When Duty Becomes Deviance: A Psycho-Social, Political, and Legal Analysis of Police Misconduct in FIR Registration in India

Abstract

Police misconduct in the registration of the First Information Report (FIR) — including refusal to register cognizable offences, wrongful reclassification of criminal wrongs as "civil disputes," and selective inaction — constitutes one of the most consequential yet under-theorized forms of institutional deviance in India's criminal justice system. This paper undertakes a multi-disciplinary analysis of why police personnel at the station level engage in such misconduct, integrating psychological (authority bias, moral disengagement, burnout), social (community and caste embeddedness, patron-client networks), political (local power capture, electoral protection), behavioral (habituation, discretion-as-power), corruptive sense-making (rationalization scripts that redefine crime as "civil" to avoid paperwork and liability), and educational-institutional (inadequate legal literacy and disqualifying training gaps) dimensions. The paper situates this behavior within India's evolving legal architecture, tracing the shift from the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973 (CrPC) and the Indian Penal Code, 1860 (IPC) to the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023 (BNSS) and the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 (BNS), and reviews landmark Supreme Court jurisprudence — principally Lalita Kumari v. Government of Uttar Pradesh (2014), State of Haryana v. Bhajan Lal (1992), Joginder Kumar v. State of U.P. (1994), D.K. Basu v. State of West Bengal (1997), Prakash Singh v. Union of India (2006), and Vineet Narain v. Union of India (1998) — that have sought to close the gap between statutory duty and station-level practice. An illustrative, anonymized case vignette drawn from a composite of common rural North Indian station-level patterns — informants being told that a cognizable criminal matter is "civil" and refused FIR registration — is used to ground the theoretical discussion. The paper concludes with a multi-level policy framework spanning recruitment, training, technology, oversight, and accountability reform.