A better officer

Psychological testing will ensure a general mental wellness among recruits, while psychometric testing will ensure a candidate in cognition and aptitude is a best-fit to this demanding job.

Mental health problems are said to be common in this society, perhaps brought on by past situational trauma, biochemical imbalances in the brain, genetics, substance addictions, and the strains of daily life.

Even loud noise from boom boxes or firecrackers can stress out the best of us.

Sadly, this society offers little to combat these daily stresses on the mind, and indeed mental health has hitherto been widely seen as a taboo topic, and this is likely to be even moreso in the macho culture of a Police Service.

To that end, mental assessment should not just be an initial oneand- done screening process to filter out the mentally unfit, but should also offer an ongoing programme of support, guidance and counselling to officers with a highly stressful daily existence. While an Employee Assistance Programme is open to police officers, does potential stigma impede accessibility? New recruits will face the tests proposed by Dillon, public scrutiny with their photos published in the newspapers, and the rigours of the Police Academy, but what next? Even if recruits then enter the Police Service in good nick, they will then face both the harsh realities of their onerous 12-hour daily shift and possible reputed corrupt influences within the ranks.

So, while Dillon’s testing can try to filter out at the onset anyone with a latent predisposition to mental health problems and/or antisocial tendencies, the officers must be given more support in the months and years as their careers develop.

This should be done before things deteriorate to the state of needing the input of the Professional Standards Bureau whose role is to probe corrupt officers.

While we’d like to think of most officers as well-intentioned, sadly we have also seen far too many officers unable or unwilling to maintain the highest standards of integrity demanded by this job.

At present the arrest of five police officers for a $400,000 heist done in full uniform and using official police vehicles shows the futility of hiring more officers if they ultimately turn out to be corrupt.

Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley is urging local government reform that includes the addition of 100 municipal officers to each of the country’s 14 local government corporations, but he himself has warned that if corrupt officers are recruited these communities will be hit hard. We fully agree.

As an aside, we also welcome his call for more community policing even by way of police officers on bicycles interacting with residents, rather than whizzing past in tinted, air-conditioned SUVs as now obtains.

We also hope for a more qualified and more capable officer to be hired by psychometric testing, in this computer age.

While recruitment has traditionally focused on the need for “brawn” to be able to seize miscreants — as stated in the requirement to be “of good physique and at least 167 centimetres in height” — we hope focus can now shift to “brain”.

The new tools of the TTPS will surely be the use of sophisticated equipment, the ability to spot patterns in crime data, and a deep insight into human behaviour. We offer our suggestions to the TTPS, to try to avert the crisis of confidence in law enforcement that has plagued many nations, as most starkly shown by the recent Black Lives Matter protests in the United States.