Cleaning up

Tuesday, 27 October 2015 00:26 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

Sri Lanka’s newly-appointed Police Commission has set itself a tough agenda by kicking off investigations into 120 complaints against Police officers countrywide. It not only faces a tough task in transparently investigating the complaints but also obtaining genuine redress for the victims and restoring the credibility of the Police.

Next to politicians, Sri Lankans distrust the Police the most. Successive surveys have shown the Police are considered to be corrupt and politicised, with the average public having little or no trust in them. For decades people have simply avoided the Police at all possible instances because it would make life less complicated. Long years of ineptitude have also meant Police are used as a branch of the political system and are given inadequate training and resources to do Police work. All these complications have resulted in a brutal Police system where custody deaths and incidents of torture are well documented.

Last year, the Police assaulted a suspect in Minuwangoda with a pole at his residence while the victim’s mother collapsed and later died in hospital after witnessing her son being beaten; a youth in Dompe was killed in Police custody and the public outcry resulted in a standoff between the Police and residents. A video, taken by an onlooker, caught a Policeman viciously assaulting a woman at a bus stand in Ratnapura while another suspect died in custody of the Cinnamon Gardens Police, resulting in several civil society institutions raising their voices against Police brutality.

The use of excessive and sometimes deadly force by Police officers is a global issue. In the US Police brutality has reached dizzying levels, with surveys claiming that over 850 people have been killed by the Police this year alone. The use of body cameras has been proposed in an effort to curb the unnecessary use of deadly force; however, these measures act only as stopgaps to a larger problem concerning the psyche of a Police force that operates with frightening levels of impunity.

Politeness, Obedience, Loyalty, Intelligence, Courtesy and Efficiency are the traits that are believed to define a Policeman – traits that have slowly eroded from sections of the Police force over time, taking along with it the faith, trust and respect placed by the public in its office.

Although it is easy to put the blame squarely on the few Policemen who abuse their powers with such impunity, we must not ignore the system in which they operate – the toxic environment that has been created for them in which they have the authority to operate with an extreme, callous, disregard for those they are entrusted to protect.

Stronger actions against excessive force and the periodic psychological assessments of Police officers are courses of action long overdue. The allegations of internal cover ups and falsified testimony in cases of custodial deaths must also be addressed as restoring the integrity of the Police is as much an internal struggle as it is an external one. On this front the Police Commission have an almost impossible task.

As an overburdened and undermanned legal system delays the process of justice, which has given rise to an alternate system in which the Police act as the judge, jury and executioner, the noble force must remember that they are called upon to enforce the law while obeying it.