FIVE policemen were rescued after locals confined them in Mymensingh’s Gouripur upazila for their alleged bid to frame a trader in a drug case on Tuesday. A plainclothes police team, led by an Assistant Sub-inspector of Gouripur Police Station, went to raid the mobile phone recharge shop of a local trader at Ramgopalpur Bazar on Sunday. Following the incident, the policemen were closed to Mymensingh Police Lines.
Witnesses said two ASIs firstly entered the shop and started searching the shop for drugs. But they did not get any drug there. All of a sudden, one ASI cried out from outside the shop that there were drugs in a bundle of electric cable, keeping one of his hands on the bundle. Police recovered 10-12 Yaba tablets from the bundle. Locals alleged that police had kept the pills there. Hearing the news, locals rushed to the spot and confined the policemen to the traders’ association office and chanted slogans against the policemen.
It is not the first time that the police have been involved in an act of extortion. Many such incidents have occurred in the recent past, tarnishing the already shredded image of the force. The reasons for such extortion are well known. All policemen have to pay a hefty sum to get a job. For some paying such an amount is only possible if they recoup the money through extortion or other coercive methods.
Another reason is the covert politicisation of the security forces. If one gets jobs in the police because he has political links then he begins to possess an air of immunity and thinks that since he keeps the law personally he is above it. Therefore he begins to act in small acts of extortion and intimidation, tarnishing the image of an otherwise disciplined force.
So what needs to happen is for recruitment to occur without financial consideration or political links. Merit based recruitment may go a long way towards stopping such acts from occurring in the future. Continuous training and guidelines on societal behaviour may change the attitude of the forces. It is time they realise that they should be friends and not masters.
