KOCHI: Increasing the number of criminal- minded personnel in police force cannot be considered as an isolated trend or an inevitable natural flow from the present day society at large. It is the result of an arbitrary and thoughtless step taken disregarding the basic principles of police management. Police recruitment is a specialised job. It involves different and various stages requiring supervision by qualified experts in the department. The infrastructure required and methods followed for selecting civil staff are not the ones adopted for police recruitment. A hasty step taken unmindful of the consequences for selecting police personnel was the beginning of the dangerous situation the police force and the State are now confronted with. In 1978, when thousands of vacancies were existing, police recruitment was entrusted with Kerala Public Service Commission, purely a civil service recruiting agency, without serious consideration or studying what the other states in the country and the Central Police Force Organizations were scrupulously following all through. The PSC itself was caught by surprise as they had no infrastructure of any kind to handle police recruitment. Not knowing how to proceed and what steps to be taken first the so called preparations went on for four to five years. In the meantime, vacancies started mounting up and that situation gave hell of a trouble for the ordinary policemen forcing them to work overtime and thus getting overstrained. The proverbial ‘tolerance syndrome’ associated with policemen on some occasions helped to avoid the situation ending up in an upheaval.All those who were in service during that period would remember vividly what had happened then. After another couple of years, a voluminous select list consisting of six thousand-odd names was prepared and given to the police department. Medical examination was still to be completed. After that was over, another year or so was added to the delay. Those who had applied when they were 20 years old were already 25 or above and those applied when 23 years old had gone above 28 or even 30. Languishing period for this set of applicants awaiting intimation from the police department lasted five to eight years. Training could be started only in batches as there was facility for 500 to 600 to be trained at a time. Training generally lasts for ten months to one year. So, when the last batch of that list completed training, die age factor in some cases want up to even 32 to 35. Along with that, the vacancies that arose during the period exceeded what was existing before. How this backlog and the arising vacancies were handled was a mystery nobody could easily explain.That was the beginning of the deterioration of the overall situation in Kerala police. For want of youngsters to replace the ageing sportsmen and players, the scenario in sports matters turned out to be blank and completely dark. Some of the steps taken to set right that deteriorating situation by disregarding the norms and rules ended up in tragic situations for the members of the force. The effect of those developments was still haunting the police force when this writer retired in the year 1987. The department still muddles along to set the seniority problem in A.P. Battalions. It is learnt that the gap between calling for applications and publishing the select list got reduced to some extent and recently the facility for training the recruits also has been improved with the inauguration of Police Academy in Thrissur. However, scarcity of training instructors is a handicap to increase the number of trainees at a time. Still the rank list holders are made to wait endlessly as the training even now is in batches. There was a period not long ago when the rank holders having fed up after long waits had indulged in ‘shayanapradishnam’ in public places to show their feeling of protect. This long languishing period not knowing when the call would come has done immense damage to their mind-set and character which in turn made then vengeful in their attitude and general behaviour. It is not a voluminous list of several thousand names that is desirable for police recruitment.What is required is a select list according to the vacancies arising every year and that list should be exhausted to accommodate those completing training that very year itself and the recruitment should be done every year. This is what Justice K T Thomas Commission has in its report recommended to the Government. The recommendation is to constitute a board for the recruitment of uniformed staff. Only by this method it will be possible to recruit fresh, raw and young candidates between the age 18 to 23 to avoid persons of criminal habits entering police service. Unfortunately, the report is lying in cold storage. Though there were police excesses reported both during pre-Kerala days and post-Kerala days, persons with criminal background getting filled up ‘en masse’, is a new phenomenon. This, in fact, started in the late 1980s. The flow, batch by batch, is continuing. There will be an end to this danger only if the mode of recruiting personnel in the police is altered. Since the year 1980s, not a single policeman below the age of 26 has joined the police force. The case is the same with Sub-Inspectors where the age exceeding 30. In the present recruitment system followed by the PSC, candidates are made to wait for years without any assurance after applying for appointment in the police. Naturally, nobody in such a situation would dream of police selection only without thinking of other ways also for existence for the time being.
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