May the Force be reformed…

Some things in life are easy to predict. Like riots, for instance. Or the end of the world, which has been predicted at least a dozen times in my own lifetime (though strangely, we’re all still here).

Well, the outcome of the inquiry into the Sheehan shooting case was just another of those easily predictable things. So easy that even I, who am but dust and ashes, manage to pre-empt at least two of its conclusions without even having to think very hard.

Last week I wrote: “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”.

And this is a direct quote from the inquiry report: “In the opinion of the board, [there was an] effective attempt at a cover-up by a person or persons close to PC 533 Paul Sheehan, who were the first to arrive at the scene where the shots were fired and where Smith’s car had stopped. This probably happened in order to downplay the gravity of the consequences of the shooting, by covering up the fact that Sheehan had fired in the direction of the car, and instead claiming that the shots were fired in the air as warning shots”.

Big surprise there, huh? Yet the only really surprising thing about this particular conclusion was that it took the inquiry two weeks to actually reach it. It was obvious even on the day of the shooting itself. The sequence of events, resulting in different versions reaching the media, all suggested that the initial lies had been concocted at the scene. And incidentally, the ‘transcripts’ of recorded phone conservations, released in dribs and drabs by the Opposition, only proved this beyond any shadow of doubt.

The only remaining question was whether anyone at a higher political level had colluded with this campaign of misinformation… which in itself does not change the fact that the cover-up had occurred at street level.

On this point, the inquiry concluded that (now ex-) Home Affairs Minister Manuel Mallia had to shoulder political responsibility, because he had insisted on a press release being issued despite knowing that it contained misleading information. Well, Mallia is now gone, and rightly so: even without the damning conclusion of this report, his continued presence as minister responsible for the police had clearly become politically untenable. He was simply too large a political target – big as a barn-door, and just as defensible – and his removal had become necessary for the long-term survival of the government more than anything else.

But, as I argued in the above-mentioned article, that was all along a secondary consideration. The really important thing was to establish what actually happened, with a view to taking the necessary decisions to prevent similar incidents from recurring… because from the outset, the entire case had the paw-prints of a police cover-up all over it.

This, at the end of the day, was the ‘intolerable’ situation that the shooting incident so dramatically illustrated, and which yesterday’s inquiry report so emphatically confirmed. The lack of accountability, or a proper system of checks and balances, within the police force. The culture of omerta’, which results in a dubious camaraderie that makes some police officers feel their allegiance is towards one another, when it is actually towards the general public. And you can add the depressingly routine habit the Malta police have of arresting and intimidating the same people they should be protecting.

There have been countless indications of this culture over the years; in fact it is one of the constants of Maltese society that doesn’t change with a change in government. Just last summer we all saw how two foreign women were subjected to a humiliating and invasive full cavity search, then arraigned for ‘assaulting police officers’… only for the judge to rule that the two women were in fact themselves the victims of assault, and that the police officers were a ‘disgrace to their uniform’.

I myself wrote about several analogous cases further back in time: one incident involved a young woman arrested by no fewer than five (male) police officers, for the grave crime of walking her dog on the beach.

In a nutshell, the problem can be described as a lack of serious professional standards of policing. We talk about reforming the judiciary, we discuss redrafting the Constitution… both of which involve cognisance that our country’s most crucial institutions are outdated and dysfunctional… yet when it comes to the police, there just hasn’t been any comparable drive for reform.

Yet it is arguably the most outdated of the lot. We’ve all seen how the police force itself stolidly resists efforts to upgrade its internal practices: legal assistance during interrogation being a classic case in point. Though it is now mandated by law, the service falls far short of the expected standard… with the result that convictions are still being overturned on human rights grounds.

Some of us remember how former Police Commissioner John Rizzo had objected to the measure, arguing that “it would make it harder for the police to solve crimes”. Yes, well, of course it’s a lot easier to ‘solve crimes’ when you can simply extract a dubious confession from people who aren’t even aware of their basic legal rights. But that, on top of all the many known cases of police abuse of power, is precisely why some of us don’t trust the police in the first place.

The example also gives us an indication of the level of seriousness with which the police internally view their own work. There has all along been the impression that police sometimes consider themselves a state within a state; not only above the law, but also able to tweak the law to suit their own purposes, leaving the victims of abuse helpless.

All this and more is what really emerged from the inquiry, which incidentally even spelt it out for us in big, easy-to-read letters. Acting Commissioner Zammit, we were told, had betrayed “a certain lack of professionalism in the way he carried out his functions”. The same dilettantism, coupled with a non-existent ethical code of behaviour, lurked behind every single aspect of the Sheehan shooting incident.

In any case: we now have solid evidence that something is seriously rotten in the Malta Police Force. Where does this leave us? Well, in a world devoid of political hysteria, the next logical step would be to initiate a long-overdue reform of that particular institution, with a view to dragging it kicking and screaming into the 21st century.

But of course, that’s not what everyone’s talking about, is it? This brings me to the second thing I accurately predicted – though I don’t expect any applause, as even my cat would have probably joined the dots on this one: “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… ooh, big surprise coming up… the Opposition has stuck to the script almost to the letter. The inquiry report, Simon Busuttil tells us, does not mean that all the truth has come out. And he may well be right: in fact it is highly unlikely that ALL the truth of any scenario would ever come out. For instance, the inquiry did not even look into the possibility – admittedly just conjecture – that Sheehan and Smith might have known each other from beforehand. There are, no doubt, many other unknowns yet to emerge.

But from the rest of his reaction it is pretty clear what ‘truth’ the Opposition leader had in mind. And unsurprisingly, it is only that version of the truth that the Opposition actually wants to hear: a version which broadens the net of politically culpability from Manual Mallia… ideally to include the Office of the Prime Minister, and by extension the entire Labour government.

Do I blame him? Heck no. Like I said, with a target as big as a barn-door, you can hardly expect the Opposition to hold their fire. And besides: the political showdown has been entertaining. Not since High Noon have I so thoroughly enjoyed a shoot-out on TV.

My only concern is that all this gun-slinging will only detract from the real lessons to be learnt from this state of affairs: i.e. the possibility of something actually being done about the standards of the police force in the light of this report… that, unlike so many other earlier incidents, it doesn’t become just one more case of a crisis from which we learnt nothing, and where the root causes remain unaddressed.

Firing the minister and police commissioner are only a small step in that direction. The ultimate goal should be a thorough reform of Malta’s entire law enforcement capability.