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.