The Shakedown or Cop Calculus

Today is a holiday in Maharashtra and our classes are cancelled for the day. Yesterday after class I went home and got a little work done, and then I went to meet up with Sam and Cary to hang out and figure out what we were going to do with our free night.  We talked about a lot of things, and eventually fell to talking about all the music we like that we haven't heard in a while, and we suddenly had the great idea to ditch all of our more ambitious plans for the night and just get some beer, go to Sam's porch, play some cards and listen to some records, which idea we were all very pleased with.  So with our decision made we headed back to my house, grabbed a little to eat, and then headed to the liquor store to get some beer.

There are plenty of liquor stores within a few minutes walk of here.  Liquor is much more taboo here then it is at home, especially since we live in a Brahmin neighborhood, but it's not illegal (the way it is in Gujarat, for example) and the liquor stores are all legitimate, well-lit, well-established stores.  Still, for the sake of discretion, the liquor stores here give you your purchase in a black plastic bag, and the idea is that no one will be able to see through the bag and know that you are carrying something dirty and shameful.  The only problem is that no one needs to see through the bags, because liquor stores are the only places in the city that have black plastic bags in the first place.  Walking around with a heavy black plastic bag dangling from your hand basically feels like having a neon sign flashing above your head that says: "I am a dirty white degenerate with no morals!!!"  On the walk back to my house we realize we didn't really think this out well beforehand, and we notice we are drawing attention from a lot of the people we pass, and we start to feel very uncomfortable.  We have the right to drink, and I personally don't think there's anything morally wrong with drinking some beers and playing some cards, but walking through this neighborhood I am definitely starting to wish we had at least brought a backpack or something to conceal our black plastic bags.  Sam and Cary strongly agree, and just as we get near my apartment we are in the middle of talking about how we will never do this again without a backpack or larger bag, and suddenly I hear someone say, "hey".  The someone turns out to be an Indian police officer sitting on the back of a parked motorcycle with a chubby older man who isn't in uniform but has that dull, lazy confidence that marks him out instantly as a cop or someone very used to authority.  The uniform strolls over and says in broken English, "what's this?" and peers into the bag.  I decide not to piss him off, and to just play it open and honest, and I respectfully say, "oh, it's just some beer.  We are going to my apartment to have a quiet night sir."  And he says, "Beer?  Where is your license?"  Um, what?  "Your license, permit, to carry beer," and after a little confusion we realize that he is asking to see--not our proof of age--but some sort of license allows us to legally walk down the street with closed containers of alcohol on our way somewhere else.  All three of us look at each other, and in an instant we all come to the same conclusion.

Under the circumstances, here is what we assume: we are foreigners walking down the street at night in a Brahmin neighborhood with visible alcohol--something perhaps suspect and a little inappropriate, but by no means illegal.  The police are bored and have found what they think is a great opportunity to have some fun and hopefully make a little money by harassing some white kids who are on shaky ground.  The "license" they are asking for is a code word for the money that we will have to pay them to "buy" the license and continue our walk home without problems.  And there is a chance they are making all of this up on the spot.

This is what we all think, and it's a little bit scary, but there are a number of options open to us yet, and we decide to start out slowly.  The first trick we try is to fake stupidity.  We pretend we don't understand, and when he insists I hand him my driver's license and Cary gives him his passport, as if that's what he was asking for.  This was our first mistake.  Not only is the cop not placated, but now he has our IDs and won't give them back.  Okay, lesson learned.  Now we are one teeny, tiny bit older and wiser.  Next move: we try to give the cop the beer.  Here, you take it and we will just walk away.  We're sorry.  We don't want it anymore.  Nope, uniform is not having it and neither is his mentor, to whom he seems to look often for guidance.  Then we try: look, we will leave the beer here on the sidewalk and just walk away.  Nope.  That's not it either.

So next we trot out the good old fashioned, American, one-white-guy-to-another routine, the one where you say, "Oh, gee whiz officer, I had no idea.  Really, I didn't know.  I'm really sorry," and unless you are unlucky or doing something serious or aren't white, the cop thinks about it and says, "All right you knuckleheads.  Run along and be safe, and don't let me catch you out here again."  It doesn't always work in the States, and even if the Indian officer could have understood our English well enough I'm pretty sure it wouldn't work here.  And it doesn't.

