Transforming the police force is in everyone’s interest for two main reasons. First, it is a vital institution in maintaining law and order and, second, the majority of the officers deserve all the respect and confidence they can get in recognition of their loyalty and dedication to duty.
Indeed, the 11 strategic objectives and 49 measures listed in the strategy document released last week include initiatives aimed at assisting the force to win back the public trust it lost over the years and also rewarding that kind of behaviour and attitude that are a credit to policing.
One can only hope this exercise is not destined to meet the same fate as the three others that preceded it over the past 13 years.
The chairman of the police governance board, Saviour Formosa, admitted the force lacked direction over the years. He stopped short of explaining why, though he did say that the strategic documents of 1997, 1999 and 2004 had all failed because of lack of implementation and no monitoring.
The responsibility of ensuring this is not merely a stunt designed to appease international entities like the Venice Commission and GRECO but a genuine attempt to ensure the people have a well-oiled and fully functional disciplined force that can be blindly trusted, of course, rests squarely with Police Commissioner Angelo Gafà.
A long-standing police officer himself who also served as the force’s CEO over the past few years, Gafà surely knows where the root of the problem really lies.
He must, therefore, resolve that the police enjoy “the confidence of the public and is perceived as politically neutral in the service of the state and the professional, unbiased, enforcement of the law and the protection of the citizen”, as the Venice Commission had eloquently put it.
The initiatives recommended in the transformation strategy are, in themselves, commendable and, in most cases, doable too.
However, the real challenge to transform the force is to effectively address what GRECO, the Council of Europe’s Group of States against Corruption, observed in its Malta report last year. It noted the police had the reputation of being traditionally heavily subjected to the executive branch of power and that its ability to deal with sensitive or major cases depend largely on the capacities, determination and self-assertiveness of its head to lead the work despite external pressures.
A notable improvement recently has been the manner and frequency in which the police communicate with the public via the media.
Accounts of accidents and crime are issued on a regular basis and crime conferences held when incidents of a certain entity occur.
It is now time to go a notch higher even to prove the force is slowly but surely severing the strings that so evidently were pulled from Valletta and also regularly communicate with the public about cases that are of particular interest to them, like money-laundering investigations involving top people in the echelons of power and their henchmen.
The prevention of money laundering acts bans disclosure of investigations to avoid giving any advance warning to suspects or potential suspects.
Once such suspects are interrogated by the police, the cat is out of the bag and the public interest kicks in.
These, and, of course, prosecution where there is prima facie violation of the law irrespective of who the suspect is, are the sort of challenges the police force must overcome to really transform itself into a reliable and trustworthy law enforcement institution.