Policing the police

TRUE story from Moorestown, New Jersey, in the United States where a police officer was charged with molesting children in 2008. But the country was more horrified when it learned that the officer also had a moonlight tryst with a group of cows. Animal cruelty charges were brought against the man, but the grand jury couldn't determine whether the cattle had consented to the apparent one-night stand.
The judgment may have been funny, but the judge was not. "I'm not saying it's okay," he said in court after dismissing the charges. "This is a legal question for me. It's not a question of morals." That, to me, eloquently speaks about the police conduct this country.
I mean to say, the legal function of the police is largely influenced by their moral dilemma. These law-enforcers are human beings first, mere mortals of flesh and blood. They are also citizens afterwards, like the rest of us.
If three men have died in police custody in the past weeks, that was neither the first instance of alleged police brutality nor is it going to be the last. In the past, police have raped, abducted, robbed and extorted money. In future we might see the same, if not worse.
It's the same story throughout the government. The bureaucrats are not doing their job, we hear. The customs people, tax people, teachers, lawyers, judges and even those entrusted with government printing are finding ways to shirk their duties and make money instead. And, mind it, all of them are human beings, citizens of this country.
So, this is what we need to sort out first before we isolate the police for their faults. We know it's wrong when a policeman takes bribe, or kills someone in the lockup. But do we look at it from a legal or moral angle? Needless to say, all laws are moral, but all moral issues may not be legal. For example, helping the needy is a moral obligation. But nobody goes to jail if he doesn't do it.
The reason I say it is that moral judgment is a relative thing, and given the state of our chaotic national mind, one man's wrong is another man's right. People are making money by unfair means to buy luxuries for their families, and they are raising their children with that money, even sending them abroad to get education. Yet, unfortunately, shame and guilt, two fundamentals of human decency, have been banished from this country.
All of these are moral issues, but who is really being punished for them? And, who is really bothered that sooner or later the immoral is bound to descend into the illegal? One doesn't have to be a psychologist to understand that the deranged mind builds its own progressive capacity. A little boy, who is cruel to domestic pets, grows up to become a notorious killer.
The police, for that matter the entire country, has come to this stage at an incremental pace. It didn't happen in a single day that the moral infringed upon the legal to create a confusion that has overtaken this country. In one form this confusion breeds hypocrisy, which leads to corruption. A legal eagle in this country evaded taxes in full confidence that he wasn't guilty since he was never going to get caught. Here the moral façade was hiding legal infractions.
We have also seen the opposite form after 1/11, which showed that getting caught didn't mean one was guilty. There the legal façade was covering up moral delusions. The police come somewhere in the middle. Intermediate between security guards and the minions of powerful men, it's a pity that they can't overcome their identity crisis.
My friend once visited an inspector general of police and complained against a man, who had forcibly taken his house. The knavish man turned out to be a brother-in-law of the IGP's college buddy. So the chief law-keeper spoke like the usurper-in-chief, and hinted that his visitor give up the house.
A group of mid-ranking police officers recently tried to explain that the police had their reasons, and what they said pretty much sounded like a housewife who goes for compulsive shopping when she gets upset. They said they were driven by their frustration at work due to neglect from the government, disregard from other men in uniforms, and, above all, humiliation from politicians who treat them, I am quoting one ASP, like "eunuchs in a harem."
The criminals also give almost the same kind of excuse. They lash out at the world, because it lashed out at them. I say we are living in dangerous times. We the people are like those cows in the American small town. The police are police, and the judge is judge. We can't even bring cruelty charges against them.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a columnist for The Daily Star.
E-mail: badrul151@yahoo.com.