REPORT: ‘Status of Policing in India Report 2020-2021: Policing in the Covid-19 Pandemic’ (Click to Read)
‘Status of Policing in India Report 2020-2021: Volume II- Policing in the Covid-19 Pandemic’ was released on 16 August 2021. It was followed by a Keynote Address by Justice Deepak Gupta, Former Judge, Supreme Court of India, and a Panel Discussion on ‘Law Enforcement in Crises: Discretion, Excesses, and Expectations’.
Lokniti-CSDS in collaboration with Common Cause, has been preparing a series of baseline documents titled the ‘Status of Policing in India Report’ (SPIR). The idea of the SPIR series is to improve policing through a study of the official data, ground-based surveys, and wide-ranging research conducted in collaboration or cooperation with academia, civil society, and government agencies. Two editions of the report have already been published-SPIR 2018, on common people’s perception of policing gauged through a citizens’ survey and a performance evaluation of policing using official data; and SPIR 2019, which was a study of the working conditions and experiences of police personnel gathered through a nation-wide survey, along with measuring police adequacy using official data.
Third in the series of the SPIR, the 2020-2021 study is divided into two volumes. First, on ‘Policing in Conflict-affected Regions’, was released in April 2021. Volume II, 'Policing in the Covid-19 Pandemic', aims at understanding the challenges faced by the police in the states that are most affected due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic and the consequential lockdowns, as well as the experiences of the common people with the police and their perception of various aspects of policing under special and exceptional circumstances created due to the pandemic. It is based on a sample survey of 3,607 individuals (1,198 police personnel and 2,409 civilians), across 19 cities of 10 states/union territories of India. The survey was conducted by Lokniti- Programme for Comparative Democracy, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), in the months of October and November 2020.
