Fix policing properly

PRIME MINISTER MIA AMOR MOTTLEY’S acknowledgement that the Barbados Police Service requires urgent modernisation is, at its core, correct. The institution has operated for too long under structures inherited from a colonial era designed not to serve the public, but to control it.

The growing incidence of violent crime, the brazenness of recent offences and the deeply felt anxieties of ordinary Barbadians all confirm that something must change – and change substantially. The question is not whether reform is necessary. It is who should shape it, how it should be designed and whether Barbados has the institutional courage to do this properly.

The current approach – characterised by ministerial pronouncements, Executive-led restructuring and top-down directives – carries risks that ought to concern every thinking citizen.

Police reform, driven primarily by politicians, tends to reflect political priorities rather than institutional needs. It produces announcements calibrated to public anxiety rather than strategies grounded in evidence. It generates activity without accountability, motion without transformation and headlines without lasting change.

Trinidad and Tobago stands as the region’s cautionary tale. That country has endured decades of promised reform, successive commissioners, legislative amendments and ministerial initiatives. Yet the Trinidad and Tobago Police Service remains deeply compromised in public confidence, beset by internal resistance and widely regarded as reformed in name only.

The lessons are instructive: reform owned by politicians is abandoned when political priorities shift. Reform that excludes civil society loses the community trust it requires to succeed.

Reform measured by press releases rather than independent indicators cannot be sustained.

Barbados deserves better. What this country requires is not a minister’s vision or a commissioner’s preference, however well-intentioned, but an independent, formally-constituted Commission of Inquiry into the future of policing, structured to operate entirely free of partisan interference.

Such a commission should draw on legal and criminological expertise, civil society, the academic community, officers from within the service at various ranks and a formal delegation from the parliamentary opposition. Its mandate should not be a sixmonth exercise but a rigorous, evidence-led study oriented towards a strategic policing vision spanning the next 25 years.

Past commissioners may offer valuable institutional memory and their perspectives should be heard respectfully. However, their testimony must inform the commission’s deliberations, not define its conclusions. Institutional memory can easily calcify into institutional resistance. A police service fit for 2050 cannot be designed by those whose professional formation belongs to yesteryear.

Barbados has the intellectual capital, the civic tradition and the institutional maturity to do this properly. The question is whether those currently in power have the discipline to step back and allow a genuinely independent process to lead.

Reform shaped by public servants and citizens, anchored in research and free from political calculation, is the only reform worth having. Anything less risks becoming another well-intentioned exercise that changes little and disappoints everyone.

Our Police Service will not be reformed by announcements.

It will be reformed when the full truth of what ails it is placed, unflinchingly, on the public record; and when those with the authority to act prove willing to read it honestly.

The stakes are simply too high for theatre.