Now it's the cop's turn.  He says, "You come to station.  Okay?  You come to police station," and he hails a rickshaw for us to get into.  Now things are getting more serious and we are getting pretty scared.  There is no way I'm going to an Indian police station unless my other options are seriously exhausted.  I don't want to think about what it will be like if we follow them to the station.  The best-case scenario probably involves mountains of forms and bureaucratic wastes of time and money and possibly drags on for days.  Plus there's a fair chance we'll have to spend the night in a cell until it's "business hours" again, and meanwhile they'll be thinking of all sorts of ways to screw us and take our money.  No, we are not going to the police station, and we don't even have to look at each other to agree on that.

Then Cary, in a stroke of tactical brilliance, tries out a new approach.  He says, "A permit for carrying liquor?  That doesn't sound right to me.  Are you sure?"  And when they say, "yes yes, come to station," he just says, "No.  We're not going to the station.  Nope."  The cops are unarmed and have no radio, and Cary is trying to feel out how serious they are about this and whether it's a bluff.  And surprisingly, we see the cops flinch and get a little sad, and we can tell they aren't quite sure what to do now.  They just meekly insist again that we come to the station, and Cary, sensing the advantage, pushes it further.  He says, "No.  We're not going to the station.  Either you let us go, or you take us to the US Embassy.  We want to talk to the US Embassy."  At the mention of the US Embassy the cops flinch more.  Cary's message is understood by everyone involved: 'Okay Mr. Police Officer.  You can play a game with us, but we're not going to make it easy.  We want you to know that if you go through with this, we are going to make this a serious bureaucratic and legal pain in the ass for you.  Plus now you have to know how the US Embassy works.'  So we come to an impasse.  The cops keep insisting that we get in the rickshaw they have hailed and come to the station, and we keep insisting that we want to get the US Embassy involved immediately or no deal.  There are moments when everyone stands there quietly looking around, waiting for something to happen.  No one knows quite what to do.

Late that night, after all this is over, Cary and I sit around parsing all the angles of this encounter as we remember it.  The cops had a big upper hand, not only because they were on home turf, but also because they knew the laws and we didn't, and moreover, they knew that we didn't know the laws, and we knew that they knew, and they knew that we knew that they knew, and all this compounded their advantage.  And in fact, it turns out that they had an even bigger advantage over us than we realized, and this is that it actually is illegal to carry alcohol in Maharashtra without a special permit, even if it is sealed.  So they had legitimate grounds to detain us.  They knew this the whole time and we didn't, and it sort of gave them a rock solid foundation for harassing us.  

However, we were not totally helpless; we had our confidence that we weren't doing anything wrong (misguided but useful to us), and our obstinacy, and our US Embassy ploy, and whatever else we could come up with before the situation ceased to be manageable.  Cary, examining all the angles in retrospect, came up with an interesting question.  What if we had just walked away?  The cops had no weapons, no radio, no hand cuffs, not even a club, and it was dark, and we were three tall young men and they were only two.  Would they have chased us down?  Would they have tried to tackle us?  Cary proposes that the cops would quickly have seen that forcing a violent confrontation with three white guys over a tiny infraction is not worth the risk or the time, and they would have let us go.  It's an interesting possibility, and one that I am very happy to leave completely hypothetical for the rest of my life.  Because the fact of the matter is that we were in a game with the police and we didn't know most of the rules or what was at stake for us or for them.  We didn't even know if we were breaking a real law or not.  Maybe the cops would have let us go because that would be the better decision for them.  On the other hand maybe hurting an Indian cop's pride and challenging him to save face would lead him to do things that weren't strictly "worth it" for him in cool, mathematical terms.  Moreover, there's a good chance that any cop who is accustomed to patrolling and confronting people without weapons and without radios has thought about this possibility before, or maybe even dealt with it, and has already come up with plenty of ways of handling it that we couldn't foresee.  I'd be very interested to know what they are, since I can't imagine them.  Any parents reading this are hereby assured that experimenting on this hypothesis was not ever at any point close to happening.  It's just good conversation.

Back on the street the situation is not resolved and we are getting pretty shaken.  And actually, the cops seem a little shaken too.  They are starting to get embarrassed that they don't speak English very well and have gotten themselves into this situation that they can't really handle, and they are probably starting to worry that this is going to be more trouble then it's worth if the US Embassy gets involved.  I would guess that they are small city cops who have never confronted Americans before and probably don't really know how the US Embassy works or what it can and can't do, or how much trouble they can get in for denying us access to it.  Of course, we don't really know this either, but this is a bluff that seems to be working for us because this time we have the advantage that they are the ones with something to lose if the embassy gets involved, and plus they don't know much about the US Embassy, and we know that they don't know, and they know that they don't know, and we know that they know that we know that they don't know, etc. etc.  

