By Mahil Dole –

The 160th Police Day last week was entitled to its dignity. It should not, however, be allowed to swallow the more important sentence written two days later. The Officer-in-Charge of the Traffic Division at Dehiwala Police Station recorded in the information book that he could no longer cope with the workload and the pressure, left his post and went home. An inquiry followed. Precedent was the word that travelled fastest.

That entry is not interesting because one Inspector lost his nerve. It is interesting because it asks a question the service has postponed for years: what mindset does a good policeman, a people-friendly policeman, now require, and how is that mindset to be grown here, in this country, from this society, and not imported as a hybrid ornament?

I write as a third-generation officer, as a man who served more than four decades from Sub-Inspector to Senior Superintendent, as an intelligence officer who headed counter-terrorism, as a parent and as a citizen.

The uniform is only an identity. The person inside it is a human being. Some can bear what the job pours on them. Some cannot. The disciplinary code can compel obedience. It cannot issue a character.

Home-grown problems, home-grown solutions

Sri Lanka’s policing crisis is not a shortage of foreign models. It is a shortage of honesty about the soil in which the constable is grown. Home-grown problems need home-grown solutions. Hybrid packages,  a new app, a new uniform, a borrowed doctrine,  fail when they are laid over the same untreated ground.

That ground is familiar to anyone who has commanded a station. Hierarchical pressure that travels downward and rarely returns as care. Political interference that turns a professional decision into a negotiation. Poverty that sits in the same household as a public oath. Injustice and favouritism that teach the young officer which files move and which files wait. Cultural and religious pressure in a plural country, often exploited rather than understood. Cut-throat competition for scarce promotions. Fewer opportunities, less recognition and higher expectations in the same breath. Less unity inside the service than the parade ground suggests.

The police service today is a cornerstone of national security. Officers provide that service at every level,  the junction, the station, the division, the intelligence desk. The recognition given for that work looks insufficient. Frustration follows. Some, or many, keep silent because they do not know what else to do. Some react. A few reactions are acceptable. Others are inappropriate and end in disaster or confrontation. Social media then lifts the worst minute of a long shift and blows it out of proportion. The demoralising effect on the honest majority is real. So is the damage to public trust.

The criminal world has not waited for us to finish our speeches. Narcotics have become part of ordinary life. Offenders are, at times, more sophisticated than the officer across the counter. Transformation cannot be a circular. It has to be a change in the person who wears the cloth,  and in the three estates that shape him: the political authority, the police hierarchy and the general public.

Even at this late hour, the President’s words at the anniversary, that purchasable officers should leave the uniform, that hours are too long, that recruitment, housing and a proper promotion scheme must follow,  can be treated as a stepping stone. A stepping stone is not a destination. It is only of use if the next foot falls on firm ground.

To the political authority

Do not ask the policeman to carry every anxiety of the State and then wonder why he snaps. Traffic, narcotics, school gates, temple crowds, politician security, disaster relief and the residue of every other institution’s failure cannot remain one man’s residual duty. If national security is the claim, national security must be the budget, the cadre and the protection from partisan use.

Favouritism and political telephone calls are not a small cultural habit. They are a training syllabus in cynicism. An officer who learns that the file of the connected man travels faster than the file of the poor man will not become people-friendly by attending a workshop. End the practice of treating transfers and promotions as patronage. Let schooling years of children weigh in postings. Let risk allowance reach the constable on the road, not stop at the announcement.

You cannot lecture integrity while leaving the honest officer the poorest man in the room. You cannot demand a people-friendly service from men who have been used as a labour pool. Collective responsibility begins in Cabinet as much as in the barracks. If the political authority wants a different policeman, it must stop manufacturing the present one.

To the police hierarchy

Teamwork and collective responsibility are not mottoes for the notice board. They are the only way a short-staffed service survives without eating its young. Trust between superiors and subordinates grows stronger, or weaker, at the exact point where a mistake is handled.

Mistakes are of two kinds. Error is human. Deliberate failure is not. A hierarchy that treats both as the same offence will drive the honest man into silence and leave the dishonest man to calculate his odds. A hierarchy that excuses both will lose the public. The professional task is discrimination: welfare first where distress has been recorded; discipline without theatre where duty has been abandoned; no cover for the officer who has sold the cloth.

The Dehiwala inquiry should follow that line. Walking off a post is a breach. An OIC holds keys, files, exhibits and command. Precedent matters. So does the roster that produced the entry. If the first public instinct is only fear that others may follow, juniors will hear a message: the problem is your mouth, not our hours.

Training must change with the reality in front of the station, not with the syllabus of a quieter decade. Law, drill and the baton will still be needed. They will not produce a people-friendly officer. That officer has to be groomed as a human being who can speak to a citizen without contempt, resist a politician without career panic, and notice a warning before it becomes a file.

Research should tell headquarters what the hour-load actually is, how many seek early release or overseas no-pay, how many have counselling that is not a rumour, how many live in quarters fit for a family. Research and Development does not need a foreign consultancy to discover burnout. It needs permission to say it in language that cannot be filed away.

S.S.S. – loyalty to the State, the Service and the Superior, still has meaning. It was never a one-way street. A Superior who spends men as disposable hours should not be surprised when loyalty thins.

To the general public

The policeman is not an outsider posted onto your street. He is grown in the same society that produces the good neighbour and the bad one. Honesty and dishonesty are not issued with the kit. They walk in from the home, the school and the town that raised the recruit. If we want a different officer, we cannot only shout at the uniform. We have to look at what we have sent into it.

The public has reasons for anger. Those reasons do not justify turning every exhausted outburst into a spectacle. Social media has made a sport of the worst minute and buried the sixteenth hour. That sport demoralises the officer who is still trying, and it teaches the next recruit that this is a profession without honour. A people-friendly service needs a people who can distinguish a human error from a crime, and a crime from a clip.

Confidence is a two-sided education. Cooperate where the officer is fair. Demand accountability where he is not. Do not ask for steel from men the State has left to rust, and do not accept rust as character. A parallel programme of public trust, honest, local, not a slogan campaign,  is as necessary as any change inside the barracks. Non

The transformation that is still possible

How is today’s policeman to be made ready for evolving realities? Not by hybrid decoration. By a home-grown compact.

Immediate work is unglamorous. Cap actual hours at traffic divisions. Stop treating leave as a favour. Put a counselling line in every division that an Inspector can use without becoming a case for the Legal Division. Treat recorded distress first as welfare, then, if needed, as discipline.

Short-term promises must arrive on a calendar: staggered recruitment so trainers are not overwhelmed; allowance and quarters treated as operational tools; transfers that consider families; court duty shared so the same handful of officers are not living in Magistrate’s Courts while the road goes unsupervised.

Long-term work is a change of mind. The political authority must stop using the service as a residual army. The hierarchy must practise collective responsibility and tell the difference between human error and deliberate betrayal. The public must recover a sober relationship with the man on the junction. None of the three can transform the policeman alone. Each can prevent the other two from succeeding.

I have seen this service from the household, the station, the intelligence desk and the citizen’s side of the counter. National security does not begin in a conference room. It begins with a constable who still has the patience to notice, and with a public that still has the confidence to speak. The Dehiwala Inspector did not invent the pressure. He only wrote it down. The President’s words can still be a stepping stone, if political authority, police hierarchy and public decide, together, that the next step is a mindset, not another parade.

(This analysis is offered in the interest of national security, institutional reform, and public safety)

*Mahil Dole, SSP (Retired), is the former Head of the Counter-Terrorism Division of the State Intelligence Service and a former Director of the Police Special Branch. He is a third-generation police officer.