There is a complete failure of the law and order situation in Goa. Not only are policemen – who are there to defend the law and protect the citizens – themselves embroiled in controversies and illegal acts but there appears to be absolutely no fear among the citizens who believe they can break the law and get away with it. Not too many weeks ago the DGP had said that there are ‘levels of corruption’ in the force that are not acceptable. Herald has been regularly reporting of scams and illegal activities where police officers have been involved. Some of these have been exclusive investigative reports that have resulted in inquiries against the concerned police officers, others of investigations against policemen and court cases in which they are defendants. When the law enforcers themselves cannot keep a clean slate, can the citizen expect to receive help and justice from them?
Tuesday night’s shooting incident at Saligao is evidence of how lightly the law enforcers and the department are being taken. Take a relook at the sequence of events. A person in a car stopped outside a restaurant in Saligao and fired shots at a Swift car parked there, while those who had come in the Swift car were dining inside the restaurant. The owner of the Swift car filed a complaint and named a person as a suspect. The person named as a suspect, a restaurant owner, has filed a counter complaint against the owner of the Swift car for having damaged his car at another place in Pernem.
In the first place, if indeed a car was damaged in Pernem then the owner of that car should have gone to the police right away with a complaint, instead of deciding to avenge the damage to his car by shooting at the other person’s car. The persons who had arrived at the Saligao restaurant in the Swift car are known to the police to be extortionists and they have come under the police radar in the past. Is it because of this that the restaurant owner of Pernem decided to take the law in his own hands? Because he couldn’t expect to get justice from the cops?
This entire incident has reminiscences of scenes from the Wild West movies of Hollywood that were popular so many years ago, movies that were set in a period when the American nation was just beginning to evolve and the law was not strong enough to deal with the gangs of those tumultuous times. A time when people sought their own justice and the State was unable to deliver proper justice. Are we descending into such a situation in Goa?
This eye-for-an-eye kind of justice has no place in the 21st century and definitely not in Goa. The State machinery has to step in and put an end to such sort of ‘justice’ by showing that it can act immediately and deliver on the law and order front. It has to first take stock of the police establishment and the officers against whom there are charges of corruption and even involvement in the drug mafia. Unless the government can establish beyond doubt that the police force is clean, there will always remain the niggling fear that the man in uniform seated behind the desk and dealing with the citizen is not above board. The only manner in which the citizens’ confidence in the police force be gained is by a complete purging of the tainted officers from the force. That would show the seriousness of this government in creating a clean image and giving the State a proper police force.
There is another instance of police uselessness that has been on display for the past few weeks. Their effectiveness can be easily gauged by the time it is taking the men in uniform to find the missing Nuvem MLA. It is over a month that he is missing and court directions to the police to go out and arrest him have yielded little response from a force that is ill-equipped to find somebody as well-known as Francisco (Mickky) Pacheco. Even the efforts to discover his whereabouts are half-hearted. If the police force can show such disinclination to work on court orders, how can the aam aadmi expect the cops to rise to their defence?
