One good response to Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa's call this week for urgent remedial action 'to restore public confidence in the police' is to remind him that the first step in this regard is very much in his own hands.
This is to divest the command responsibility of the Sri Lanka Police Department from out of the hands of the Ministry of Defence, thereby drawing clean and clear lines between a civilian police administration and a militarised defence apparatus. Without this basic first step, no amount of rhetoric and pious calls to the police to behave well, will do any good.
The problem is not only
the police
A corollary of the above is to allow the Department of the Police to function independently from the politicians. The problem is not always the police even though it may suit many of us to think so. On the contrary, the problem is the political control of the police which is so embedded in the law and order machinery now that even good law enforcement officers cannot function properly. Obstinate police officers who do not jump to the command of their political bosses are demoted, transferred out or even dismissed. This has been a common practice for decades, undermining the police service and depriving officers of even the last vestiges of professionalism. First and foremost therefore, the police needs to be stripped of political control.
In the mid and late nineties, there were notable instances where junior police officers in the Disappearances Investigations Unit (DIU) of the Police Department who attempted to investigate their seniors in cases of enforced disappearances during the eighties and early nineties of the United National Party regime were transferred out or otherwise, punished. We have seen some examples of this in recent years as well.
These practices do not change with political administrations. In such an atmosphere which demoralizes honest police officers, what is the point of extolling them to work professionally? More to the point, what is the point of establishing specialised training academies and devising sophisticated training manuals or training programmes in the absence of fundamental changes securing the independence and integrity of the department and changing the mindset of the most junior to the seniormost officer in the hierarchy.
Political patronage and the police force
In a notable case last year, the Supreme Court marveled at the ease with which one habitual abuser (who 'by any expected standard of the police force was clearly unfit to continue as an officer') had survived in police ranks, obtaining one promotion after another (see M.D. Nandapala v. Sergeant Sunil and Others, S.C. (FR) Application No. 224/2006, SCM 27.04.2009). The conferring of political protection to this particular police officer was clearly evident to the Court as a result of which, not only did those senior to the erring officer refrain from disciplining him but the National Police Commission (then in its compromised second term and a pale shadow of the independent and vibrant body that it was supposed to be) had also turned a deaf ear and a blind eye to his transgressions.
In the countless numbers of cases where police abuse have been proven during past decades, leading the Supreme Court itself to pronounce on the limitations of their own orders, has the Department of the Police enforced disciplinary action against the offenders? In many of these instances, what have been infringed are Departmental Orders of the Police themselves, not only high constitutional norms or complicated legal directions. But where is the adherence of the police to these Departmental Orders in the first instance?
Frittering away a unique
opportunity
And what of the National Police Commission and its responsibility in this regard? This country had a unique opportunity in 2001 when the parliament unanimously agreed to establish a National Police Commission with wide ranging powers to discipline the police service and to inquire into public complaints against the police. This was not a new demand by any means but one that had been made from the time of the Basnayake Commission (1970) onwards.
However, Sri Lanka's government frittered away this opportunity, objecting to a Police Commission that tried to do its best during its first term, replacing it with a compromised body in its second term and finally doing away with the Commission altogether. Its promise to restore independent commissions in the coming months ahead as part of a constitutional reforms package is naturally met with much cynicism given past encounters of an extremely unpleasant kind insofar as reforming the police is concerned.
Returning the police to civilian
law enforcement
During a brief period post 2002 when the emergency law was lifted, I had much difficulty explaining to a visitor from an enviably more ordered jurisdiction as to how and why Sri Lanka's police officers were torturing and indefinitely detaining persons not only from the North but also from the South not so much for suspected terrorism but for stealing a bunch of plantains from a boutique. The brutality which met such lapses was uneasily juxtaposed with far greater crimes and criminals going uninvestigated and unpunished given an inevitable nexus between the underworld, the police and politicians.
Ultimately it must be clear to all but the most dense that returning the police to a civilian law enforcement body requires far more than cosmetic changes. It requires, for example, that emergency laws conferring ordinary police powers of search, arrest and seizure onto the army, to be done away with completely in this post war period. It requires that the police be brought back to a mentality that they must act according to the ordinary law and that the law itself will be enforced strictly against them if they infringe it though an independent supervisory mechanism.
In the absence of such reforms in disciplinary structures, laws and mindset, little can be accomplished through stirring speeches and calls to action. |
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