After the NYPD shot a groom leaving his stag party two days ago, there has been a huge uproar in the American press over what was clearly a crime committed by the men in uniform in the world’s wealthiest city. The mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, however played it safe. At a press conference he appeared to condemn the murder by the police while saying that he did not want to judge what had happened because the enquiry that had been ordered would decide. This reminded me of the "Yes Minister" and "Yes Prime Minister" series where the minister is advised that the best way to sweep something under the carpet is to order an enquiry into it. You might say that that was a cynical comment on the British system and that this happened in the USA, a country that is extremely lawsuit friendly and where there may be legal activism by civil rights groups over this murder by the police.

I do not believe that anything would come out of the legal process too, and here’s why. A few months ago, two retired NYPD police offcers were hauled off before the courts for having acted as hit men for the mafia. One would assume that in such a case, they would have been subjected to exemplary punishment. Nothing happened. The courts said that the Statute of Limitations had expired and they could not be tried for their murdering ways. The two criminals in uniform got away with murder, and that was sanctioned by the court system.

While this kind of thing is common in the third world and it evokes howls of protest from both third world countries and the developed world when it happens, the developed world has learned, quite smartly, to brush this kind of thing under the carpet. The USA rightly deposed Panamanian dictator and drug smuggler extraordinaire Manuel Noriega for masterminding the trafficking of cocaine. But, in Chicago, a huge haul of drugs that had been seized by the police disappeared from police custody. No one talks about it, not even the newspapers here who initially expressed token outrage like the New York mayor did after the murder of the black brdegroom recently. One would think that a country that deposed a foreign dictator for trafficking in drugs would take the authorities within it’s own borders to task for the same thing. Nothing was done.

There was the killing of a Brazilian electrician in the UK, following which the same policemen who shot him and were exonerated by the government in what was a monumental coverup, then went and shot one more man. Yet another case of judicially sanctioned murder by the police? You bet that is what it is! But, if I remember right, the British media gave more press to the Larins shootings in Delhi than they did to their own murderers in uniform.

There is a smugness to the western approach to matters like crime and human rights that is hilarious at best and callous if looked at with a critical eye. The recent death of the RUssian spy who defected to the UK, Alexander Litvinenko, inspired The Times to write column after column almost condemning the Russian establishment as his assassins. There were columns on ther esearch that the Russians are supposed to carry out on the use of poisons etc and the newspaper concluded that the Polonium was administered by someone who wanted to murder the spy, until it was pointed out that someone who tried to administer the poison, Poloniun 210 to Litvinenko would have been at as much risk of dying as Litvinenko himself. Two people who were supposed to have dined with the dead Russian were questioned and neither seems likely to have been the poisoner. There was also a huge amount of noise and fury over a dying deposition that Litvinenko was supposed to have made though it was obvious to anyone who read the statement that it sounded like a cheap 1950s propaganda piece. It was obvious to the British establishment that the RUssians were guilty. This was, after all, a nation where the brave people kicked dachshunds to death during two world wars because they were German dogs. A good friend who is half Jewish and loves dogs, often wonders aloud why the Brave British did not do the same to Rottweilers...

There are the inevitable NGOs, always selective in their noisemaking over various issues depending on who pays their bills, latching on to one or another such issue from time to time to get publicity for themsleves and donations for their cause. The German NGO Transparency International has a pompous annual report detailing corruption in the countries of the world. Human Rights Watch is always quick to jump on Asian countries for their human rights violations. But, I doubt that TI would take the theft of drugs from the Chicago police’s custody into account when rating the USA on corruption. Or, that Human Rights Watch has anything to say about the two murering NYPD men who were let off by US courts. Germany has been hit by a number of corruption exposes in recent times with companies like Siemens, Volkswagen etc shown as horrendously corrupt and efficient in buying their way through the corporate world as well as in governments. I doubt that TI’s next report would do anything other than rank Germany among the least corrupt countries in the world.

Perhaps, this is a place where the so-called Third World could show the wealthy nations their place. The press in the Third World is undoubtedly more honest - Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi newspapers are severely more critical of their rulers than British and American newspapers are. In the end, this tells me that the South Asian media, for one, is a lot more critical and less gullible than that in the west. This might be off topic, but is this why newspapers continue to sell in South Asia in record numbers while they seem to be slowly going bankrupt in the west?