-on effect on the society at large. Suddenly you will see people clamouring for governance.

Harini Calamur is a media entrepreneur, writer, blogger, teacher and the main slave to an imperious hound. She blogs at calamur.org/gargi and @calamur on Twitter