Eve Teasing and Counterinsurgency

This week, we sat down with Atul Goel, who is on leave from his job as an officer of the Indian Police Service (IPS) for two years as he pursues a Masters in Public Administration at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. In his most recent posting, Atul commanded a force of 1,200 police officers in the Kashmir valley, heading up investigations of violent crime, government malpractice, and counterinsurgency-related crimes.

Atul, thank you for speaking with us. To start, can you tell us a little bit about the Indian Police Service and your role with this law enforcement body?

The Indian Police Service (IPS) is not a force itself but a service providing leaders and commanders to staff the state police and all-India Para-Military Forces. IPS officers are recruited and trained by the Indian government, after which they are assigned to police departments in various states to work in key leadership positions.

I have worked with IPS for 5 years, including a training period in which I spent one year in the academy and one year in the field, acting out all of the roles I would later command, from being the most subordinate officer (beat constable), all the way up. It took me 4 years to get into IPS. It is a highly competitive exam that is used throughout the federal government to recruit senior executives in foreign services, administrative service, policing, etc. The position requires somebody who is highly competent but also a generalist – obviously, we are taught law and forensic science as part of the training, but what is stressed is common sense and how not to be prejudiced against certain things. Additionally, we have to know how to deal with politicians, handle the common people's problems, and do personnel management.

Although my family lives in Delhi, I was sent to Kashmir, one of 100 IPS officers sent to that region. I was responsible for 1200 policemen most recently, supervising 7 police stations. Since Kashmir also has paramilitary forces, I also supervised 3 battalions of paramilitary forces (focusing on counterinsurgency problems, not hard crime). My region encompassed roughly 300,000 people, with a middle class population of roughly 40% and a lower income population of about 60%.

It is interesting to hear that you were responsible both for "hard crime" problems and for counterinsurgency issues. Can you give us a sense of what kinds of crime you most frequently dealt with in both categories?

Well, for hard crime, the most frequent issues were burglaries, low-level drugs (not cocaine or marijuana, but usually prescription drugs that people were taking illegally, like cough syrup), and eve teasing.

What is eve teasing?

You know, like Adam and Eve? It means making snide remarks about women -- Indian citizens can be booked for it and prosecuted. In fact, just before I came here, when the elections were happening, there was a case with this guy doing eve teasing from his car. Two girls were walking on a road, this guy was trying to make conversation, and the girls weren't responding to his small talk. So he crushed one of the girls under his car and she died. Also, there is a fair amount of mob violence. Because of certain political circumstances and the insurgency in the area, there are a lot of protests and they are not always peaceful ones.

And what about the counterinsurgency crimes?

Our biggest concern is about bomb blasts. In fact, last July, we had a really bad one, in which a family of people died (among the dead were four small siblings). This is the kind of thing we are always worried about, so we are constantly collecting intelligence, doing paramilitary prevention based on that intelligence, and investigating cases once a crime has happened. When a blast happens, you have to rush in, insure immediate relief, conduct autopsies in case there are any dead, and investigate the case (the level of insurgency-related violence has in fact decreased significantly over the last few years).

Really, the distinction between hard crime and counterinsurgency is not that clear-cut – once an event occurs in a place, it is a crime under your local penal code, so it becomes your duty to investigate. Sometimes, larger federal investigation agencies come in to take the case. Like that blast where four people died, that was investigated locally, but I used a special investigation team at my office level because it was slightly more important than the normal set of events. With counterinsurgency, it becomes really important, especially in terms of intelligence collection, that the officers who are working there at the police station have a good knowledge of the area (they have a good feel of what’s happening). We have an entire branch in the police that is just for collection of intelligence, but we are not going to separate the channels of information if there is relevance for other crime issues.

So what is the murder rate in your area?

It's really pretty low, absent counterinsurgency issues, perhaps two murders registered per year. The murder rate is generally pretty low in India, as compared to other countries. Our crime is mostly for economic reasons, in my opinion. Burglary, for example, people stealing mobile phones. Last year, one murder case was the crushed girl and there might have been one more.

