To serve and to protect?

“Towards a peaceful environment, to live with confidence, without fear of crime and violence” – The vision of the Sri Lankan Police force; its mission – to uphold and enforce the law of the land, to preserve public order, prevent crime and terrorism with prejudice to none and equity to all.

Police conduct has been a subject of contentious debate and great concern in almost every part of the world including Sri Lanka. Numerous deaths of suspects in the custody of the police as well as the brutal assaults on suspects and offenders have been documented by the media and civil society institutions leading to a public outcry to clean up police conduct.

This week, in what was termed by onlookers as a brutal display of arrogance, a traffic policeman was pictured assaulting a disabled motorcyclist for allegedly failing to heed the policeman’s orders. The police later claimed that the man was also riding his motorbike under the influence – an explanation almost meant as an excuse for the debasing brutality that the victim endured at the hands of the policeman. 

The policeman dragged the man onto the curb and physically assaulted him while his prosthetic limb lay detached beside him. The juxtaposition of this brutal scene with the noble vision of the police force highlights the gulf between the sacred functions of a policeman and the crude, detached and heartless abomination that an indifferent system has fostered over the decades.

Last year, the police assaulted a suspect in Minuwangoda with a pole at his residence while the victim’s mother collapsed and later died in hospital after witnessing her son being beaten; a youth in Dompe was killed in police custody and the public outcry resulted in a standoff between the police and residents.

A video, taken by an onlooker, caught a policeman viciously assaulting a woman at a bus stand in Ratnapura while another suspect died in custody of the Cinnamon Gardens police resulting in several civil society institutions raising their voices against police brutality.

The use of excessive and sometimes deadly force by police officers is a global issue. In the US, police brutality has reached dizzying levels with surveys claiming that over 850 people have been killed by the police this year alone. The use of body cameras has been proposed in an effort to curb the unnecessary use of deadly force; however, these measures act only as stopgaps to a larger problem concerning the psyche of a police force that operates with frightening levels of impunity.

Politeness, Obedience, Loyalty, Intelligence, Courtesy and Efficiency are the traits that are believed to define a policeman – traits that have slowly eroded from sections of the police force over time, taking along with it the faith, trust and respect placed by the public in its office.

Although it is easy to put the blame squarely on the few policemen who abuse their powers with such impunity, we must not ignore the system in which they operate – the toxic environment that has been created for them in which they have the authority to operate with an extreme, callous, disregard for those they are entrusted to protect. 

Stronger actions against excessive force and the periodic psychological assessments of police officers are courses of action long overdue. The allegations of internal cover ups and falsified testimony in cases of custodial deaths must also be addressed as restoring the integrity of the police is as much an internal struggle as it is an external one.

As an overburdened and undermanned legal system delays the process of justice, which has given rise to an alternate system in which the police act as the judge, jury and executioner, the noble force must remember that they are called upon to enforce the law while obeying it.