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Executive Summaries

I am extremely privileged to speak at the IPES session inaugurated yesterday at the beautiful city of Buenos Aires.

This is an extremely educative symposium held every year in some part of the world that brings together criminal justice practitioners and scholars and helps generate new ideas on policing. I must pause here to pay my compliments to Prof Dilip Kumar Das of the USA who is the brain behind the IPES. But for his dynamism and tireless efforts the IPES would not have been the success that it is today. I would like to avail myself of the occasion to pledge my continued support to this commendable exercise.

It is saying the obvious that the everyday life of the modern citizen, wherever he lives, be it the US, Argentina or India, is now marked by a fear of crime that was not there decades ago. Let us not go by statistics. Statistics, except occasionally, do not portray the correct picture. They may say that crime has fallen in New York City, Buenos Aires or Chennai in India. Police officers and politicians alike will say that crime has gone down under their leadership. But public perceptions are wholly different. No community is satisfied with police performance in the area of crime prevention or detection. This is universal. Because of this, the police start with a severe handicap, viz., the wide gap between public expectations and police performance, and public perceptions and hard realities of the street. The police leadership should focus its energies against this backdrop of the consumer´s lack of faith in them.
I served the Indian Police Service for 38 years, the last two as head of India’s highest investigating agency. I can therefore speak with some authority on the Indian crime scene. I also advise the cyber security unit of Tata Consultancy Services, India’s largest IT Company that has a significant presence in Latin America, including Argentina. I am in intimate contact with police officers and CJ academics in the USA and UK also. Although my knowledge is limited to these three countries, I closely follow crime trends in other parts of the world as well. My wide travels on behalf of my company TCS provides me this opportunity to keep in touch with crime trends. This emboldens me to hazard a few highly provocative generalizations. You are at liberty to agree with me or contradict me at the end of my talk.

Proposition One
 The incidence of crime in the urban areas of many countries is on the rise. Whatever police departments and governments have done has produced only marginal results. Take the U.S. for instance. The country has from time to time successfully brought down crime in its major cities. But it has found it difficult to sustain such drops over long periods of time. I am told that cities like Philadelphia have again registered a distressing rise in crime, especially homicides. Despite its much touted COMPSTAT, New York City has also had marked fluctuations. The Metropolitan Police in London have had the same problem. Knife violence indulged in by young thugs wrecks the Met’s reputation at periodic intervals. The Delhi Police image suffers frequently from ordinary rapes and gang rapes perpetrated in broad daylight and in the most crowded areas. Some sensational killings of young women – bartender Jessica Lal, Delhi University student Priyadarshani Mattoo, journalist Sowmya – in the past few years have brought a bad name to the otherwise efficient Delhi Police.
My conclusion from these incidents is that murders of men and women belonging to the elitist sections of society will continue to happen despite whatever the police may do to beef up their strength and expand their technology.

Proposition Two
Investigation of urban crime is becoming more and more complex because of the sheer sizes of modern cities and the enormous diversity of their populations. London and NYC may not have had much of an accretion in population because of the fairly tight control over immigration. Still, they are large enough – nearly 8 million – to attract bad characters, who are enamored of the huge opportunities these two cities present to them. Also consider the diversity of London. According to the MET more than 60 to 70 languages are spoken at any point of time in the city! I can vouch for this as I travel by public transport in that city every time I go there and I just cannot figure out which language I hear! My fellow countrymen who live in London or in urban America speak so many languages that I myself cannot identify many of them. It is this problem of language and poor knowledge of the culture of different sections of a city’s population that handicaps many urban police forces. The problem of human trafficking and illegal migration compound the problem. India is a classic example of how burgeoning cities bring a huge dimension to crime and its control. Delhi and Mumbai have each a population of 20 million, with Kolkata not lagging behind very much. The fourth largest city Chennai is as big as London and NYC. Just imagine the plight of the Indian Police. It is no surprise that crime is going out of control in urban India. I am most distressed by violence accompanying such urban crime. I presume this trend is seen in many other large cities in the world about which I am not very familiar.

My conclusion here is: Unless governments make a conscious decision to control the size of their cities, crime will multiply in these cities and detection will become increasingly hard. But this is an inconvenient political decision which very few governments will readily do. This has also economic implications. In these days of declining economies, which government will agree to interfere with the growth of their cities that are a powerhouse to generate employment and attract tourist traffic?

Proposition Three
Urban crime control has become complex also because of the incredible international traffic that one witnesses now. There is now a boom in air travel despite more stringent visa restrictions. This boom facilitates the easy access to cities by international gangs. Just recall the clinical efficiency with which an Israeli intelligence team came into Dubai last year from different parts of the world, breached a hotel’s security and assassinated a Hamas operative. I do not think the crime has yet been solved. Our cities are becoming alarmingly international and opening themselves to large numbers of alien agencies to perpetrate crime ranging from pure and simple murders to physical attacks on vital installations of a country. The attack on the iconic Mumbai hotel in 2008 was a terrorist act. It revealed how easy it is for hostile elements to sneak into a city and commit a daring act. Both the Dubai and Mumbai incidents show how a modern city is vulnerable not only to terrorism but to conventional crime as well.

Proposition Four 
The growth in IT education is a phenomenon in many Asian countries. This is the response to the growth in IT industry because of increased outsourcing of work to many Asian countries, especially India. Companies like my own are the greatest beneficiaries of this boom. This has also brought in its wake many undesirable developments like enlarged knowledge of IT systems, especially how such systems can be misused to make money or settle scores with one’s enemies. This kind of cyber crime is an essentially urban phenomenon. India is witnessing this kind of spurt in the abuse of cyberspace. Some corrective measures have no doubt been taken by both private and public authorities to check this phenomenon. But this has had only a marginal impact. My proposition is that online frauds will escalate in the near future posing a new challenge to police agencies. The police in most parts of the world are alive to this danger. It is however a matter for debate whether they are doing enough to sensitize the police forces, as also modify recruitment and training methods. While conventional crime may not be totally displaced, cyber crime will become more and more challenging to every country’s police force. Also since crime transcends national borders, there will be an increased need for international cooperation, including the creation of an international database. The Interpol will have a larger role to play than now.
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