Bitter truth behind the brutality

Constable Ram Singh had absolutely no clue how to handle this one: a mentally unstable 20-year-old had crept under a car and was refusing to come out for hours.
Singh's first impulse was to start the car (hoping it would scare him out) and his second, to drag him out. Gentle persuasion?
Didn't even cross the cop's mind. Policemen are the first to be contacted in a crisis, and often have to face emotionally charged people.
Yet, whether it's a suicide attempt, a peaceful demo or a riot, they have one set of rules to handle it all ��� talk tough, bulldoze into line, psyche into submission.
If the police behave the way they do, it's because that's the only way they know, say experts.
"They are still in rural policing mode, of control, scaring people and using oppositional force to bring down a situation. But they have to shift to cosmopolitan policing, where you treat people as equals and not as offenders," says Dr Rajat Mitra, psychologist, who has held several workshops to sensitise policemen.
Learning to talk and negotiate are the most important skills today, he says. "For the police to change, you have to treat it as any other profession. Like medicine or engineering, there should be a professional course for policemen," says Mitra.
So do we get the police force we deserve? "Certainly the one you pay for," says K P S Gill. A constable's salary ��� the constabulary forms 88% of the force ��� is about a third, even a 10th, of the pay other professionals get.
Talk of police brutality, and they will tell you they are the ones at the receiving end most of the time: "We work 12-24 hours at a stretch often, with no holidays even on festivals," says Avtar Singh, at his second home, a small, two-room police chowki in Gurgaon.
"Mob duty is killing. Hours in the scorching sun without a drop of water and no place to ease yourself...," recalls Arvind Verma, IPS officer from the Bihar cadre who quit the force to pursue studies.
"When we talk of police brutality, we should remember the force has been brutalised by inhuman working conditions." "The police have to work with limited manpower resources ��� the ratio is 1.2 policemen for every 1,000 people, according to NCRB ��� and poor service conditions," says Doel Mukherjee of CHRI.
"The isolation of the constable is manifold. They are treated as unskilled labour, get low salaries, and have poor social status." No wonder they aren't up to it.
"It's good to show indignation, but have we trained our police to act in any other way? Have we empowered them to act differently? When Japan and Korea were facing street demonstrations, they retrained the whole police force," says Gill.
"Do we train our police force to deal with mob rioting? Society has to be willing to invest more on their training."