Isle of MTV (Murder, Terror, Violence)

I am still uncertain which aspect of last week's double murder I find more disturbing: the sheer violence of the crime itself - which would be deemed excessive even by Tony Soprano standards - or the long-term implications of a criminal underworld that has 'progressed' in leaps and bounds in the past 30 years, while the local law enforcement sector is still firmly stuck in an 1980s time warp.

Let's limit ourselves to the latter consideration for the time being - if nothing else because there are only so many ways you can express shock and disbelief at the fact that a young man could have been stabbed 34 times before being shot, execution style, in front of his own father... who was likewise 'executed' in turn.

Faced with a crime of such chilling proportions, I am reminded of the classic line 'like a dog', from Franz Kafka's The Trial. The murder in fact bore a striking resemblance to the much-publicised case of Star, the dog which was likewise shot and partially buried (still alive) in a field which also happened to be fairly close to the scene of the more recent crime.

Only we are not talking about dogs here, but about people. And this is why last week's double murder strikes me as so inauspicious. It is the sort of crime we'd normally associate with the drug wars of Mexico or the notorious crime warlords of places like Belarus or Uzbekistan: places where the value of human life is scarcely distinguishable from that of a household pet. And while Malta has any amount of skeletons in its cupboard, I can't help but feel that this latest spate of murders has notched up the level at which Malta's criminal underworld actually operates.

Having said this, there is another level at which the enactment of gruesome mafia-style murders is no longer surprising at all. Let's be honest: Malta is not and has never been the innocent place it is so often portrayed to be on tourist postcards. Anyone with a pair of eyes and ears in his head will have heard or seen some pretty awful things over the past few decades... though most of us (understandably enough) prefer looking the other way.

But there is a limit to how studiously such things can be ignored, especially when people also come into contact with the other side of the coin on a regular basis - the law enforcement side, from the police to the law courts and beyond - and are therefore in a position to see with their own eyes how woefully unprepared it all is to actually handle this level of crime.

Anyone who cut his social teeth in Paceville in the 1980s and 1990s - I am less familiar with the place now, but in this respect it seems not to have changed very much - will also know that the Maltese police are openly afraid of criminals; and the more dangerous and violent the criminal, the greater the fear and the reluctance to any way intervene when the need arises.

This is not an idle impression of mine, by the way. One assistant police commissioner once famously testified in court that he was "too afraid" of a certain notorious local criminal (with an equally notorious nickname) to do anything about him. At street level, the word in my day was always 'don't mess' with this or that guy, because if anything happens the police will automatically arrest you and not them. Unsurprisingly one of the guys we were warned to avoid was eventually killed in a very public shoot-out, OK Corral-style, outside Bamboo bar. This is, after all, what happens when the police abdicate their responsibilities to tackle crime: citizens are eventually forced to take the law into their own hands.

The same general principle applies across the board at all levels of criminal activity in this country. The police can be relied upon to take prompt and effective action against minor infringements - Spanish students skinny-dipping at St George's Bay, for instance, or teenagers caught smoking a joint.

But faced with dangerous, armed thugs, the same police will suddenly prove altogether less enthusiastic... and in many cases they will overcompensate for their cowardice by coming down like a tonne of bricks on the lesser offender instead.

I myself have had experiences in this regard (and not just in my other incarnation as a professional Paceville barfly, either). One quick anecdote should suffice for now. I must have been around 12 or 13 when a neighbour came ringing the doorbell late one evening to inform us that his house across the street had been broken into. He had called the police, but they hadn't yet arrived. Would I be good enough to accompany him into his home, 'just in case the intruder is still inside the house somewhere'?

To this day I still can't understand why he'd come asking for the help of a weedy, spotty little teenager who found (and still finds) it physically difficult to open a jam jar, let alone apprehend a potentially violent criminal fleeing the scene of the crime.

But to me he came for succour; and I admit I'm a sucker for that sort of thing.

So in we went - myself armed with a broomstick, as I recall - and the police showed up at more or less the same time. Looking back (though it didn't occur to me back then) I find it remarkable that the police would somehow manage to find an officer who was smaller, weedier and even spottier than myself to dispatch to the scene. Yet there he was, a uniformed extra from 'Revenge of the Nerds Part XVIII', with the reassuring facial expression of someone who might literally shit himself at the first sign of danger. 

And guess what? This walking, talking embodiment of cowardice turns to ME and suggests that I go into each room, one by one, and switch on the lights.

Erm, sorry to sound uncooperative, but... isn't that your job, Mr Policeman? Isn't that precisely the sort of thing you guys are trained to do at the Police Academy? (Note: the film had more or less just come out at the time.)

Oh no, came the emphatic reply. MY job is stay out here in the corridor, just in case the thief tries to make a dash for it when you open the door... Now, be a good little obedient citizen and just do as I say, OK?

Hmm. The fact that I am writing this article today, 30 years later, should be proof enough that the burglar was no longer in the building when I actually obeyed that miserable pipsqueak's orders, and entered one darkened room after another, switching on all the lights.

With hindsight, this marked an important milestone in my development as a human being. In an instant the scales fell from my eyes, and it dawned me that all the institutions I had been brought up to respect were actually... rather useless.

