Policing the Police

Human Rights Watch this week highlighted how Police abuse and brutality in Sri Lanka had surged amid the COVID-19 pandemic and called for the Government to restore independent oversight of the Police, while also investigating the alleged abuses.

The HRW statement comes in the same week that a lecturer from the University of Sri Jayawardenepura alleged that policemen dressed in civilian attire had attempted to abduct him, sans an arrest warrant, as he was returning from a protest against the militarisation of education in the country.

This is by no means new behaviour as far the Sri Lankan Police goes, and it’s seemingly only getting worse.

In May, the Executive Committee of the Bar Association of Sri Lanka (BASL), as well as the SJB, strongly condemned the killing of two suspects in Police custody – the most shocking aspect being that the deaths had been predicted by the victims’ attorney just days before.

Nevertheless, Tharaka Wijesekera was killed while being detained by the Peliyagoda Special Crimes Division, allegedly “when he tried to attack Police while recovering some weapons”. On 11 May 2021, another suspect, Melon Mabula alias ‘Uru Juwa,’ had met his demise in a similar manner.

While one or two could be written off as coincidence, the sobering reality is that incidents of police brutality take place pretty frequently in Sri Lanka. In 2009, Parliament was informed by Chief Government Whip Dinesh Gunawardena that for eight months, 32 people had died in police custody. A further 26 people had died in Police custody in 2008. In many instances, the deaths were reported as having occurred when suspects were being taken to uncover hidden caches of weapons. The stock-in-trade Police answer at the time was they were shot while attempting to escape. This excuse was so transparent, that at the time it became a running joke on social media.

In September 2010, a Fundamental Rights petition was filed by a resident of Embilipitiya town in Sabaragamuwa Province that her husband had been arrested and ‘killed’ by the Police, who thereafter ‘fabricated a version to justify the killing’. After nearly a decade later, the Supreme Court in 2019 ruled this was a case of custodial death, ordering seven Police personnel and the State to pay a total compensation of Rs. 2 million to the victim’s family.

The Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka (HRCSL) says 90% of their torture complaints are against the Police, with hundreds of cases being reported each year. In 2015, it was 420 cases, in 2016, 450 cases, and in 2017, there were 380 cases.

All these instances and many others point to police brutality being a systemic problem in Sri Lanka. Police are routinely protected with transfers and other slap-on-the-wrist punishments. For decades, the State of Emergency and the Prevention of Terrorism Act provided them with often blanket legal and political protection. The institutionalised impunity was never rolled back despite the conflict ending more than a decade ago.

Minorities, the poor and the disabled are among the most vulnerable due to this continued impunity and lack of sensitisation.

But this is not just a Sri Lankan problem; the entire ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement in the US was borne out of, yes systemic racism against African Americans, but also a culture of impunity amongst law enforcement.

President Gotabaya Rajapaksa talks about a disciplined society, however, that will never be the case if the people fear those enlisted to protect them more than those that they are supposedly being protected from.