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‘Create awareness on Police Complaints Authority'

Panaji: Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI), a non-governmental organisation, has released a 40-page report written by Navaz Kotwal and Sharan Srinivas on the functioning of the Goa State Police Complaints Authority (GSPCA) from April 2007 to January 2009.

The report, which was released to the media on Friday, documents the establishment and growth of Police Complaints Authorities across the country. It stresses the need to create more awareness among the people on the way Police Complaints Authority work. It further says that the authority is functioning only in Kerala, Goa, Assam, Tripura and Uttarakhand states.

According to the report, the Goa State Police Complaints Authority has not recommended any disciplinary or criminal proceedings against police officers for poor, shoddy or delayed investigation. The authority has said that complaints relating to poor investigation lie almost always in the domain of the police's internal disciplinary mechanisms.

Finding fault with this stand, the report has recommended that the authority apprise the District Superintendents, Director-General of Police, Goa, and the State Home Department about the negative trends in investigation, and press for remedial measures to improve the performance of the police with regard to investigation.

The report claims that the Chairman of the Goa State Police Complaints Authority retired judge Eurico Da Silva says: “My job is not to punish officers but to instil a sense of professionalism in the force”. The writers of the report conclude that the Chairman Eurico Da Silva has indicated his preference to get ‘guilty' police officers to confess and apologise for their misconduct in front of the complainant. According to the Chairman, the authority does not have the powers to see to it that its recommendation for disciplinary action against ‘guilty' police officers is acted upon. The report says that if the Goa State Police Complaints Authority does not want to be perceived as “soft” then it should embrace a “hardline approach”. It has recommended that authority must be unafraid to take tough decisions needed to effectively confront the well-entrenched culture of impunity in the Police Department.

The Goa State Police Complaints Authority (GSPCA) has received 100 complaints from April 2007 to January 2009. The authority dismissed 47 of them stating that they lacked substance. In one case, disciplinary proceedings were initiated while in none of the cases registration of an FIR was recommended.

Giving details about the complaints received, the report said the complainants were predominantly male. The religious background of the complaints was also quite revealing. According to the 2001 Census, 65.9 per cent of Goa's population belong to the Hindu community, 26.7 per cent to Christian community and 6.8 per cent were Muslims. But a vast majority of complaints that the authority received were from Christians.

CHRI report says that although it is difficult to draw inferences solely based on these statistics, lack of awareness among some communities or the propensity of a certain communities to be targets of police misconduct may be the reason for such disparity.

Apart from telling the authority to demonstrate its independence and assertiveness through policy interventions towards police reforms, the CHRI report has asked the GSPCA to make renewed efforts to raise awareness of its presence, role, functions and activities.

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