{"id":51065,"date":"2016-01-14T20:55:13","date_gmt":"2016-01-15T02:55:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=51065"},"modified":"2016-01-14T07:16:15","modified_gmt":"2016-01-14T14:16:15","slug":"double-standards-of-the-police","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2016\/01\/14\/double-standards-of-the-police\/","title":{"rendered":"Double Standards of the Police"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2><span style=\"color: #0000ff;\"><em>P.A.Samaraweera<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n<p>During recent times the performance of the police had been widely criticised by the public. Because it had become obvious to the people that they pick and choose the way they treat those who come under their jurisdiction. Some time back we saw how a mentally retarded man being beaten up at Mt Lavinia beach, despite his pleas. Then there were\u00a0the university students being given the same treatment when they went to present their grievances. The more recent incident was the Embilipitiya case where unnecessary force had been used to break up a party which led to the death of a man.<\/p>\n<p>Apart from these we have also seen instances where young\u00a0school children\u00a0being arrested for flimsy matters such as stealing a few coconuts to pay their fees or\u00a0steal something to eat. Neither did the police\u00a0look at their age nor\u00a0consult the\u00a0Legal Draftsman.\u00a0\u00a0Compared to these we\u00a0saw the way how Hirunika MP was arrested.\u00a0The whole of Sri Lanka probably thought she should be arrested. But despite all the evidence showing that she was involved in an abduction, the police surprisingly\u00a0sought advise of the Attorney General. This as usual took weeks. Then after\u00a0instructions were given by the Legal Dept, the arrest, producing before a magistrate, giving bail, preparing all the paper work in relation to this and so on had been done in a few hours. All these were done so swiftly people think that\u00a0it\u00a0is a\u00a0 record. The photographs displayed in the media shows that even Hirunika seems to treat her \u00b4arrest\u00b4 very lightly. We see her laughing all the way to courts. The new govt had appointed Independent Commissions and the people are wondering if they are\u00a0independent only on paper!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>P.A.Samaraweera During recent times the performance of the police had been widely criticised by the public. Because it had become obvious to the people that they pick and choose the way they treat those who come under their jurisdiction. Some time back we saw how a mentally retarded man being beaten up at Mt Lavinia [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-51065","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-drpasamaraweera"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51065","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51065"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51065\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51065"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51065"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51065"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}