Yesterday we carried a Reuters report about more than half of Malta’s traffic police being arrested on Tuesday for suspected fraud. According to motorists there were noticeably fewer police directing traffic on the roads the next morning. Malta is a very small island, of course, with a total of only about 50 officers being assigned to traffic, 30 of whom have now been held. However, cynical members of the citizenry here might remark that if more than half of Guyana’s traffic complement involving infinitely larger numbers had been arrested, road users might not have noticed any difference the following day.
And that is Traffic Chief Linden Isles’s problem: his department has little credibility in the eyes of the public. He could go on citing a diminution in road fatalities, etc, until he is silly, but no one would take much notice because they know what they see for themselves on the roadways every day. Traditional police responses to reducing the number of traffic offences have tended to take the form of temporary campaigns. An earlier one under the auspices of Mr Isles’s predecessor called ‘Operation Safeway,’ for example, produced the claim that there had been a 22% decrease in accidents and a 20% decrease in deaths following its introduction. If there was, no one outside Eve Leary noticed.
We have been told for years that the GPF is under strength, but in 2017 the Traffic Department was augmented by the addition of 26 members. Then Traffic Chief Dion Moore was reported as saying that it had been recognised that there was a need for training to boost the discipline, tolerance and professionalism shown by traffic ranks. People are unlikely to have anticipated that the additions would make much difference, not least because there were simply not enough of them, but also because of the culture of the section into which they were drafted.
On Wednesday we reported on an entirely new initiative from the Traffic Department involving the introduction of a WhatsApp number. The police press release on which this was based said that people could now send pictures, videos and information pertaining to traffic issues to the number which was provided so that they could be “promptly” addressed. This is certainly on the face of it a very progressive move, but the problem is that in isolation it is not guaranteed to achieve anything very substantial.
It is the case that last year even the police hierarchy was forced to admit that members of the force themselves do not always observe the highway code. This came in the wake of a horrific accident in which five people died. One of the vehicles involved was attached to the police, and an inquiry revealed that the driver had been speeding. The Traffic Chief warned GPF drivers about speeding and the abuse of the vehicles which were assigned to them, but everyone except arguably the Police Force knows that warnings on their own are ineffective.
Similarly, a special seminar was subsequently held for drivers of the force’s vehicles. However, the populace, at least, was probably not at all surprised when they read that on the following day a police vehicle crashed into two utility poles and a shop at Perseverance, ECD. Any ordinary person in the street could have advised Mr Isles that seminars on their own really will not cut it. Where is the monitoring and the application of sanctions where appropriate? People want to know.
The absence of a consistent, sustained approach to issues and the fearless application of consequences aside, it has to be recognised that the police face several difficulties in achieving orderly traffic arrangements, not all of which are under their control. No one can deny that the vehicle burden is too great for our existing network, that our streets are too narrow, that for the most part they lack pavements for pedestrians, that there is no room for cycle lanes, that animals roam willy-nilly and that signage (which they do have some control over) is a disaster area. Traffic problems in general could be mitigated, however, if Mr Isles and Police Commissioner Leslie James were to accept that there is an elephant in the room.
That elephant is corruption. Apart from making periodic statements about how they will not tolerate corruption in the force, those at its apex have shown no inclination to address it in a systematic way. As such there is a hiatus between how the population sees the problem of ensuring the law is observed on our roadways, and how the senior hierarchy of the GPF sees it. The public is of the conviction that the underlying reason for the traffic chaos – although not the only one – is the culture of corruption which is associated with the traffic police in particular. In fact, the layperson’s view is that corrupt police officers learn their ‘skills’ initially in the Traffic Department.
In a small society such as this citizens will inevitably be able to identify an officer whom they allege is driving a car they couldn’t afford on what they earn, or who is living a lifestyle hardly in consonance with that of an honest policeman. Then there are those officers who own minibuses and are not subject to the traffic regulations if found in breach of them. This is not to forget matters like the purchase of driving licences and the like. It was not always so; fifty years ago the traffic police, although paid a very modest salary, were for the most part honest, unlike many of their hemispheric counterparts in Latin America in particular. In some of those societies, if stopped by a policeman, you handed over your documents with a bill already inserted inside.
The difference between Malta and Guyana is that the officials here simply refuse to confront what is popularly known as the ‘raise’ culture. The island of Malta is known for its corruption, and perhaps this latest drastic act follows the public outcry after the murder of an anti-corruption journalist there. It is true that while the problem in the Traffic Department here is one of bribery, that in Malta is reported to be related to accusations of the fraudulent filing of hundreds of hours of overtime and the misappropriation of fuel. However, that distinction really does not matter. What matters is that in the end the Maltese authorities were prepared to act in an unequivocal manner, and the ones here are not.
The traffic problem on our roads is only going to get worse with the advent of the oil economy, and the whole new range of vehicles which will be imported. All kinds of problems on the roads need to be fixed, and in dealing with newcomers the traffic police will be on the front line. Anodyne statements from the upper echelons of the force about corruption not being tolerated, more especially after the unsatisfactory outcome following the revelations by police officers in Berbice, are totally inadequate. It is not good enough to have senior officers act only after some issue has been thrust under their noses; there needs to be a pro-active policy in place to stamp out corruption, not least in the Traffic Department.
For that, however, they need to acknowledge that it exists on some significant scale in the first place, which they have not done. The citizenry waits to hear from the Traffic Chief and the Police Commissioner on how they are going to tackle this matter.
Finally, we will repeat a position this newspaper has long maintained, namely, that there should be an independent police complaints authority. That, however, will have to await a new government.
