urgent need to police the police - EDITORIAL

hile the Armed Services are maintained mainly for national security, the Police Service is for the security and safety of civilians or the ordinary people for whom the police station needs to be a refuge where they could find a solution to a crisis or problem.





On the basis of what has been happening during the past few years the people-friendly Police Service to a large extent is imprisoned with most people today being afraid or unwilling to go to a police station to resolve a problem.

Rampant bribery or corruption, ill-treatment or torture and growing party politicisation of what the police department does or does not do are among the main causes for the degradation of the police and the resultant breakdown of law and order or the rule of law.

The crisis became a malignant cancer in 2011 with the abolition of the 17th Amendment which, among other virtues made provision for an Independent National Police Commission. Appointments above the rank of inspectors, promotions or transfers and inquiries on complaints by the people were among the powers given to this independent Commission appointed by an all-party Constitutional Council. But the President whose party in 1994 described the Executive Presidency as a curse and pledged to abolish it in  24 hours, reportedly complained after his re-election in November 2010 that he did not even have the power given to appoint the officer-in-charge of the Tangalle Police station in his Hambantota home base. So the 17th Amendment was abolished by a patched-up two-thirds parliamentary majority for which the government did not get a mandate at the 2011 General Election but put together through political power brokering and backroom deals. With the implementation of the 18th Amendment which gave absolute powers to an already powerful Executive Presidency, one of the main victims was the police department and as a result of it we have seen serious violations of the basic rights of the people who are supposed to be sovereign, though such high sounding words are largely on paper if not in the waste-paper basket of party politics.

Independent analysts and most people believe that two of the biggest profit-making businesses in Sri Lanka today are narcotics and politics. The virtual dismantling of the people-friendly Police Service and its degeneration into a government or party political department is widely seen as the main reason for the criminalisation of politics and the politicisation of crimes.

For instance most people see the police spokesman today more as a government spokesman and his assurances of three or four special teams probing various crimes or often taken as a jackboot joke.

During the past few months several container loads of heroin were detected and spotlighted in the media. Last Monday Rs.700 million worth of heroin hidden under welding pipes was detected with analysts warning that Sri Lanka may have become a heroin hub and our young generation may be ruined by thousands of addicts. After all the talk and when the spotlight is switched off we do not know what happens to these container loads of heroin.  But like in the case of  many other crimes -- including killings, white van abductions and robberies -- special teams are supposed to be investigating them but they end up as skeletons in the political cabinet.
The Government has one option now to save Sri Lanka from full scale lawlessness or anarchy where we often see criminals tampering with the crime scene -- as in the case of the shooting down of the Malaysian Airways Boeing 777 in Eastern Ukraine.

The Police must be policed and the way to do it is to restore the 17th Amendment and thereby the need for the Independent National Police Commission.