Police and the Criminal Court

We are attempting to turn the police against the courts, or at least to make the police realize that they are not within a common system with the courts, a system known as 'law-enforcement.' We start from the belief that it is the police which is the better organ, more justly in service of society, but the courts put it into a lot of troublesome scenarios. We must not take the relationship between the police and the courts for granted, meaning that we must not assume that both originated together and are in fact a part of same law-enforcement system. It is only today that the police and the courts have been so close to one another. In this relationship, the police has always come out secondary. It always seems that it is the police which is borrowing from the courts the terminology and tactic in how it should do its work. One consequence is how rigid the police system seems, the level of policing seems, today overburdened by its own call for discipline...its disciplining of another is often turned upon itself to become an act of self-discipline. The courts themselves have more flexibility, and seem to treat the law as something which is blurry in conception and in their execution of it. The police being the chief authority, because of its guns and badges, is in fact an illusory assumption; the real authority are the courts, the lawyers, the judges.

There are many concrete manifestations of the influence of the courts upon the police. The courts have a freedom of shaping the criminal. “The suspect was too violent” the courts may assert, and in the subsequent pursuit of suspected murderers, the police focuses on those which are “too violent”. In the character sketch of the criminal, the courts point to those traits of the criminal that selectively make some things sound more problematic over others; the criminal is made in the court and then found in the street by the police. The police understands what to look for depending on what the lawyer speaks, the lawyer who has private agendas, who has political agendas, who has biases...And borrowing from the courts, in the police's job too the issue becomes less to do with the truth and more to do with the more convincing argument. And the first step here is the intellectualization of the police, the making of the police into an enforcer of law. In this and many other ways, the courts influence the police in the process of criminalization. And what is the issue? Precisely that the private lawyer dominates the court, and therefore what is meant for public service is in fact for the private good. With its influence to the police force, the courts manage to steer what is supposed to be purely for the public/social good towards private agendas. The police finds inspiration from the courts in many ways: the treatment of the criminal in the courts, the way he is judged, the scenarios which are highlighted around him, and the degree of punishment he gets as a form of justice all have direct influences on the police when he/she is on duty. The police is a silent observer in the courts; it is supposed to watch and learn about the process of making a criminal.

It is true that it is difficult to truly note the foreign influence upon the police force. The police force, by itself, seems to demonstrate a great distance from any type of foreign influence, and seems to be a national organ through and through. But the foreign influence is in the courts: through a law education abroad, through the study of Western ethics etc. It would be fine if only the influence was foreign, but, in the contact points between the police force and the courts, there is often direct foreign intervention. Where the foreign law and the domestic police meet, where they have their most meaningful and productive contact is indeed obvious: it is nothing other than the prison. We must not consider the prison to be a backward place, a place that seamlessly integrates with the rest of Nepal in its lack of development...rather, the prison is a place of advanced knowledge, intelligent subjects, and a place with the continuous monitoring from foreign interests. The prison is not under the authority of the police, it seems so only because such an image has been crafted. Rather, the courts too have their presence in the prison, and their influence in the prison is quite deep. It is these courts that may facilitate the conversion of a prison into a mass prison system, and the criminalization of the population is already underway here. This mass imprisonment is possible thanks to the lawyers' equation between words “reckless,” “undisciplined” and others which the police is then allowed to associate with its suspects.