Including the militancy, however, the murder rate is pretty high. As I mentioned, with the mob violence: there was one day when six people died in our jurisdiction. Although gangs are not really a problem -- we don't have the culture of gangs in the same way that US does -- there was a case where a family of five was murdered. The person who did it was 600 miles away, in another state. You know, there are these tribes, groups of people who, under the British system, were classified as professional criminals. Since one is born into this group, the entire male adult population of a village could be part of these "criminal tribes." After independence, the government reorganized this group of people, but the 5 murders I mentioned were committed by a gang of people from these "criminal tribes." I don't agree with this terminology, but just to give you an understanding of the issues at play.

I would imagine that there would be a certain amount of gun trafficking in the area. Is that correct?

Yes, there is a lot of gun trafficking in Kashmir, most of it done from Pakistan. In fact, we had this one murder case in which a son killed his father. So as to divert the attention of the police, he got a hand grenade (which are easily available in Kashmir) and planted it near the dead body, to make it seem like it was a militancy-related crime. There is a lot of shifting between militants and crime. There are some cases in which the guns that are meant for militants go towards committing of routine crimes and in some cases regular crimes have been given the color of militancy. People sometimes go into others' houses to steal stuff, with toy guns, behaving as if they are militants. They don't do any physical harm, but maybe they steal a mobile phone or some other valuables.

What are you hoping to do moving forward?

Getting into the police service is a big gamble, because you might not get through past the test. It's a big stress job with lots of power and perks, but a lot of educated Indians see the opening of the economy and moving are to private sector. A lot of people take this exam because one of best ways to serve the people and change the way the country functions, since you get into a powerful role. I hope that an education at Harvard will give me the skills and the credibility required to contribute meaningfully to the manner in which the criminal justice system in general, and policing in particular, is perceived by people in India.

One of my objectives would be to get rid of the sense of fear or shame that an ordinary Indian feels in approaching the police for a bonafide service. We should be able to project the image that the police is a just like any other public provided service and that it exists to serve the people. What policies will get police to be more people-friendly?

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California's Parole Problems with Sex Offenders

Today's NY Times has a pretty good article about California's troubles managing paroled sex offenders (and parolees in general). As you may know, California's budget crisis has forced it to close a number of prison facilities and now large number of people will be released to parole supervision. Additionally, as the article notes, reentrants will not be sent back to prison for "technical violations" -- or those infractions that include missing your curfew, abusing alcohol or a controlled substance, failing to go to work -- as they have been in the past. Interestingly, this is actually good policy in general. The idea that people's addictions or curfew problems can be addressed with a community-based solution instead of more prison time has been tested by the Harlem Parole Reentry Court over the past ten years and the results have been positive in terms of reducing recidivism. Hopefully, California will be able to create statewide infrastructure that supports this kind of intervention. (Budget cuts are hurting everywhere -- take a look at this article about the elimination of financing for California's Domestic Violence Program. Also, Gov. Schwarzenegger recently enacted an 80 percent cut in Proposition 36, the state’s largest drug treatment diversion program)

Today's article does a really good job of laying out how difficult it is to parole people with sex offenses. There are logistical challenges like finding them a place to live -- nobody wants to live near or with a sex offender -- helping them maintain employment, and keeping an unpredictable surveillance operation going. On top of all this, most paroled sex offenders battle mental illnesses that promote their illegal behavior and many use drugs or alcohol to self-medicate. Although parole officers with this specialized caseload will see the number of people they supervise decrease from 70 to 45, it is an open question as to whether cuts to other key services (like drug treatment) will put these officers in even more of a bind.

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Literally Leaning Into Conflict

Today's NY Times has a compelling article about the Reverend Vernon Williams, a pastor who sees it as his mission to interrupt violent conflict in Harlem. Possessing himself a criminal record for drug addiction and guns possession, Rev. Williams has turned his life toward helping younger generations in Harlem.

In addition to presenting this very human story of tragedy and rehabilitation, the article speaks to an issue that the Harlem Community Justice Center has been working on for some time: gangs.

At least seven major gangs operate in an area bordered roughly by West 125th Street, West 155th Street, Fifth Avenue, St. Nicholas Avenue and Harlem River Drive, according to residents and community leaders. They include G.M.B., short for Get Money Boyz; F.S.U., which uses two profanities in its name; O.T.N., short for 129; and G.F., meaning GoodFellas.

