Cleaning up the police

There are over 6,000 complaints related to police brutality, claims of planting of drugs and weapons, discreditable conduct, failure to attend court, insubordination, lateness, and absence from duty.

Some of these complaints would have gone directly to the police and some to the Police Complaints Authority, but even those going to the PCA would have had to involve some reference to the PCD.

This backlog has arisen primarily because of a shortage of staff at the Police Complaints Division (PCD) to investigate them. In the Budget debate last year, National Security Minister Martin Joseph revealed that there are only 15 officers to handle these thousands of complaints. The Sunday Newsday report by Nalini Seelal noted that US crime consultant Stephen Mastrofsky had recommended that officers from all divisions be used to deal with the backlog. But local police officers, rightly, pointed out that there was a manpower shortage throughout the Service. This shows the limits of using foreign consultants who do not appreciate the peculiar features of our local systems.

But Police Commissioner Trevor Paul says that 40 additional officers have been added to the PCD staff.

However, a lack of manpower is only the ostensible reason that has prevented the PCD from being effective. Underlying this lack is an unwillingness to frontally tackle the problem of police abuse and inefficiency. This is because doing so would inevitably lower morale and cause fractures within the Service. Any police organisation, in order to be effective, must have a sense of solidarity. When police officers are appointed to investigate other officers, that solidarity is broken. It might therefore be better if civilians were trained and hired to handle the bureaucratic aspects of the complaints, leaving the investigative aspects to be handled by officers — perhaps retirees.

But the related problem is that, for any police organisation to be effective, the abuse of power, corruption, and incompetence must be kept to a minimum. It is worth noting that only the first two categories of the complaints listed above — police brutality and the planting of drugs and weapons — would have come from civilians. All the latter would have been internal — made, presumably, by higher-ranking officers about their juniors. The number of complaints is also significant. Given that there are between 7,000 and 8,000 persons on the force, it is either that the majority of officers have complaints against them or that a minority of officers have multiple complaints about them.

If it is the latter, then it is clear that weeding out these individuals quickly and efficiently would go a long way to increasing the efficiency of the Service. Not only that, but the sense of solidarity amongst the remaining officers would be greatly strengthened, to an extent where the whole culture of policing could be altered within a few short years.

If, however, these complaints are against the vast majority of officers, then the country has a much larger problem on its hands. Whichever it is, this is a matter that has to be handled expeditiously if the Police Service is to become what it at present is not: an effective crime-fighting organisation.