Worse than useless, in this case (a useless police officer wouldn't have shown up at all. This one did show up, and proceeded to expose innocent people to danger instead of facing the danger himself).

But let's not dwell on the past. The real problem is that the police force as a whole still behaves exactly like that spotty little policeman, called to assist in a Stella Maris Street break-in some time around 1984.

Oh, there have been a few improvements, I readily admit. Especially in areas like cyber-crime: you know, stuff that can safely be done in the comfort of an air-conditioned office, without going toe-to-toe with possibly armed criminal thugs.

Meanwhile, Malta's criminal underworld has simply evolved beyond recognition since the days when what passed for crime rarely went beyond the theft of a car stereo. And this brings me precisely to the point that the above anecdote was intended to illustrate. It is evidently not just people like myself who have lost respect for the Malta Police Force and other aspects of the law enforcement sector in this country. Criminals, too, are now openly contemptuous of the forces of law and order. Murder, armed robbery and so forth are now committed with impunity in broad daylight - and there have been no fewer than seven such murders in the past year (eight, if you include the curious case of the severed human leg that turned up at the scene of this latest crime), which are apparently all interconnected.

What this adds up to is a broad sensation that the 'cat is away' insofar as Malta's crime-fighting capability is concerned... and even if the cat does make a sudden appearance (as happened in this case - three people have so far been arrested for the murder of Mario Camilleri and son), well, what's the worst thing that can possibly happen?

If convicted, the criminals will spend some time at the so-called 'University of Crime': making better contacts, building more extensive criminal networks and basically honing their skills in a variety of ways. But the truth is that they don't fear conviction for another reason.

Going on past experience, they know the sentence will almost certainly be laughable, and possibly even suspended to boot. (Note: One the of the suspects in the Camilleri murder had earlier been granted bail, on a deposit of only 2,000 euros, on charges of armed robbery.)

And besides, cases take so long to reach closure in this country - with even the most hard-boiled criminals routinely granted bail under incredibly generous conditions - that quite frankly, Malta's criminal underworld has come to regard the 'long arm of the law' as little more than a minor inconvenience that can practically always be shrugged off, dodged, or somehow outwitted.

And who can blame these people for openly laughing in the face of 'justice'? They are entitled to treat the country's law enforcement sector as a joke, precisely because the sector behaves like a joke all the time. In some cases literally: one recent court experience of my own could have been a scene lifted directly from a Carry On movie. I saw a magistrate joking and guffawing with both prosecution and defence lawyers, for all the world as if the administration of justice was some kind of laughing matter in this country, as bewildered defendants struggled to understand what was so very funny about a case in which their own lives and futures hung in the balance.

The sum total of all our collective experiences - with the police, the law courts and (for those unfortunate enough to have such experiences) with prison - adds up to a widespread sense of frustration and helplessness, as a visibly hamstrung justice machine struggles to cope with rampant increase in serious crime... and fails.

Now, I hate to say 'I told you so', but this is precisely the main issue I have been writing about since 1997 or thereabouts. Many of my articles have focused on Malta's disappointing failure to ever rise above the sort of institutional mediocrity I grew up surrounded by in the 1980s. For instance, it is simply outrageous - unacceptable by any standard - that we are still talking about introducing basic rights for persons in police custody today, in 2013... i.e., more than 20 years after these rights were promised by Fenech Adami on the eve of the '87 election.

In case you're wondering about the relevance to the issue at hand, consider this quote by former ECHR judge Giovanni Bonello: "Personally I would prefer to see the police registering successes in the fight against crime because they are cleverer and forensically better equipped than criminals... and not merely because the entire system is weighted in their favour."

That was my point entirely: police should solve crimes on the basis of a thorough investigation of the facts, not merely by extracting the occasional involuntary confession through fear and intimidation, which has been standard police practice forever.

Meanwhile, bolstering the rights and protection of persons in custody may seem paradoxical at a glance, but the net result would be to force the police to pull their socks up and adopt serious investigative practices that are currently lacking - something which, left to their devices, they will resist doing for decades.

Another issue concerns the complete denial with which all previous administrations - it is too early to talk about the present one - have responded to widespread allegations of corruption in the police. Incredibly, every single home affairs minister since 1987 has resisted beefing up the so-called 'internal affairs unit' that is meant supervise the police force and investigate potential cases of corruption. Their attitude has always been, oh, that's something that happens in other countries, not here.

As a result, the only entity that exists to tackle potential police corruption is a tiny office within the Floriana depot itself - i.e., under the direct command of the same police it is supposed to monitor - and consisting only of one superintendent and one police constable. I met them both in their own office, and I can't tell you how deeply impressed I was by the pair of them. (No, I mean I REALLY can't tell you. I just can't...)

Am I the only one to think this is a woefully unacceptable situation, in a country now blatantly engulfed by seriously professional criminal networks?

As things stand, the only silver lining in this otherwise appalling collage of mediocrity on a national level is that efforts are finally, belatedly being made to address at least a few of these shortcomings: namely, the proposals by the Justice Reform Commission.

And oh, what a surprise! The law courts themselves are actively resisting the change... just like the police actively resisted proposed changes to their own work practices for decades. Small wonder the criminal underworld is laughing all the way to the bank. Everything has gone its way for years.