How to fix our police problems
Posted: 20/01/2007 - 11:23 AM
Author: Frankie Rhys
I became aware of The Belize Development Trust quite recently. This organization maintains a website at: BelizeDevelopmentTrust@btl.net/Bz.Lib/html. The website has 648 articles, position papers and excerpts from debates etc. pertaining to all kinds of Belizean issues. It is a treasure trove of information for those who want to research or for those who just want to read up on what people think about our problems and about possible solutions to those problems. Many thanks to Ray Auxillou, Sylvia Pinzon and Marty Casado for doing the work necessary to maintain and update a site like this.
The only problem I have with the site is that the majority of the work remains anonymous. I would like to know who wrote those pieces, if only to give the credit that is due to the authors, although anonymity is understandable given the history of Government victimization. It is just recently that more people are beginning to have the courage to speak up. Some of us still haven’t gotten there.
The website has a paper entitled, Philosophy of Police Systems and Comparative Studies of the Role of Police Systems for the Society of Belize, Central America. It is not an article per se, but an excerpt from a debate that was apparently held in 1998. The concepts are excellent and would go a long way towards making our police an asset to our society instead of the liability that they too often are.
The piece points out that the police currently function the same way that the police function in a colonial system. They are described as “…a military organization obeying not the community standards, but the rules set by an absentee authority in Belmopan. In other words they are treating towns and villages as some monolithic whole as in colonial law. Belize City and other places need to elect their own chief and run their own police force.”
This is not a radical concept by any means. The bigger cities in the U.S., England, Canada and in many other countries appoint their chiefs through a procedure that involves the mayors, the city councils and citizens, but smaller cities and towns elect their chiefs, and, whether the chief is selected or elected, each city and each town hires its own autonomous police force.
The reasoning behind this is simple. The debater makes it very clear by saying, “To build a law abiding community you need locals running and being the police, not somebody from another part of the country with no vested interest, whose allegiance is to a shifting body politic in the capital of Belmopan. The pervasive corruption that goes with a centralized government convinces the ordinary citizen that there is no longer any law, moral or civil, criminal or protective. The opinion is that force is the law and that force emanates from a controlling cabinet via the winning political party on a national scale who are above the law. Law is perceived to be two-tiered in Belize, the disenfranchised and those politically connected. The police system was based on a corrupt monarchial system and we are not talking about individual honest policemen trying to do their job properly, but rather the framework and structure in which this work is done.”
“There are colleges galore that study the philosophy of law and order and how it should be applied. The present structure of the Belize police force is solely about power and centralized control, not about serving the people.”
The economics are simple too. Government analyzes its law enforcement budget to find out how much money is spent on police services in each district and town per year. Then it gives the local elected bodies that sum as a grant, to hire and equip their own police force. Central Government can continue to provide training and such. The city and town councils then hold elections for the job of police chief subject to a two-year term of office. The job openings for police officers would then be advertised along with a job description and a list of the required qualifications (a high school education and no criminal record, for example).
Applicants would have to pass a physical exam and a civil service exam. Those who are physically qualified would be chosen by an independent committee (appointed by the councils) on the basis of their exam scores from the highest score on down until all the positions were filled. The hiring committee will only be able to identify applicants by number. This preserves the integrity of the selection process. Promotions would be awarded according to a merit system based on job performance and exam scores.
Police officers should be on probation for the first year. After that, the job is permanent, subject to disciplinary measures clearly set out in a code of conduct, applied impartially and fairly. Thus there is a separation of powers between the police chiefs and the councils. Since the chief and the officers are not directly answerable to any politicians, they would be freer to go after corruption without fear of retaliation. The elected police chiefs and the elected councils would meet frequently to deal with citizen complaints, requests and to discuss the overall performance of the police force. They now have a powerful incentive to serve the voters, because they have to be re-elected by those very same voters in order to keep their jobs!
This particular debate (the piece unfortunately gives no clue as to the venue and the identity of the participants) was held in 1998, nine years ago. There are no shortages of people with good positive ideas for the development of Belize; the problem is that from 1964, those in power have been intent on rigging things so as to allow them to further their own interests at the expense of everyone else’s. They have made sure that they are able to ignore or reject every proposal that has the potential to give real power to the people by democratizing the system!
The present structure of our police department is arranged to preclude it from operating as anything other than as an arm of the ruling class. This inevitably, depending on the level of corruption in any particular government, puts the police into an adversarial relationship with the general population. The Minister of Home Affairs can and will use the police to make sure that an unpopular government can resist the will of the people and, with no practical constitutional means for recall during the five-year term of the winning party, governments can rule by force and intimidation rather than by consent.
Under the present system, the police are used to harass political opponents (Kenny Morgan) and to bring false charges (Moses Sulph). They try to intimidate the independent media (Channel 7, Amandala). They physically abuse citizens as part of an attempt to create a climate of fear. How far they will go depends on how far they are instructed to go.
I am of the opinion that one of the only factors preventing those instructions from including the closing of the independent media, wholesale arrests and the systematic torture of opponents, is the dependence of Belize on tourism for the majority of its foreign exchange. Tourists don’t visit a country that runs gulags. It’s not that this government cares about human rights; the cost-benefit analysis is currently not favorable for a policy of extreme repression. Note the emphasis on the word, “currently.”
I’m sure that the opponents of democracy will find all kinds of reasons to deride a proposal to decentralize law enforcement. They will cry that Belize is too small, that there would be too much fragmentation, that too many departments would allow criminals to slip through the cracks, it’s too expensive, it’s too complicated, etc. etc. My reply is, “How can things be any worse than they already are?”
The primary “qualification” for promotion to the high command is political loyalty. In addition to cases that appear to be lost on purpose, countless others are lost through carelessness and incompetence. The police already have a major inter-district communication problem. Citizens who owe the courts as a result of a conviction in one district routinely move to a different district, where they are usually safe until they come to the attention of the district police by committing a new offence. This happens even within districts!
Basic crime fighting skills are lacking. We have been hearing about the imminent establishment of a fingerprint data-base for years; we still have none. Any serious forensic analysis has to be outsourced. Since the integrity of such evidence depends on its proper collection at the crime scene, any half-baked lawyer can successfully challenge its admissibility and win. Murderer after murderer walks free, many of them as a result of problems with the police investigation. This is the end result of government policies that make the primary function of the police the preservation of the status quo, rather than the protection of the citizenry.
Spare me the “no money deh” story. There is money enough for the lavish lifestyles of the politicians and their associates. GOB has enough money to give its associates and benefactors huge tax write offs along with all encompassing duty and tax exemptions. Bad business deal after bad business deal winds up in expensive litigation, litigation paid for by, you guessed it – us! That’s exactly what’s going to happen with the latest cruise terminal brouhaha. Hit the daily double. Ruin the environment and empty the treasury at the same time.
We can have a good police system. We can have a democracy. It won’t be perfect, but it will be a hell of a lot better than the sham “democracy” we have now. Those people who would like others to believe that critics of GOB have no positive solutions, are full of it.
The ideas are out there. Will we let those ideas remain words on a piece of paper, or put them into practice in spite of those who are trying to stifle them? Think about it, and think real hard. The quality of the rest of your life and the quality of the lives of your children and grandchildren will depend on your answer.
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