Indonesian police wrongly used tear gas inside a soccer stadium to disperse rioting fans, an internal oversight official said on Tuesday, while the country's soccer federation banned two club officials.
'Politicians want pliable policemen who would carry out their orders, right or wrong, lawful or illegal.'
'What this incident must do is provide a renewed impetus to urgently bring in police reforms; changes that will ensure that political patronage and extraneous pressure are reduced to a minimum and allow the police to function independently and honestly,' argues Vivek Gumaste.
The Indian police is governed by the archaic, colonial-era Police Act of 1861, which has no place in a democracy. It was created to make the police subservient to its masters and, consequently, antagonistic to the masses, states Veenu Sandhu.
The ARC, in its voluminous Fifth Report on 'Public Order', suggested that technology should be used to improve the accessibility of police stations to the public.
You just cannot let an institution go adrift and never reporting to any other institution and never submitting itself to any monitoring review or evaluation with regard to its functioning and particularly with regards to an institution which has dominion over the lives and liberties of citizens. That kind of total abdication of government responsibility with regard to that kind of an institution will be dangerous to democracy itself, to the people, Bahukutumbi Raghavan tells Sheela Bhatt
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