And in the face of all this pressure, the cops soften even further.  They say, "No Hindi?  No Marathi?"  And we say, "no, only English," and they say, "Come to station.  Translator. For Hindi.  Come to station for translate."  So now their game is that we should come to the station to get a good translator so we can sort this out easier.  But we still don't know what's going to happen at the station, and we don't trust them, and we still assume we weren't actually doing anything wrong and that this is just a shakedown.  So I grab a local guy walking by and I ask, "do you speak English?" and when he says "yes" I enlist his help as a translator.  I do this for two reasons.  One is that I want to disable the cops' attempt to get us to the station for language purposes.  The other is that I want to get the situation plugged into the local community's gossip circle.  I figure that since we are foreigners and we are alone we may have seemed at first like some sort of anonymous free zone away from normal rules, and this may be exciting the cops to try and pull off more than they normally would.  I figure that if the situation becomes more public it can't hurt us, it can only keep things the same or push the cops closer to the law.

Our translator has a friendly little chat with them, and then explains to us again what's going on and that they want us to go to the station.  Again we turn down their request, and after some more chatting the magic word finally comes up.  "You will just have to pay some fine," the translator tells us.  Now we are down to "brass tacks" as they say.  This is where the conversation was heading the whole time, and all the back and forth and move counter-move was probably just an elaborate way of evaluating what this will cost.  Cary wants to keep arguing and insisting that this is wrong and our rights are being violated, but I see that the game is now drawing to a close.  All the cards have been shown; it is now clear who stands where and what's what.  We have no more tricks up our sleeve and neither do they, and we are not going to the station.  So the only question left is, "How much is the fine?"   The cops have now to name a price that is high enough that they are satisfied, and yet not so high that we decide we can't pay it and they lose the money, or so high that we feel backed into a corner and decide that we are better off trying to create a huge, gigantic legal headache, which we have shown we are prepared to do and the cops have revealed they do not want to deal with.  And so this elegant calculator, this subtle social abacus of power and disadvantage and value that has been clicking and rearranging itself all through this confrontation, gracefully and finally arrives at its precise conclusion, and the answer comes back through the translator: "1,000 rupees."  This is about $20 dollars.  I make a halfhearted attempt to bargain, and propose that we pay 500 rupees, but the cop brushes it off and stands his ground, and I suddenly realize that this is not just futile, but naive as well.  I was still under the impression at this point--and this was really foolish--that bargaining is what it looks like on TV, where one person simply says a price, and the other simply says a lower one, and they meet in the middle; and I thought that now that the issue of a "fine" was out in the open it was time to bargain.  What I completely failed to recognize was that everything we had just been through was the bargaining; that that's what bargaining is and it had already run it's beautifully logical course and was complete.  What was my silly little proposal in the face of this well-oiled and fine-tuned machinery, which has been balancing power and exchange value for God knows how long now?  Sacrilege, that's what it was.  The cop had no reason to take it seriously, and he didn't.  We paid the 1,000 rupees and left quickly, still shaking.

So were we taken advantage of?  I submit that we were not.  If you want to be pedantic you could call what happened "corruption".  But it's not exactly corruption.  If you want to be realistic and precise, you could maybe call it para-systemic justice.  The actual system, the official system, doesn't really work.  The courts are back-logged for something like 200 years in most of the major cities here, and the police stations don't really receive enough money from the federal government to run themselves properly.  So a practical system for handling these kinds of problems has been hammered out, and it exists alongside the official system--a para-system.  We were introduced to it last night.  Although it has many problems, it is at least somewhat predictable and stable, and that goes a long way when you are just trying to get by.  It is also more efficient than the official system is, in certain respects.  Of course this kind of system isn't always fair, and I'm sure people get screwed by it in terrible ways all the time.  It's not hard for a cop to take money from people who have done nothing wrong at all.  But name me a system that doesn't screw people unfairly.  At least this time, this way was quick and easy, and everyone got what basically amounts to a fair deal.  The police could have taken us into the station and put us through all the legal proceedings, and in the end we probably would have had to pay a fine anyway, but what good would that do anybody?  It wouldn't do us any good, because we would have to pay the same fine with much more hassle, and it wouldn't do the cops any good since they would never see any of that money and these kinds of exchanges are probably how they support their families, given that the salary of an average policeman here is not very high.  Plus there was the unknown US Embassy variable.  So under the circumstances I actually think this is about as well as it could have worked out for everyone involved, and I was very relieved.  We learned some important lessons, we practiced some valuable skills, and in the end we only lost a little bit of money.  

And we got to keep the beer.