While these may be the major gangs, there are a number of smaller, more localized "crews" that function very similarly, often in public housing projects. They are loose conglomerates of young men and women, and their more dispersed structure than traditional "gangs" has made it a much more difficult public safety program to address. For some time, the Justice Center has seen a need for some kind of coordinating body addressing these gang issues among police, community members, schools, and faith leaders -- much like the Upper Manhattan Reentry Task Force has done around the issue of adult prison reentry. This article highlights how successful the efforts of even one committed man can be -- perhaps a collaboration of stakeholders could take a page from his book.

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Proving a Point

Here's an interesting story from the Criminal Justice blog at Change.org on one of Philadelphia's candidates for District Attorney. Michael Untermeyer, who most recently was in private practice in the city, has donned an electronic monitoring device to make a point about mass incarceration.

You can track his movements (including the time of his most recent cell phone call) here.

His argument is that non-violent offenders could be more cheaply supervised using such tracking devices, instead of being incarcerated. Change.org does a good job of evaluating this tactic and adding some other perspectives.

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Interview with Carl Wicklund, Executive Director of APPA

Carl Wicklund is the Executive Director of the American Probation and Parole Association (APPA). We sat down for this interview on Tuesday, August 11, 2009, at the National Forum on Criminal Justice & Public Safety. Mr. Wicklund was part of an earlier panel I attended at the Forum on Corrections Information Sharing. I wanted to probe the issue of law enforcement collaboration with probation/parole.

What is the best way to encourage local police-parole/probation collaboration?

I think that one of the premises that [must] be understood and appreciated for any of these partnerships between law enforcement and probation/parole to work is the fact that both groups have as their primary goal public safety. Now, law enforcement tends to be focused more on short-term public safety, where probation/parole has a dual purpose of both short-term public safety and long-term public safety, which ultimately means changing the behavior of that person on probation or parole. Where I’ve seen it really work, they come together and develop a joint mission that doesn’t degrade the strength of their own individual missions. There is some acceptance and understanding of the roles that both groups have and they look for commonalities, and obviously the main commonality is public safety. How they go about that can be very different -- there can be some meshing of that, but they have to be careful not to mesh it to a degree where you start getting mission-bleed. One of my concerns is that, in a lot of places where partnerships between law enforcement and probation and parole have occurred, probation and parole start seeing that balance of monitoring and behavior change getting out of balance, and they start seeing themselves [more] as law enforcement. It’s an easy trap to fall into because the compliance aspect for probation and parole is much more concrete than behavior change, which is a more difficult challenge. People tend to go towards that which is easier to define. A good partnership keeps people focused on what their primary roles are in order to meet that partnership’s overall goal.

Are there examples of strategies that encourage a balance between monitoring and behavior change?

I’m fond to saying that there is not best practice, there are really best people who are committed, dedicated, and skilled at what they do and they don’t lose sight of their long-term goals. It is very personality-driven, but I think that [a] strategy that is so important to any effective partnership between different units of government or different units of the justice system is what I call "horizontal diffusion," as opposed to vertical diffusion. I think that a lot of partnerships occur from a top-down push, where you have top leadership saying, "we are going to do this" and they push it down. The people that are mid-management or line staff ask “what do we give up to do this? You are just giving us more to do [, but] you are not relieving us of anything.” Instead, we should be looking at who are the leaders at all levels of an organization and working with them at the same time, coming at it horizontally, embedding it in the practices. When things are pushed from the top down you get a passive-aggressive resistance from people at other levels of an organization because they haven’t been part of it.

Don’t you always have to start at the top to get buy-in and approval?

No, I don’t think you have to start at the top. I think you have to have the top involved. Again, I’m talking horizontal diffusion; I’m not talking vertical where it’s from the top to the bottom. If you look at what happened with Boston Nightlight, how did that start? That started with a probation officer and a police officer talking, and saying “we have to work together,” and they pushed it in their respective agencies. They were not CEO’s, but they were leaders [in] what they were doing. My point is that there are leaders at all levels of an organization, and I don’t think that we always do a very good job looking at who are the champions within those mid-management positions, who are the champions in the line staff, and getting them involved. Find out who are the people that can make this actually work at different levels of the organization. Engage them, empower them to take this and run with it. Maybe you only have a pilot attempt originally or a certain neighborhood [to start], but let them go with it and let it diffuse through the system that way, rather having someone push it down like a food press.

