Fixing the Police

Sri Lankans have a mixed bag, which is putting it mildly, when it comes to the Police. A survey carried out by Transparency International (TI) in the Asia-Pacific region has revealed Sri Lankans pay more bribes to the Police. But the heartening factor is they also feel they have the capacity to fight against the corruption. 

The survey results showed Sri Lanka has a bribery rate of 15% among 17 countries and its citizens frequently pay bribes to the Police, which will come as no surprise to anyone. It also said people pay bribes to public schools, courts and utility providers, indicating that corruption is endemic in the larger State system and the police are merely a facet in this larger framework.   

The report titled ‘People and Corruption: Asia Pacific’, which was launched on Tuesday, has surveyed nearly 22,000 people in these countries about their experience with corruption and paying bribes during the last 12 months. 

The countries included India, Pakistan, China, Sri Lanka, Australia, Taiwan, Japan, Hong Kong, Thailand, China, Myanmar, South Korea, Cambodia, Indonesia, Mongolia, Malaysia and Vietnam. Governments in Hong Kong, Vietnam, Japan, Mongolia and Malaysia were perceived to be doing badly at fighting corruption by six in 10 of their citizens. 

However, around a half or more of people living in India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Thailand had said that their Government was attempting to tackle corruption but with limited results. According to the results from the survey, Australia followed by Sri Lanka and Taiwan have done the best with the most positive ratings overall across the key corruption questions in the survey. 

In these countries, few people felt that corruption was increasing; many people felt empowered to help fight against corruption and bribery rates were very or fairly low. However, even in these well performing countries, there were still areas for improvement such as poor ratings of Government efforts to fight corruption (Australia and Taiwan) or a substantial minority of people who thought that the Police were highly corrupt (Sri Lanka). In fact this has been underscored by successive TI reports that show public perception of the Police as corrupt has not changed over the years. Incidents of Police brutality and inefficiency in the recent past has not helped repair the damage caused especially during the previous regime – a time when the Police force acted with a staggering level of impunity and violence.

It is easy to put the blame squarely on the few policemen who abuse their powers, as has been done so many times in the past. However, the public cannot ignore the toxic environment which allows them to act with such extreme and callous disregard for those they are entrusted to protect, especially given the apparent and sometimes toxic link between Police and politicians. 

The IGP and the Government need to back their oft-repeated statements with stronger actions against excessive force and the periodic psychological assessments of Police officers. The allegations of internal cover ups and falsified testimony in cases of custodial deaths, torture and bribe-taking must also be addressed as restoring the integrity of the Police. It is as much an internal struggle as it is an external one. Most importantly, in order to mend the broken relationship between the citizen and the policeman, the force must be reminded of the fact that they are there to serve and not to rule.