Sunday Times 2
Law and Order and the downfall of Police Intelligence
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Police Intelligence is a matter that has lost its way for several years now. This underscores a fact that Police Intelligence was a prime requirement, for a century or more previously, in the annals of policing in this country. In effect, Police Intelligence is not a matter of time to come and go periodically as history would show it. But that is the reality. Police Intelligence has undergone unpredictable and eccentric changes as others outside the police would have it, not as police need it.
For police, Police Intelligence is basic to policing from the year dot to this day and will have to so continue. Even as it is, basic police Intelligence is even statutorily specified as pointed out many a time earlier. Accordingly, in this country, the Police Ordinance in section 56 spells out that the duty of police is to ‘collect and communicate intelligence’. All this has been lost, however, along the way. The point of this article is to refocus on the fundamental duty of the police on intelligence. For this task of the police is lost even to all other statutory functions of the police enacted in the same section of law. There are reasons for this neglect of the purpose and meaning of police Intelligence.
One is by neglect on the part of the Police Department itself. The statutory function of Police Intelligence is made clear in terms of Police Ordinance in section 56. The purpose of this stipulation is simply law and order. It is for this that the end the task of police intelligence is cast. Its formulation is cast wide, anecdotal though. Collection of intelligence is then open to myriad ways from a legion of sources. Just a few examples of intelligence collection are cited here.
Recently, the priests at Mihintale Temple were alerted by an unusually excited behavior of monkeys. The priests followed up to find what was wrong and discovered a gang of robbers prowling around the temple and informed Police Intelligence. Police Intelligence at hand were able to round up the robbers and prevent the robbery. In late nineteen seventies, a constable attached to Minuwangoda Police was on day-patrol duty in Nilpanagoda. He observed a cart drawn by a bull refusing to go forward and trying to turn back. The bull was not cooperating with the carter. Police intelligence on duty got the cart turned around and the bull moved forward readily when they met the owner running, panting desperately, towards them. The thief was confronted by the alert constable. These are homely examples to illustrate the ways and means of police intelligence.
Secondly, is the fact that this duty of intelligence collection is a direction to all police officers without exception. But in course of time the ambit of this task has been reduced to an idea of buddhi anshaya, to a section set apart for police Intelligence. The statutory task of police intelligence has now been reduced to a ‘specialist’ notion. This breakdown of the police task was, in the main, brought about by the police organisation itself in an appeal to their warped mind.
The task of police intelligence was thereby degraded against the other clauses of section 56, as investigation. By this reason, the policing task of intelligence collection was consigned to a lesser order when in truth and fact the given duties were mutually beneficial to each other. In truth investigation is closely related to intelligence which is lost to the work of security outfits as Postal, Railway etc. in their limited area.
Apparently, this aspect of Police Intelligence was also lost to the authorities which investigated the recent 2019 Easter attack. Neither the Presidential Commission nor the Parliamentary Committee, not even the intervening authorities, identified the issue of intelligence at their investigations. The intervening authorities are the Security Council, Secretary Law and Order Ministry, the IGP, the SLIS earlier named ‘NIB’, and other coordinating officers. To none of these did it occur that failure of intelligence ran through the whole course running up to the Easter attacks. Had this been done, the information received in that last week could not have been merely ’passed on’ to the others concerned.
A dossier incorporating all the intelligence/investigation/information, even during two or three years before would have paid dividends. The April Easter information would then have been duly assessed. Results would then have been different. A last-minute mention of a ‘conspiracy’ by the former outgoing AG would equally have been redundant.
Thirdly, it is the failure of police intelligence in the wake of the Easter attacks that is the glaring fact. Their role is pathetic. More so is it that none of the authorities listed above failed to see this in their Easter intelligence and investigation. In this unravelling situation it is inevitable that political domination and influence is drawn into this void. In fact, political domination of the police intelligence process wormed its way into the ‘sectionalised’ notion of police Intelligence. Manipulation set in to the obliteration of due intelligence. None of the Commissions of Inquiry, noted above, saw through this, nor even considered this matter later.
Failure then has been Police Intelligence, and with it of Law and Order. This is the recent experience. Thirty, forty, fifty years ago such debacle would have been unthinkable.
(The writer is a Retired Senior Superintendent of Police.
He can be contacted at
seneviratnetz@gmail.com)