CPA Project Panel Discussion: Policing During Lockdown [26th Sept]

Theme: Policing During the Lockdown: Of Discretion, Violence and Systemic Marginalisation in our Criminal Justice System

Date: September 26, 2020

Time: 4:30 PM

Panellists:

• Advocate Nitya Ramakrishnan
• Advocate Disha Wadekar
• Data Researcher Srinivas Kodali

Moderator: Journalist Sukanya Shantha.

Over the past few months, we saw India rely on stringent criminal laws to manage a national health crisis, the COVID-19 Pandemic. During the various phases of the nationwide lockdown, there was a heavy deployment of police personnel to enforce it. This in turn resulted in an increase in instances of police brutality, frivolous criminal cases and the prison population.

It is this use of criminal law resulting in the marginalisation of disenfranchised communities that we seek to highlight through the Project's report- Countermapping Pandemic Policing: Sanctioned Violence in Madhya Pradesh. Madhya Pradesh was selected as the site for conducting the research for this report owing to our previous work experience within the state's criminal justice system and MP's large prison population. For our study we analyzed 21,015 arrest records and 500 FIRs from MP.

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