It hasn’t been a good week for the Police Service. Even as Acting Corporal Sean James was being buried after fatally shooting his girlfriend and then killing himself, guns and drugs were found by the Crime Intelligence Unit (CIU) hidden in the ceiling of the St Joseph Police Station.

Opinion surveys show that three out of every four citizens have little or no confidence in the police. That negative view will be deepened by these incidents, which are only the latest to demonstrate the psychological instability or corruption of certain officers. Just last Christmas, for instance, a police officer allegedly killed a 24-year-old man and wounded his brother and mother in an apparent property dispute. And, in March last year, several members of the Eastern Division Task Force were found to have a shotgun, ammunition, and a quantity of marijuana hidden in their lockers. These items turned out to be court evidence.

What is happening in these cases? Have the errant officers been charged or been fired from the Police Service? If the Commissioner of Police wants to build public confidence in his officers, this is the way to start. Indeed, the very fact that the CIU acted on the tip-off which led them to the St Joseph Police Station (a station, perhaps not coincidentally, where officers have been accused of sloth) reflects well on the willingness of some units to stamp out corruption within the Service.

But these same officers would surely become frustrated if their good work does not result in a concrete outcome i.e. prosecutions. Indeed, it is often the case that police officers become corrupt and inefficient, not because they are wicked or lazy, but because they come to see that competence and adherence to principle do not lead to advancement within the Service. How often, for example, has the public heard about officers on disciplinary charges receiving promotions even as their cases hang fire in court? This is a key factor in undermining morale and creating a Police Service which is part of the crime problem rather than part of the solution.

What, then, can be done to improve the service’s image? The first step must be to realise that image depends on reality. Thus, methods must be found to improve the calibre of officers within the service, in terms of both their personality and their character. But this cannot be done, as popularly assumed, through psychological and polygraph tests, because such tests have only limited reliability. Instead, procedures and structures must be created which ensure that the best officers are advanced through the ranks as quickly as possible. Only when such persons are put in charge will the culture of Police Service begin to change.