It’s about effective law enforcement: Let’s recommit the country
Prakash Singh case. State governments have been loath to implement the order because it would mean political leaders relinquishing personal control over the coercive apparatus that they covet. As much as these structural reforms are desirable, we need to think of other politically feasible reforms that take us in the right direction.
Here’s an example. In 2017, I asked the gifted data scientist Karthik Shashidhar to help analyse data relating to crimes against women in a large, relatively well-governed south Indian state. He found that the conviction rate for all crimes was abysmally low (less than 1% for molestation, for instance).
It was worse in the state capital. Cases took a long time to investigate and on an average took one-and-a-half years to be brought to court. There they languished for years and decades.
As Karthik concluded, this leads to a perverse situation where victims are discouraged from reporting crimes and potential offenders are undeterred from committing them. Despite what you read in books and see on television, our police forces do not have an adequate number of trained detectives, forensic specialists and prosecutors. Karthik and I found that setting up specialist investigation units within police departments and publicizing successful prosecutions can deter crimes.
These units can select cases from across the state based on a combination of severity and random sampling, so that there is an overall sense that perpetrators will be brought to court promptly. Further, setting up case progression units, with personnel trained in project management techniques, can help navigate the thickets of courts and bureaucracy. Such measures will have a deterrent impact across the board.
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