Are there models for this?

So much is dependent on the individual or individuals involved. I think there are models in a sense that there are some principles that you need to keep in mind: you have to have a joint respect for each other missions, you have to look for the commonality in those missions, you have to have the blessing of the cops, you have to look at the workload and take that workload and devise it in a way that allows the people that are actually on the streets doing this stuff to focus on it. Doesn’t mean that you eliminate all of the other stuff, but you have to give some relief that way. There are models in good management, you can look at innovation. Look at 3M. They have crazy meetings where they sit around and throw out these ridiculous ideas and some of the best things that ever occurred come out of it. There are models that way, but I think ultimately what it looks like becomes very personal. If you and I develop a partnership ultimately for that partnership to work we have to get along. If there is any distrust between you and I that partnership is not going to work. So maybe you and I start a partnership, but people in your organization and people in my organization have some distrust. Then it is incumbent on me to deal and diffuse some of that distrust in my organization and you to diffuse some of that distrust in your organization. We help people in our respected organizations understand and appreciate the role that the other organization plays and the strengths and shortcomings that they may have. We have this joint mission that is not a threat to our turf or your turf.

How should information-sharing between probation/parole and law enforcement work in the reentry context?

I think that especially in this day and age people want to get all the information they can and then they will determine what is useful to them and what is not. The reality of that is that they will get overwhelmed. Just think of your email: do you want all the emails you are getting? But are you willing to put stops in place deterring some? Ultimately, when you talk about sharing information between different agencies within the justice system you really have to sit down and develop a business case for what is needed. Qhat does law enforcement and corrections really need? Not what do they want, what is going to help you do your job better. What is the interesting information that they have? I think that you have to build that business case. The kind of information that law enforcement needs is going to be different than the kind of information that probation and parole needs.

I gave some examples where law enforcements certainly would need or should have conditions of supervision because there are some nuisances to conditions of supervisions that tell you a lot about that person under supervision. For example, if you have a sex offender driving in a car with two little girls in the back and you [police officer] pulls him over for speeding. You [have] whatever the statute is in that state. [However,] there is nothing in there that says he has a condition of supervision not to have any contact [with minors] -- you don’t have that information. That’s an important thing for law enforcement to have. Or, if someone is a gang member and one of their [probation/parole] conditions is that they will not be displaying gang symbols [or] wear gang colors, etc. A law enforcement officer sees them standing on a corner doing just that. That’s not only important for law enforcements to know, it’s also important for probation or parole officer to know that the person is violating their conditions. I also gave the example of catching people doing things right because probation and parole have that dual role of ensuring that people are following their conditions of supervision, but also changing behavior. So if you are on my caseload as a probationer and you have a condition that you will not be out at certain hours or that you will be employed during certain times and a cop sees you working your job, I’d like you know that too. Then I do not have to do all these collateral contacts, and a cop can come up to you and say, “Hey I see that you are supposed to be working here and you are doing it. That’s cool. Way to go!” You get that kind of reinforcement of behavior and that informal social control that is so important for people to have in order to change. The formal social controls are important, but they are not the ones that typically change behavior, it’s the informal ones. In some smaller jurisdictions, you have people on a GPS tracking system and probation gets an alert that a person is in a exclusion zone [in other words, an area where they are not supposed to be]. You have a partnership with law enforcement, law enforcement is already over there patrolling, they can go look. There are so many false alerts with GPS that it is driving probation officers crazy because they have to respond to everything. If a probation officer goes inside someone’s house and is having a meeting with them and happens to see a letter from somebody that is an acquaintance and checks with law enforcement only to find out that that person is being investigated for some sort of drug trafficking, its very helpful for a law enforcement to know that person has been in contact [with your client].

Are joint police-probation/parole patrols a good approach to community supervision?

I think they can be great. I used to ask our officers to do ride-a-longs at least once a month with law enforcement. It was as much for them to have an appreciation for what law enforcement’s challenges where, what they were up to, what they were seeing, etc., as it was for law enforcements to [understand] the probation officers [perspective]. I know that a lot of places are doing that much more regularly than once a month, they are actually going out and doing home visits. I think that is great if people can stay true to their individual agency missions and at the same time have that joint mission too.

Posted by: Christopher Watler, Task Force Coordinator

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