NON- REGISTRATION OF FIRS- A SORRY STATE OF AFFAIRS
“It is a sorry state of affairs in the country where police officers are totally corrupt.” Harsh words indeed, but the Supreme Court’s anger reflected in this observation made on July 24, 2007 mirrors what the ordinary citizens in this country feel and suffer every day. Non-registration of their complaints is the most common, serious, frequent and widespread grievance of the people against the police.
The process of criminal justice starts with the registration of information by the police about the commission of a crime. Non-registration of a case ends the process of justice then and there. It leads to denial of justice in two ways. One, it shuts the doors on the victims of crime and, two, it allows the criminals to escape.
The police resort to different practices to avoid registration of complaints. One is to intimidate and threaten the complainant to dissuade him from registering his complaint. He is accused of fabricating the case or told that the case is full of lies and will not hold out in the court of law. One subterfuge employed is to make pretence of registering his complaint without actually doing so. This is done by making an entry in the General Diary of the police station and giving the complainant a copy of that entry. The complainant goes under the false impression that the police have registered his complaint while in reality they have not done so. At times, the complaint is not registered on the ground that the offence has occurred in the jurisdiction of some other police station. If registration of complaints becomes unavoidable, an attempt is sometimes made to minimize the gravity of crime. For example, an offence of robbery is reduced to an offence of theft or an attempt to murder becomes a case of hurt.
There are various reasons why the police do not register FIRs. The governments sometimes encourage non- registration of crimes. Crime figures are often used for political gains. During the last election in UP, the repeated advertisement telecast by various channels showed Amitabh Bachan singing his paean of praise for Mulayam Singh’s government, citing Crime in India figures to show that “zurm yahan kam hai”. Another example of a brazen attempt was made in the same state a few years earlier, where instructions to bring down the crime figures were given to the police. According to Mr Prakash Singh, a former DG of the state, “the Chief Minister, to drive home the message, suspended quite a few officers of the rank of SP and DIG. What followed was suppression and minimization of crime on a scale never before witnessed in the history of independent India.”(The Pioneer, dated July 12, 2003) Later, the UP government inserted advertisements in the newspapers, extolling the Chief Minister for her achievements, including that of bringing down crime in the state by 69% in less than a year of her rule.
Crime figures are used not merely to advertise the success of the government in providing security to the citizens, but also to evaluate the performance of the police. This is a major reason for the existence of the evil of non- registration of complaints When the department evaluates the performance of its employees on the basis of crime and conviction figures, the police station staff do not hesitate to use questionable methods to artificially bring down the crime figures and to secure convictions by using means fair or foul
Corruption is another important reason for this practice. The accused bribes the station officer, who ensures that the case is either not registered or the facts are twisted to save the guilty. If the complainant or the accused happens to be poor, he suffers because of his inability to bribe the police station staff.
Heavy crime load and inadequacy of staff also encourage non- registration of complaints. Crime keeps on increasing but the strength of the police station does not increase correspondingly. Consequently, the existing investigating staff come under heavy pressure and one way of avoiding additional investigation work is not to register complaints.
The 1973 Code of Criminal Procedure introduced two new provisions in law to deal with the malady. One made it mandatory to provide a copy of the FIR to the complainant free of cost. The other laid down that any person aggrieved by a refusal on the part of the officer in charge of the police station to record his complaint could send its substance in writing to the District Superintendent of Police, who would then take necessary action to ensure investigation of the case. The initiative did not succeed in curbing the malady.
The Law Commission of India examined the subject in its eighty fourth report (April 1980) and recommended the insertion of a specific provision in the Indian Penal Code to prescribe that the officer in charge of the police station refusing or without reasonable cause failing to record the FIR would be punished with imprisonment for a term of one year or with fine or with both. The Government did not accept the recommendation. Recently, the model Police Act drafted by Soli Sorabjee committee (October 2006) has a provision that a police officer, who “without lawful reason, fails to register a First Information Report as required by Section 154 of the Code of Criminal Procedure 1973… shall, on conviction, be punished with imprisonment for a term which may extend to three months or with fine or both.” The draft is presently under government’s consideration.
To deal with the problem, steps must be taken to increase the strength of investigating officers in the police stations, base evaluation of police performance on criteria involving more than crime statistics, improve the quality of supervision exercised over the work of the police station staff and make non registration of a citizen’s complaint a specific penal offence either in the penal code or in the Police Act. These recommendations can work, but only if there is no pressure from the political executive on the police to show ‘good results’ on the crime front.
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( Original Version of the Article published in the Indian Express on 11.08. 2007 )
