Shoot first, ask questions later

I'm beginning to think gun mania is contagious. Three gunshots fired in a tunnel last Wednesday, and suddenly everyone is shooting in all directions like it’s the blinking OK Corral.

Of course, in the ensuing gunfire everyone also seems to have forgotten that an investigation into that incident has barely even begun… let alone reached any of the conclusions now expressed with absolute certainty by political slingers across the entire nation. Makes you wonder why we even need such things as magisterial inquiries, when we all already know everything there is to be known about any given case.

And yet, a week later, the precise sequence of events leading to that shootout remains unclear. What we know as fact is that the personal driver (also a policeman) of National Security Minister Manuel Mallia gave chase to a foreign-licensed car, after the latter had rammed the ministerial vehicle and broken its side-mirror.

The policeman fired at least two shots into the rear of the car. Its owner, a British national, has since been arrested. At the time of writing, the same cannot be said for the man who fired the shots – PC Sheehan – who has now been hospitalised following an (apparently misleading) report that he was about to be arraigned.

Already, as you can see, we have drifted into the territory of doubt. But let’s stick with what we know. There was a car chase, shots were fired, the car was hit. This much at least is certain; and it is significant that we only know the last detail because of the physical evidence left by the bullets themselves. Had we relied exclusively on the official version of events instead, we may well have concluded that those shots had been fired into the air, and the car itself might have been spirited away before the conflicting evidence could be seen and photographed.

Meanwhile, everything else we have heard until this point has to be treated as suspect, either because it is hearsay or downright conjecture. Even the widely reported detail that the British national was drunk, and that he threatened the policeman with a beer bottle, has to go down as part of the official version of events: other parts of which have already been put in doubt.

As for the other details – i.e., that PC Sheehan was ‘coked out of his eyeballs’ at the time, or that there may have been previous dealings between the shooter and his intended target – that is all speculation. And there has been a lot of that going on. In fact, we know a heck of a lot more about what certain people think they know about the incident, than about the incident itself.

So much for the shooting. The facts concerning the misinformation that followed are a lot harder to ascertain. Manuel Mallia insists that the false information supplied to the media had been given out in good faith on the assumption that it was correct. The Opposition insists that Mallia himself was directly involved in the cover-up, and should therefore resign. Both are possibilities (except perhaps the bit about resignation). What I find interesting, however, is that they also overlap on a critical detail.

Regardless of whether Mallia was himself involved or not, both scenarios assume that a cover-up took place. The only difference concerns the administrative level at which responsibility should be shouldered.

Sounds like a good start, doesn’t it? We actually agree on at least one aspect of the issue that we’re supposed to be investigating. But of course, we know that in reality it is the worst possible place for any investigation to begin. And oh, look, it’s all gone pear-shaped already…

Let’s rewind to the original incident. As far as the non-politically motivated observer is concerned, there is only one real purpose to even investigate the shooting: and that is to establish what actually happened. The question of political responsibility or culpability comes later. It has to come later, because it can only be determined after the first question has been answered.

What normally happens in such cases is that an inquiry is launched to establish the facts, and it is on the basis of its results that subsequent actions and decisions are taken. Because we are dealing with the police force here, there are other procedures that may also come into play. This should surely be a case for the Police’s Internal Investigations unit, for instance. But normal procedure is an inquiry by the duty magistrate.

I stress ‘normal’, because this is not exactly what is happening right now. There is a magisterial inquiry, yes. But we also have a separate, independent inquiry appointed by the Prime Minister – under pressure from the Opposition – to be conducted by three retired judges. Its declared intention is to investigate whether Manuel Mallia was himself directly and personally involved in the presumed cover-up of the incident.

This is not standard procedure. Nor does it make very much sense, from a purely investigative point of view (from a political perspective, the view is slightly different; but I’ll come to that part later). For one thing, this judicial inquiry has been given 15 days to deliver its verdict. I am unaware that any such time limit was set for the concurrent magisterial inquiry… but experience suggests that these take a good deal longer than two weeks.

Even in the unlikely scenario that these two inquiries simultaneously announce their results… and even assuming that these results are in no way contradictory… they are set up in such a way that they can only tread upon each other’s corns.

It is the magisterial inquiry that can effectively conclude what took place both during and in the aftermath of the shooting. That includes answering such questions as, who gave the order for the victim’s car to be removed from the scene? Who reported that three warning shots were fired into the air? Etc. etc. Only when armed with this knowledge can the second, unorthodox inquiry reach its own conclusions… which will by then be redundant anyway. So already there is a gargantuan conflict of roles staring us in the face.

But the real problem is another. The terms of reference of this second inquiry are rooted in claims made by the Opposition leader, which are by definition political. As such, it has set itself the task of either proving or disproving a political thesis; and its conclusions will entail serious political consequences either way. This goes well beyond the purely clinical, forensic exigency of establishing the facts of the case before drawing any conclusions. It goes as far as to determine those ‘facts’ from beforehand, on the basis of what is preferable for the two political parties.

The entire investigation has in brief been polluted by glaringly visible political agendas on either side. When that happens, ‘the truth’ inevitably becomes a casualty of political warfare.

So suddenly, we have two stark versions to choose from: Muscat’s version, which is that there was no direct ministerial intervention of any kind; and Busuttil’s version, which holds Mallia personally responsible for this (and every disaster since the Ebola outbreak, etc.) For all we know, neither may turn out to be 100% accurate. There might have been collusion with the ministry at lower levels, whereupon the question of political responsibility becomes academic.

But these are the only avenues being explored by an inquiry which has now assumed greater strategic political importance than the one which is supposed to establish the facts.

In a sense this is logical. It reflects precisely how the Maltese political psyche operates. It is not just Simon Busuttil who has a priori judged the entire incident and found Mallia guilty on all counts; nor is it just Joseph Muscat to have done the exact same thing in reverse. Practically everyone else has already reached the exact same conclusions, each precisely mirroring what their beloved party expects them to think. All without knowing any of the basic facts. It is a little like the belief in alternate realities: as though Mallia is both innocent and guilty at the same time, just depending on your perspective.

By the same token, you can already comfortably predict that the judicial inquiry’s conclusions will be rejected by roughly half the population either way. The truth doesn’t actually matter, when all you’re interested in is the political consequence of events. And I’m getting the sneaking suspicion that this was, in fact, the real reason to hold an independent inquiry in the first place. It will serve as a distraction from the one thing that really matters… and that is, finding out how this colossal miscommunication (deliberate or accidental) actually happened.

Why is this more important than the question of whether Mallia should resign at this stage? Simple: if the root cause of the problem lies within the Police Force itself, Mallia’s resignation will achieve nothing to address it. If the problem concerns a (some would say ‘typical’) knee-jerk response of certain police officials to automatically rally around one of their number when caught out in irregular behaviour – agreeing on a common version of events, and then passing it on to their superiors – then it would be criminal to disregard the abuse altogether, just because it is more politically convenient to call for a minister’s resignation instead.

Yet this is what is happening. An investigation that should have been into the internal operations of the police – and yes, which might also have resulted in responsibility for the minister – has been hijacked and turned into a smoking gun for the two political leaders to duel with at high noon.

All along we are missing the real implications of the case. Ministers come and ministers go… though admittedly they tend to stay a heck of a long time in between. But the police are a different story. They stay with us no matter what. We therefore have a much more direct and vital interest in clarifying the precise police chain of command in this case, than in affixing any number of ministers’ heads to the battlements.