India's police must get out of Dirty Harry's shadow

The Hindu

30-07-2025

Imagine a crime scene, where two detectives arrive. The first person is Sherlock Holmes, who is calm, meticulous and relentlessly logical. He sees what others overlook, asks things that others miss, and lets logic and evidence guide every step. He knows that the truth cannot be extracted by force and that it must be uncovered through careful, patient investigation.
The other person is Dirty Harry, gruff, impatient and contemptuous of rules. He does not investigate; he intimidates. He does not gather evidence; he extracts confessions. For him, justice is about speed, not accuracy, even if it leaves behind broken bodies and ruined lives.
These are not just fictional characters. They represent two conflicting visions of policing in India. The question is this. In the fight against crime, do we want a Sherlock Holmes or a Dirty Harry in our police stations?
A culture of impunity
The custodial death of Ajith Kumar, a 27-year-old temple guard, in June, in Tamil Nadu, is a grim reminder of the perils of the Dirty Harry-style of policing. The case (which involved missing jewellery from a car) happened just months after the Tamil Nadu Police Commission had recommended, among other things, a series of reforms to curb custodial torture.
According to a 2023 Lok Sabha reply, 687 people had died in police custody across India between 2018-19 and 2022-23, which is an average of two to three deaths every week. The data showed that these States had the highest numbers — Gujarat (81), Maharashtra (80), Madhya Pradesh (50), Bihar (47), Uttar Pradesh (41), West Bengal (40), and Tamil Nadu (36).
Official figures conceal more than they reveal. Many custodial deaths are quietly labelled as suicides, accidents, or sudden illnesses. Torture often occurs off the record — beyond lockups and CCTV surveillance. In Ajith Kumar's case, it reportedly happened in police vans, abandoned buildings, a village tank bed, and in a cow shed behind a temple.
Custodial violence overwhelmingly targets the daily-wage worker, the migrant, the slum dweller, the Dalit, and the tribal. So, torture is not just bad policing. It is structural injustice that reflects and reinforces the entrenched hierarchies of caste, class and power.
Torture persists due to inadequate training especially for the public-facing constabulary that makes up 90% of the police force alongside poor infrastructure, pressure to deliver quick results, and weak institutional oversight. Disciplinary action is rare and criminal convictions rarer still. More troubling is societal tolerance of custodial violence, which normalises the abuse, turning crime into the routine and impunity into unofficial policy.
In D.K. Basu (1996), the Supreme Court of India had laid down detailed safeguards against custodial torture. In K.S. Puttaswamy (2017), it reaffirmed dignity and bodily autonomy as fundamental rights. Yet, torture remains rampant. The Law Commission of India's 273rd Report (2017) urged Parliament to enact a standalone anti-torture law, but no such law exists. India has yet to ratify the United Nations Convention Against Torture. In 2025, India was ranked a 'high-risk' country in the Global Torture Index — a searing indictment we can no longer ignore.
On research and real world examples
The case against torture is not just moral or legal. It is scientific. Torture is often mythologised as a necessary evil — the quick fix when time is short and lives are at stake. Films and television shows often portray a suspect cracking under pressure, revealing the truth just in time. But decades of scientific research and real-world evidence tell a very different story.
In Why Torture Doesn't Work: The Neuroscience of Interrogation (2015), neuroscientist Shane O'Mara explains that torture impairs the brain's prefrontal cortex and hippocampus, the very regions essential for memory and clarity. Victims become disoriented, incoherent, and cognitively impaired; they will say anything, even lie, just to end the pain.
Experience bears this out. During the Algerian War (1954-62), French forces used torture extensively, only to find that much of the intelligence gathered from Algerian insurgents was useless or led to dead ends. In 2007, the International Committee of the Red Cross found that detainees from CIA 'black sites' had confessed only to end their suffering, producing false or unusable information. In the United States, the Innocence Project used DNA evidence to overturn over 375 wrongful convictions, many based on coerced confessions. In Ajith Kumar's case, the victim 'confessed' to hiding jewels in a cowshed — not because it was true, but because he wanted the beatings to stop.
The CIA's now-infamous 'enhanced interrogation techniques' — waterboarding, stress positions, sleep deprivation — were debunked in the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee Report (2014). The 525-page partially redacted summary (from a 6,700-page report), based on classified CIA documents, concluded that these methods failed to yield actionable intelligence against al Qaeda. Worse, the time wasted chasing false leads had diverted attention from actual threats. So, what works? According to a Netflix documentary 'American Manhunt: Osama bin Laden', the vital lead (the courier who led the U.S. to bin Laden) was uncovered through good, old-fashioned detective work — non-coercive intelligence gathering, surveillance, and methodical analysis.
After the wrongful conviction of six men in the 1974 Birmingham pub bombings, the U.K. abandoned confession-based policing. It adopted the PEACE model (Preparation and Planning, Engage and Explain, Account, Closure, and Evaluation) that focused on building rapport and trust with a suspect, open-ended questioning, active listening, and video recording of the interviews. This model reduced false confessions, improved conviction accuracy and restored public trust. Countries such as Norway, Canada and New Zealand have adopted it with similar success. The European Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT) has endorsed it.
Post-9/11, the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG), a joint initiative of the FBI, the CIA, and the Department of Defence, undertook extensive research on interrogation techniques. Its peer-reviewed studies confirmed that non-coercive, rapport-based methods consistently outperformed torture in producing accurate, timely, and actionable intelligence.
In Norway, far-right terrorist Anders Breivik, who killed 77 people in 2011, was interrogated without threats or coercion. The police's calm, professional approach led to a full confession and valuable insights into extremist networks, demonstrating that even the most heinous crimes do not justify abandoning legal principles. In the U.S., Najibullah Zazi, who plotted the 2009 New York subway bombing, cooperated with the FBI after being treated with respect. His detailed disclosures helped dismantle a wider terror network.
Holmes, not Harry
The core issue is that this is not a debate about policing. It is a test of our democratic maturity. The law must protect the most vulnerable, not brutalise them. Every custodial beating is not just a wound on the body of a citizen. It is a stain on the soul of the state. India must immediately ratify the UN Convention Against Torture and enact a standalone anti-torture law. All States should embed the PEACE model into police training, and declare zero tolerance for custodial abuse. When Sherlock Holmes's methods succeed in reality — not just in fiction — why should India cling to Dirty Harry's shadow?