Time to rein in rogue police officers

POLICE abuse will continue to be a serious problem.
It has a long history, and it seems to defy all attempts to eradicate the issue.
The problem is nationwide – no police station in the country is known to be completely free of misconduct.
Last week, the national court in Port Moresby ordered the State to pay over K400,000 to victims of police brutality.
Justice David Cannings, who is also the human rights judge administrator, ordered the state to pay K398,120 in total to six victims and another K48,000 – a total of K446,120.
Over the years, the State has spent millions fighting and settling lawsuits involving alleged police misconduct, damages to public property and a range of other legal challenges.
It was revealed in 2016 that the State had spent over K131 million in compensation for police abuse cases.
Solicitor-General Faith Barton had said payouts had been made since 1992.
She told the annual police commissioners’ conference in 2016 that on top of this, over 8600 cases of State litigation were registered with the Solicitor-Generals’ Office, of which 19 per cent related to police abuse.
Barton said 60 to 70 per cent of those cases were the results of police negligence, in which police
officers had acted outside the scope of their operational requirements.
The lack of communication between police and the Office of the Solicitor-General often resulted in default judgments obtained against the State.
The challenge is now on the commanders and provincial police commanders to enforce discipline so as to reduce the number of police abuse cases happening across the nation.
There isn’t much comfort to be found in an atmosphere where calling the police for assistance could potentially be your own death sentence.
We would like to see that this situation is not hopeless.
Policing has seen progress in some areas.
Today, among both officials and rank and file officers, it is widely recognised that police brutality hinders good law enforcement.
A lot of effort is being put to addressing this with the public being called on to report all instances of police brutality to the internal investigation unit to investigate.
Several commanders have introduced foot patrols in their bid to get police officers closer to the people.
All efforts should be made to make police officers aware of their powers to arrest and the procedures to adopt and what they should do following the arrest and for the command and supervisory officials to issue and enforce clear standing orders on arrest procedures. There should be a debrief of the officers involved after every arrest.
Some officers continue to commit acts of savagery towards innocent people because their superiors either cannot control them or simply condone their actions.
These uniformed thugs must be removed from the police force as a matter of urgency.
They are a deadly menace to civil society.
The Government and the police hierarchy must surely be seeing that there is a problem with their policing policies.
They should have that addressed so that liabilities do not accumulate to a point where the State is put under unnecessary financial stress