It was in our November 1 edition that Eastern Mirror first reported the incident in which a juvenile was brutally beaten inside Kohima’s North Police station by a police officer after being wrongly accused of theft. It has been alleged that the police officer concerned was in an inebriated state when he was beating up the boy. As per the statement of the victim – given to two local newspapers, including Eastern Mirror – the beating inside the police station lasted for almost an hour, even as the other police personnel simply watched the officer beat the boy up. Despite the horror that it provokes, we still would like to repeat what the victim’s aunty had to say – that they found the victim “in a battered condition” inside the police station. We have been told that an investigation is on.
Of the many statements issued in the aftermath, condemning the police officer’s brutality, one that resound loudest (at least in this context) came from the Nagaland Law Students’ Federation (NLSF). “Juveniles are not training fields for interrogation,” the NLSF reminded and, in doing so, captured the horror of the police officer’s action with chilling accuracy. In addition, NLSF has also reminded that juveniles in conflict with law are required by law to be produced before the Juvenile Justice Board at the earliest and that confinement in lock-up and being ‘videographed’ while being verbally assaulted by the police officer was in total violation of the Juvenile Justice Act.
Perhaps, our collective mortification is amplified by the fact that the boy was innocent. This is not to say that such brutal beating by a police officer could be accepted had the boy been guilty. But as rightly pointed out by another Law students’ organization: “Even a juvenile in conflict with law is not physically tortured in this manner and rather corrective measures are preferred, so no part of law gives the duty officer to handle the juvenile in such an inappropriate manner”. This incident is as much about the law as it is about humanity.
Only a few days ago, while inaugurating the first women police station at Dimapur, the Director General of Police, Nagaland, LL Doungel spoke about how the state police must change its public face. Nagaland police, he said, must adopt a more humane approach and discard its image as a colonial-era arm of the government. To be fair, over the past 18 months or so, the attempts of our state police to adopt more friendly approaches while dealing with those that they police have been most visible. Some of the younger officers, especially, have been nothing less than friendly and accessible.
So it is even more jarring – for us, the public – that the incident has occurred at a time when the efforts of our state police to connect better with the people were taking a turn for the better. And we would like to believe that the feeling is mutual, that our police force is equally jarred by the incident. Yes, the law will take its own course as it should. The police officer concerned, if guilty, will be punished as deemed fit by law. But the real casualty here is the humane image of our police force, which they have cultivated so carefully over the past few months. This, it must be said again, is not simply about juvenile law. This is about our humanity. And it is our hope that Nagaland police would recover its humanity sooner than later, in the aftermath of this unfortunate incident.
