Awarded Ph.D.
degree in Law by National Law University Odisha for his thesis, “Arrest
discretion Behavior of the Police in India; A Socio-Legal Study”
ABSTRACT
The
objective of the 2009 amendment to the century old arrest law in the Criminal
Procedure Code of India was to reduce the number of avoidable arrests based on
the legal principles of “reasonableness”, “necessity” and “restraints”. The
amended law introduced a new provision - “service of notice” - instead of the formal
arrest, where a person is accused of an offence punishable with imprisonment of
less than or up to seven years, which constitutes two-thirds of all penal
offences. Following the new amendment, the arrest figures in India should have
been reduced by two-thirds but data show that there has been a very
insignificant reduction in the arrest figures. This
leads to the inquiry
if the statute, departmental guidelines, court rulings, police manual rules
etc. have any influence on the arrest decisions of the police or if there are other
factors that have escaped our scrutiny?
A
number of studies have established that although legal factors significantly
influence arrest decisions, the exercise of an enormous amount of discretion is
at the core of overall police functioning. Moreover, factors like organisational,
situational, subcultural, environmental and individual determinants are at the
forefront of influencing the arrest decisions of law enforcement officials. The use of discretion by the police has remained a lesser
researched topic in India than in the West. This study is a
maiden inquiry to test if the determinants of arrest discretion are valid in
the Indian context, how do they interplay and which among these determinants significantly
influences arrest decision.
This
study establishes that organisational, subcultural and environmental
determinants are significant for the police in India and positively correlate
to their arrest discretion behaviour. The study empirically establishes that
subcultural and environmental determinants influence arrest discretion
behaviour twice as much as the organisational determinant, contrary to the
popular perception that it is the organisation, through statutes, rules and
compliance with court directives, that determines or constrains arrest
discretion. Thereby, this research attempts to fill a major gap in the
study of the use of police discretion in India.
