Joseph: Top cops unhappy

Minister of National Security, Martin Joseph, said top police officers were unhappy over the state of the country, vowing to transform the Police Service. He was contributing to the Finance (Supplementation and Variation of Appropriation) (No 2) Bill 2004 Tuesday night in the Senate. “The leaders of the Police Service cannot be happy and satisfied about what is happening in this country.” Saying he would not “beat up on the Police Service,” he explained: “I praise in public and I criticise in private.” He said he wanted to transform the Police Service from being administrators to being managers and then to being leaders. The solution, he asserted, was not the import of foreigners to lead.

Top officers, he effused, had undergone an Executive Leadership Development Series. They had heard talks by luminaries such as Robert Riley, Ron Harford, Ken Gordon, and Bhoe Tewarie, plus a former deputy chief of police of Miami/Dade (USA), a former mayor of Cali, Colombia,  and chairman of the Integrity Commission, Gordon Deane. Saying the Police Service needed a change in attitude, Joseph declared: “It will take time, but efforts are being made.” Community policing, he vowed, would not been seen as a soft option or as just a department of the Police Service. “In a modern Police Service, community policing must be a way of life.”  

Joseph said each of the country’s nine divisional police commanders was to be held responsible for crime in his division. He explained that as crime statistics came in, resources would be appropriately allocated. Each commander, he said, had to assess his own crime statistics and say to himself: “These are my ‘hotspots,’ these are my patterns. How do we allocate our resources? “One of the first things we do is to make sure police have adequate remuneration. This Government negotiated increases.”