Police force ‘lacks direction’, full skills-audit recommended

Professor Saviour Formosa, an associate in the Department of Criminology at the University of Malta, has found in a survey of police officers that the force lacks direction and what it would take to bring about meaningful change within the corps.

Soon after his appointment, Home Affairs Minister Carmelo Abela held meetings at each police station to get a genuine feel for officers’ real concerns. A survey among police officers was then carried out, coordinated by Prof. Formosa, with 600 respondents and over 9,000 suggestions on the way forward.

The exercise led to the development of a High Strategy Document outlining a ‘game-plan’ of sorts for the next steps the police force should be taking.

Professor Formosa - who has a Ph.D. in spatiotemporal environmental criminology, an MSc in GIS and a BA (Hons) in sociology - explained that the underlying driver behind his work as a criminologist is to predict the sort of crimes that will take place, and prevent them from happening in the first place.

“For starters,” he explains, “let’s take a look at policy: it’s useless discussing philosophy, criminology or sociology without actuating it. People tend to be very comfortable just doing the theory. I want

the operational aspects and the results because that shows whether you can say something.

“The police strategy is one such case. The police have no strategy that they follow. There was a strategy formulated in 1987 which was written by two experts in the field. That was a good strategy but it was never adopted.

“That is why we felt the need to carry out this survey. We have tried to make inroads for years. The police force’s structure is steeped in tradition and changing the status quo is a nightmare. We had this in most entities - transport, planning, health, etc... – and trying to change established practices becomes very difficult. Some entities only have 400 people and found it difficult. Let alone the police force, which has been around for 200 years.

“From the 1960s to date there have been no changes. You have constables, sergeants, major sergeants, inspectors etc... Officers are promoted through the ranks for 25 years until the 25 year retirement scheme kicks in and they retire. My aim is to retain the knowledge they have accumulated rather than losing it - not by removing the 25 year retirement scheme, that should remain, but by making the job attractive enough so that they will stay on.

Asked whether this would take a business model approach, Professor Formosa confirmed as much, adding, “That will take 10 years. As far as I’m concerned the ministry is risking it because it is coming up with a policy that they will see results within 10-20 years.

“In this type of strategy, we are emphasising short, medium and long term goals all building on each other with annual and quarterly reviews.

“There will be appraisals, even on the method of working and the changes being implemented. The first few years will be very tough. But we will have instant results in the sense that when something is going wrong, we will immediately try to identify why. When something is going right, we will ask ourselves if we going to enhance it further or morph it to make even further improvements.

“Technically, from a criminologist’s point of view my main aim is to reduce crime. However, and I cannot be franker than this, crime will go down long term, but in certain areas they will increase.

“Crimes occur because there is a victim and an aggressor, but in actual fact they occur because of an opportunity being offered to commit a crime.

“Sometimes the victim offers the opportunity, intentionally or not. Opportunity is a bit weird and it is interesting how the dynamics change. A strategy will only work if the victims change the way they perceive and deal with the police.

“We can create the perfect strategy, but as a strategist once said: 90 per cent of strategies do not work because there is no take-up by the entity or society. Our aim is to tackle both: social partners, and the victims themselves or potential victims. For example, crimes on the elderly will increase in the coming years because of the baby boomers.

“We need to determine, in light of this, where the elderly are going, what the architects need to change, what transport needs to change - policing is not just about the police force.

“I was quite harsh in my report because I said things like the entity is there to serve itself, policing is serving the police which is not fair because it should serve society. It could be argued that because it has become such a rusted entity, and an isolated one, it serves itself. Why should you have policemen, who instead of being on the ground or carrying out knowledge-based policing, are instead trying to keep up with the bureaucracy or with procedures?

“For instance, if I am a policeman, why should also I be messenger, a financial controller, an accountant – why should I be doing that work? It’s a wasted resource.

“It is not just about changing places, I call it functional displacement. If you are going to move people around, do it within a function in mind. Let us try to find out what skills we have, what training and analyses we have, let’s try to find out where people are most comfortable working. What I am speaking about is essentially a complete audit, which, unfortunately cannot be done at this entity right now.”

Asked why, Prof. Formosa explains that, “It is because there is no structure or function for that. Even though there are personnel who work like human resources managers, and they are good, the police work being carried out isn’t being done on the basis of skill, but, rather, on the basis of needs.

The police force has an IT system, he explains, but it does not show who is doing what. “This is why we are looking for a CEO for the force. At first it was a bit tough because the law gives absolute power to the Police Commissioner.”

In terms of training, one change Prof Formosa wanted to see through was having the police inspector’s courses commencing during the day and not the evening. “This was done because following a day’s work, people weren’t coming into the course fresh and it’s hard to actually retain anything. Once we had a course where six out of 12 people were called out on to duty and had to leave right away.

“Things are changing slowly. For instance the police force can plan their leave better now than in the past. In the survey we conducted, for which we received 9,000 suggestions, the most prevalent comments, funnily enough, were ‘what we need is a sense of direction’. This shows that there is no direction. Then you have drastic issues like inaccessibility to certain knowledge, distinctions between districts and branches, who gets what, they have no aptitude to stay in the force after they have served their 25 years.

“So what we did over the past months is we drove the process. We ran this survey, the minister held a series of meetings with all the police stations, and met with all the special unit branches. I had one in conjunction meeting to make sure we do not contaminate the process; we review the documentation and the survey.

“Based on that, we came up with something tangible – the drafting and presentation of a high level strategy. Why high level? If we had drafted a real strategy, it wouldn’t have worked.”