A series of alleged extra-judicial killings by police in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh has raised serious concerns about its force. Sharat Pradhan and Nitin Srivastava report for the BBC.”I got a call from the police at around 6.30am, asking if I wanted to film a gun battle going on with two criminals,” says a TV journalist from Aligarh, a city in Uttar Pradesh, who has requested anonymity.He rushed to the spot, where to his surprise he was joined by several other journalists brandishing mics and cameras. Together, they filmed a scene that could have been out of a Bollywood film. Live images beamed across most of India’s national television channels showed policemen armed with sophisticated assault rifles, kneeling behind thick bushes and firing at a bungalow. It’s reasonably clear from the video footage that only the policemen are doing any firing.
Police in India are staging and making up invalid excuses to shoot innocent civilians. There needs to be a call of action from the government for this to stop. The article mentioned that there was a 12 year old boy who was shot and killed for stepping on a policeman’s shoe. How is that a justified reason to shoot someone, let alone a child? The police system is totally corrupt and apparently there are policeman that are put into the field with hardly any training. On top of that some of the police that were hired didn’t have the education that they claimed to have. This leads to another question, if India’s government is going downhill? These police actions wouldn’t fly in other countries that are more strict and structured such as the United States or Great Britain. There needs to be more precautions that police need to take in India in order to sufficiently do their job and at the same time cause the least harm to civilians. That means that police training needs to be prolonged throughout a longer period of time and background checks on the police need to be made to determine if they are fraud or not. The government should take more initiative in taking both sides of the story when it comes to shooting, instead of just the police’s side. In addition I do agree that a family who was wronged by the police (a family member who was shot and killed by police) should have compensation for the crime, but also justice. The police shouldn’t be above the law just because they are suppose to enforce. We are all humans therefore no matter where you stand in government we should all be tried the same in court. The Indian government needs change, no doubt but how are civilians going to be able to stand up to government about the police injustices without getting trampled upon or even shot by the police themselves? These questions need answering and these injustice killings need a reckoning.