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Politicizing The Police Service
Posted: Saturday, December 14, 2002
By Stephen Kangal MOM
CARONI
The proposed constitution amending legislation ostensibly designed to upgrade efficiency in the operations of the Police Service is a conduit for the politicisation of the Service. An appreciation of the political ecology that gave birth to this legislative initiative is fundamental to an understanding of the intent and several provisions of the bills. This ill-conceived, mis-directed, scatter shot, one- size- fits- all legislative approach is the product of a former UNC Administration that never sought to conceal its anti-public service procedural stance as well as anti- whatever stood in its path of its political intransigence.
The ex-Panday Administration demonstrated by its modus operandi an unbridled and insatiable apetite for dismantling the entire regime of checks and balances previously instituted by our collective and tried and tested wisdom for upholding the principles of transparency, accountability and non-partisanship in governmental affairs. The display of arrogance, instant quick -fixes and the circumvention of established tendering procedures aided and abetted by MTS, TIDCO, NIPDEC, The AATT etc paraded as performance but at astronomically vulgar and obscene prices. Hence the proposal to disband the checks and balance immanent in the operations of the Police Service Commission.
The process of problem identification within the Police Service and therefore problem solving approaches is fundamentally flawed. These Bills reflect an institutional response/ approach to what is essentially a manpower/ human resource/ work ethic/ motivational problem. The Police Bills are engineered to postpone problem solving in the Service. They will further conduct the Service into the realms of inefficiencies and lack of delivery of police services similar to the legislative/ institutional approaches that punished Trinbagonians with the Regional Corporations, The Regional Health Authorities (RHA's), TIDCO, MTS and NIPDEC all of which became fronts for concealing graft, corruption, astronomical salaries and blatant misbehaviour in public office.
Hitherto recruitment procedures/criteria/nepotism have alienated large sections of our qualified cosmopolitanism from being admitted into the Service. For enhancing organisational effectiveness the Police Service must equitably reflect the diversity of the policed even if positive discrimination approaches a la Lord Scarman must be temporarily utilised to achieve the desired ethnic and geographic balance in its composition. The PMA will not change the price of cocoa.
The functional link between the policed and the police is a sine qua non both for law enforcement effectiveness and its corollary of enhancing police-community relations. Secondly, from an intelligence gathering as well as from a crime prevention/detection perspectives recruits must be drawn from a wide geographical catchment area and not be circumscribed and limited to the dominant Afro-centric East-West Corridor. In fact the O'Dowd Report containing revelations of the presence of a rogue element in the Service is reaping the whirlwind of careless recruiting procedures and a congenital lack of effective internal management, control, supervision and rampant nepotism.
T&T Police Service does not need an external, politically dominated and constituted proposed Police Management Agency (PMA). This detached, external politicised Agency most certainly will fail to bring about the radical change in the modus operandi of the Police Service so essential for a service that is dedicated to protect and serve the weak from the machinations of the strong, the lawless and the political elite.
Let the Police Commissioner as CEO establish effective, internal management and control measures and mechanisms using the top echelons of the Service to take advantage of the delegation of powers conferred on him hitherto by the Police Service Commission. Retain the impartial Police Service Commission as a quasi-judicial entity and re-tool and re-engineer the Service internally. This is the only meaningful way forward to make the Service responsive to the security needs of the community.
A new work ethic is needed –not new institutional creations.
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