Corrupt police network in India – Making the invisible to be visible

INTRODUCTION: - 

Applying social network analysis techniques to map out the police corruption in India, that will further prevent corruption and foster investigation. This analysis can be done using various data that is available from the commission of enquiry department,  which exposes the network and provides insights about the dark networks of police corruption.

WHY INDIA ?

Its not surprising today that, public officials who put-forward themselves before those of public have corrupted a system in which they ignore to act as public servant. Major form of corruption – Bribe (money in form of cash/kind/gift to carry out illegal action or dishonesty). Corruption channel in the indian police department flows right from the constables to the high rank officers. The most surprising truth is that, the police takes bribe from both, the accused and the complainants. The power that police enjoys is so wide that, they can harass, accuse, arrest even an honest individual. A weekly routine of a dishonest officer goes like – beating the poor people (e.g. auto-rikshaw pullers, street vendors, labourers etc.) by taking a percentage of their hard earned money, popularly termed as ‘hafta’ (weekly fixed amount).

The bribe rate of police department varies – for constables the rate is between Rs. 10 to Rs. 2000, for a sub-inspector it is Rs. 2000 to Rs. 10000 and for a deputy supritendant it is Rs. 10,000 to Rs. 20,000 or more.

THE POLICE CULTURE 

It can be said that the corrupt police network has a similar culture and characteristics that match other types of criminal networks. I say this because, in the criminal network, the drug trafficking operations are carried out purely on kinship and friendship networks to help them protect from from law agencies. They deal only with people whom they trust and know. Therefore, it can be said that corrupt police network is also a trust based network/organisation. It is important to note that there are three possible key variable of bribe that are central to the police force – Bribes, transference of bribe and corrupt support

SNA HYPOTHESIS

HYPOTHESIS 1:- The police network will extend to only those who can be trusted through corrupt association by a common subset. The people under this network perform specific roles who fill the spaces between nodes. Therefore, it is likely that a few key people within the network who facilitate communication.

HYPOTHESIS 2:-  The structure of a corrupt network will mirror the hierarchy of the police force and thus it will tend to have a high density.

HYPOTHESIS 3:-  The structure of the network would be highly centralised, which would reflect the beuracratic structure of the Indian police force. This would be visible in the long average path length as the communication in that network will follow the chain of command and hence it will have a high rating of centrality.

HYPOTHESIS 4:- SNA will be able to identify key influencers within the network that can be exposed and disrupt the entire corrupt network.

METHODOLOGY

• First, extract and gather police enquires and plot the corrupt networks as network maps.
• Examine the network.
• Use SNA to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the corrupt police network and develop plans and strategies for investigation and prevention.

LIMITATIONS

• Data sources collected from police enquiries could be imperfect
• Network maps may mislead by plotting relationships that have been identified by a third party without any confirmation.

METRICS 

• Density – This will help us show how close knit the entire network is and show the overall the strength of the network as well.

• Centrality measure – It helps to give an indication of how concentrated a network is – Is the flow of resources controlled and managed by a small number of people or is it widely distributed? A high centralisation score indicates that some nodes in the network have more connections than others.

• Average path distance – This measure helps to identify the level of ease of navigating around in the network. In other words, amongst people who are connected, how much do they have to travel to reach another person they are not connected to.

• Reciprocity – Indicates whether there is a two-way or reciprocal relationship between the nodes in the network

Alok Agarwal

MBA candidate 2015

Hult International Buiness School