Any doctor will tell you that there are three steps in any healing process: Spotting the symptoms, identifying them as forming the syndrome for a particular disease and administering the appropriate medicine.

It is a foregone conclusion that the police force is unwell. The symptoms were made evident by the recent ‘eruption’, but I will be listing the ones I have identified.

As to the medication necessary, there is no panacea; one can only think of a combination of treatments. Some will have an instant effect while others will, like antibiotics, take a long time to become effective, but will restore health eventually. Also, like antibiotics, some ‘treatments’ will be expensive.

As to the symptoms, quite a few are glaringly obvious. We have a police force which is poorly educated, for example.

The ‘academic’ requirements for joining the force are just a few ‘O’ levels, really. That means that it is our secondary schools which are supposed to prepare prospective candidates, and our schools are already hard-pressed with other matters as it is.

So far, the antidote has been transfers. That is no antidote at all, and makes the wound fester into the ‘boil’ of revenge

Recruits are sent to an induction centre and they are taught (mostly) by instructors, whom I salute for doing their best, as I salute their heroic commander, who struggles against daunting odds.

But don’t expect too much of an instructor. Making them physically fit and giving them a bare modicum of knowledge of police force procedures hardly amounts to any sort of formation.

This became manifest in the latest incident, where even the location of a particular tunnel became an enigma, and where the victim, not the aggressor, was arraigned. Besides, most members of the force enter with a few ‘O’ levels and leave with same academic proficiency.

Mind you, the salary structure cannot attract high-flyers. But they don’t have much of a future at the end of their careers, and that is the classic definition of ‘dead-end’, or ‘Mickey-Mouse’ job.

It is time to make policing a profession, to vet candidates for aptitude and mental capability, and to see that they progress in their careers by striving for higher proficiency.

This would translate itself into certificates that have national validity and equivalence to ‘A’ levels, diplomas and, in cooperation with the university, degrees, so that at the end of their careers they could start a new life.

This is the antibiotic, which is slow working but powerful.

But there are other manifestations of the disease afflicting what we call the police force.

There is the polarisation which makes it riven asunder, so that you have a Nationalist police force and a Labour police force.

In effect, a number of police personnel are unpaid employees of one party or the other, and invest their efforts in ingratiating themselves with party grandees in the hope that this will give tangible rewards after retirement.

For many, this is the only future they envisage. They do not trust each other, so how can anybody trust them? A lot of energy is devoted, by these unworthy people, to undermining the other ‘side’, and the victims are the decent people out there who require their assistance.

I know many ‘straight’ policemen and women who are sick and, to use an overused word, disgusted by this, frustrated to paralysis.

So while the few Macchiavels have their day and their say, the hundreds of honest, upright officers are almost catatonic.

So far, the antidote has been transfers. That is no antidote at all, and makes the wound fester into the ‘boil’ of revenge.

I leave it to the directors of the force to supply the remedy, and I think they do not need me to tell them that it involves surgery, dismissal from the force if a member is found to have acted out of a personal or political agenda, with even penal servitude as a possibility for serious misdemeanour. Substitutes will be available. Cut the canker out.

This pernicious allegiance to parties has caused a widening of the inflammation. No citizen, after the recent disclosures to third parties, can have any confidence when lodging a report.

Only an idiot would place his trust, in serious matters, in the hands of people who may have hidden agendas, illicit contacts and tremendous power.

The honest citizen becomes a poor worm squirming on a hook for criminals to eat. In a much worse scenario, what is happening in Mexico is a sombre warning. We must make sure we do not go down that pathway to hell.

We must take these things seriously. By ‘we’ I mean all citizens and politicians on both sides of the House, because present trends bode no good, not just for our present peace of mind but for democracy itself, already under threat from dark fundamentalist forces.

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