Sunday Times 2
Minister wants to “revamp the Police Department”
View(s):Many an eyebrow has been raised by a recent news item which states that “Public Security Minister Sarath Weerasekera discussed ways and means of revamping the Police Department with IGP C. D. Wickramaratne and senior police officials.” Carried along with the news items was a photograph of the Minister with the IGP, senior police officers, Public Security Ministry Secretary retired Maj. Gen. Jagath Alwis
The news item is seen with raised eyebrows as this message is nothing new. For this very same message has been given to the Police since 1947 by those who had authority over the Police. The only thing new is the word ‘reform’ being replaced by ‘revamp’. Police are, therefore, quite used to such vacant message. Police officers thus barely react to these, particularly since each of those messages meant little at the end. The Police were, thereby, neither changed nor revamped in any way. This same message had, therefore, only to be repeated just as it suited the messenger — in this case Minister Weerasekera — the latest.
A customs officer holds a sniffer dog at the harbour of Calais, northern France on January 1, 2021, on the day that the Brexit transition period ends and Britain leaves the EU single market and customs union four-and-a-half years after voting to leave the bloc. AFP
The problem even with the current message of the minister is that it also means nothing, as before. But yet it is uttered to be heard loud. The sound of the note is meant only perhaps to carry to the higher authorities. It is possible that the higher authorities themselves want only to hear what is said with little concern of what thereafter is to be done. For the public, the concern is how the revamping is to be done. I think, even the minister does not have a clue, what revamping is, how it is to be done, when it is to be done.
The Police well understand this, hence the silence. The overhaul of Police or if such be the idea covers a large area, the scope of which, as extensive as it is, is doubted, whether the minister himself has any idea of it.
Therefore, the message of the minister to the Police higher echelons may have been uttered only to be heard by his own ears, only to stamp his weight. The police rank and file would not even listen, since they can size up matters far better than others can. Minister Weerasekera is blissfully unaware of this underlying current of cynicism among the constable who matters. The minister may even be treating the constable as a soldier as he would within his familiarity. Revamping the police as the minister proclaims can then be lost, dense or obtuse, if it were not to strike a police chord of reaction and response.
For better focus, however, revamping may then be confined by the minister only to police investigation. Revamping of police investigation can surely help revamping of the police in considerable measure. In this respect too, it is still doubtful that the minister can somehow revamp police investigation.
Police, as it stands today, suffer in their reputation and in their task for law and order through failure of investigation. Such failure is rampant over the recent years, in various ways. For failure of investigation has led to violence and disorder. The Ratupaswala incident and the prison riots at Welikada and Mahara are basically failure of investigation. Failure of investigation has also led to breakdown of law and order by way of gang rivalry, hired assassination, abduction even from near embassy premises and suppression of murders. Such failure of investigation has even resulted in police misdemeanor and illegality itself when suspects in police custody have come by violent deaths at police hands when suspects are said to have been trying to escape from police custody. So much so that the intransitive verb ‘escape’ has come to mean a transitive verb just as the intransitive verb ‘disappear’ turned transitive.
Thus, one hears of people being disappeared and being escaped. Dead bodies found the next morning, murders converted into suicide for politically corrupt reasons, are also the order of the day, not of law. This failure is surely the direct result of the political authorities even by encouragement or neglect. Or else such would not be so blatantly repeated as the public can see.
Failure of investigation is equally the result of a breakdown in the criminal justice administration, of the Judiciary and the court, of the AG and his role, of the police themselves and also of the prisons. The laxity of the criminal justice administration within all its agencies is now common place.
Police investigation cannot so help law and order, not in this quagmire of the law. Most lawyers are proclaimed to be corrupt. How could such ‘proclaimed’ offenders thrive if the judicial system is itself not corrupt or at least affords the space for such corruption? Can the Police be revamped in such situation? Is then the loud statement of the minister to the Police hierarchy just as inane as it sounds?
The minister’s statement to revamp Police is then made not with intelligence and discernment but with rifles and bayonets. The point is that the minister may suffer in the revamping process from a double disadvantage in his makeup, political and military. Politically, Mr. Weerasekera has shown himself to owe duly to his political superiors. Militarily, the disposition of Mr. Weerasekera to his superiors’ orders is inbuilt in him.
A concerned reader referring to my previous article ‘Police investigation into crime’ whilst commending me for writing it and urging me to ‘keep on writing’, described the speech made by the minister in Parliament, as immature. The minister is in a double bind for want of maturity and competence, and such seems to be the highest acceptable qualification desired by his political superiors.
The hope is then that the minister can yet break through this impasse and not be a mere convenience for his political higher-ups that may require only the statement not the action that follows. That hope is nearly forlorn given the realities the public are well aware of. Current experience is that the breakdown of law and order and much that goes with it are advantageous to political masters.
Nevertheless, this criticism of the minister and his claim to revamp the Police yet need some modulation. For the minister only inherits the breakdown of law and order, of failure of police investigation, all coming over for some time before he came into this position. The task now before him is huge. Yet the finger now points only at him. The minister needs advice. This guidance he may gain from the panel of experts in his political list, who, I think, are competent enough to give such guidance.
And, again, if the minister were to embark on such a venture, in such a way, I believe the Police may come around somewhat.
(The writer is a Retired Senior Superintendent of Police. He can be contacted at seneviratnetz@gmail.com; TP 077 44 751 44.)