Who’ll police cops?: Overhaul of India’s crime-fighting laws was overdue, but the new bill suffers from over-reach & ambiguous drafting

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Who’ll police cops?: Overhaul of India’s crime-fighting laws was overdue, but the new bill suffers from over-reach & ambiguous drafting


The Criminal Procedure (Identification) Bill authorising the collection, storage and analysis of biological samples, biometrics and physical measurements of convicts, arrested persons and those in preventive detention is let down by bad drafting. The Identification of Prisoners Act, 1920, which the Bill seeks to replace restricts itself to finger/foot prints of arrested persons and their storage only for convicted persons, needed an upgrade. Agencies like FBI have moved on to advanced biometrics. And such data certainly has crime-fighting uses.

But this positive intent is defeated by the Bill’s provisions. Take the carte blanche to police officers in sample collection. While those arrested for offences carrying less than seven years imprisonment or not facing sexual crimes against women or children can refuse to give samples, actual policing in India rarely gives such leeway to ordinary citizens to withhold their consent. With computing power no longer a finite phenomenon, data collection eased by handheld devices, and all state governments competing to build multidimensional databases, there may be no holding back the thana cop. A better legislative design would have inverted the process to mandate police officers to secure a magistrate’s order to collect samples.

Lumping those in preventive detention, who are essentially held on apprehension of breach of public order even before committing any act of criminality, with convicts and those arrested for major offences, has rightly irked opposition parliamentarians. Centre mustn’t see this as the usual pushback against anything it proposes; India has a long history of state governments using police departments to hound opponents. The Bill has simply not provided enough checks and balances to prevent abuse of its provisions by police to harass or implicate innocent persons. Also, it neither dwells on unauthorised access to stored data through hacking, nor on misuse of data by the police.

Even dubious techniques like narco-analysis, which the Supreme Court ruled inadmissible as evidence, or prone-to-abuse facial recognition can become commonplace. The Bill’s definition of “measurements” surpasses biometrics and biological data to offer a wide berth for “any other examination referred to in Section 53 and 53A of Criminal Procedure Code”. These two CrPC sections are, in turn, loosely worded to allow for “such other tests which a registered medical practitioner thinks necessary”.

Finally, while the Bill’s bet on big data to increase conviction rate is understandable, there’s no government action on bolstering fundamentals like more forensic facilities. In 2019, only 27% of India’s cops reported always having access to forensic technology at thanas. And courts across India bemoan delays caused by too few forensic science labs.



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This piece appeared as an editorial opinion in the print edition of The Times of India.



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