President warns compromised officers to change their conduct or leave the service as Government promises major investment in policing
President Anura Kumara Dissanayake has delivered an unusually stark warning from the very top of the State: a small number of Sri Lankan police officers are allegedly maintaining connections with drug traffickers and organised criminal networks.
Addressing the 160th anniversary of the Sri Lanka Police at the Field Force Headquarters in Thimbirigasyaya, the President said officers who had been intimidated, influenced or bought over by criminal networks must change their conduct or leave the service.
Submit Your Press Release
Get your company news, announcements, launches, appointments and events in front of a wider audience.
It was undoubtedly a powerful warning. It also raises a rather obvious question.
If there is credible evidence that serving police officers are working with narcotics traffickers or organised criminal gangs, leaving the Police should surely not be the end of the matter.
The President himself made clear that disciplinary authorities should act following proper investigations, inquiries and evidence. That distinction is important because suspicion is not proof, and no police officer should be condemned merely on allegation.
But where evidence does exist, resignation cannot become an escape hatch.
A police officer assisting a drug trafficker is not simply a bad employee. Depending upon what has occurred, that officer may be participating in the very criminality he or she has sworn to prevent, while possessing powers, information and access unavailable to an ordinary member of the public.
That makes corruption within law enforcement particularly dangerous.
The scale of the Government’s campaign against narcotics demonstrates why. The President said Police had seized 5,255 kilograms of heroin, 9,966 kilograms of crystal methamphetamine, 44,684 kilograms of Kerala cannabis and some 16.2 million narcotic tablets and capsules during the past two years.
He also said 74 armed criminals hiding overseas had been brought back to Sri Lanka with the assistance of intelligence services and foreign governments, with efforts continuing to return others.
Those are substantial numbers and demonstrate an enforcement machinery operating across borders. But every compromised police officer potentially gives the people being pursued an extraordinary advantage over the people pursuing them.
The Government is simultaneously promising significant improvements to the Police service. Plans include recruiting 10,000 additional personnel, introducing a proper promotion system, paying a risk allowance, providing hundreds of motorcycles and vehicles, improving accommodation and infrastructure and introducing a new Police uniform around the middle of next year.
Those investments are welcome if they produce a more professional police service.
But the most important uniform is the integrity of the person wearing it.
Sri Lanka’s Police officers perform difficult and sometimes dangerous work, and it would be grossly unfair to tarnish an entire service because of allegations against a minority. Indeed, that is precisely why the minority alleged to be working with criminals must be identified through proper investigation and dealt with according to law.
The President has now publicly acknowledged the problem.
The next stage cannot merely be a warning.
If there is evidence that policemen are working for drug dealers, investigate them, prosecute them where the evidence warrants it and let the courts decide.
Taking off the uniform should never be enough to take away criminal responsibility.
Be that as it may.
