Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1211889
10 maltatoday | WEDNESDAY • 19 FEBRUARY 2020 OPINION IT'S not often that I use a quote from another article as a headline: but… well, just look at it for a moment, will you? Let it sink in, phoneme by pho- neme. Allow it to allure you with its almighty alliteration… be mesmerized by its meas- ured metre… and while you're at it, also pause to ponder the precision and profundity of its problematic proposition… In all likelihood (note: I was tempted to write 'probably' there, but let's not get too carried away) not even Shake- speare would have been able to cram so much truth, so poeti- cally, into so few words. Yet they were actually writ- ten by Mary Mifsud: a former police inspector who now lec- tures at the University of Mal- ta… and who therefore might know a thing or two more than Shakespeare – or most other people, including you and I – about the internal operations of the Malta Police Force. To place those words in their proper context, Mifsud was explaining how she usually replied to questions (at inter- national police conferences) about why Malta had changed Police Commissioners six times in seven years. Here's the full quote… which sounds almost like the intro- ductory voice-over narration of a detective movie: "Dreaded politics. Red inves- tigating Red. Doesn't happen easily, it takes some real police guts as no one wants to create a Red Inferno and have it on your CV. It's much easier to run. 'Cor- aggio, fuggiamo'. In the past we've had Blue investigating Blue, and Blue investigating Red. Technically, Red investigating Blue should come easy now, but apparently not. Politics pollutes policing, full stop." And there you have it, (al- most) straight from the Force's mouth. Not, mind you, that we really needed any con- firmation that it's 'much easier to run' than to 'create a 'Red Inferno'. In recent years, the evidence of our own eyes and ears has clearly illustrated that beyond any doubt. We have seen how the police always prove overwhelmingly reluctant to ever investigate politicians (or their proteges) for their possible involvement in crime. Suffice it to say that four years after evidence emerged of possible corruption in Mal- ta's energy sector, there has still not been any thorough criminal investigation of the Panama revelations. Some Police Commissioners 'ran', others 'ate rabbit' – in so doing, adding renewed rele- vance to that ancient political anthem, 'Run, Rabbit, Run' – but the result was always the same: no action. Not even the more recent arrest of Yorgen Fenech for Daphne's murder – which, with hindsight, can be seen to be connected to the same cor- ruption scandal – has made any real difference. The politicians involved in that deal remain as untoucha- ble as ever, despite everything that has happened in the last few months. Meanwhile, the same criti- cism has also been levelled at the Vitals hospital takeover… as well as the alleged involve- ment of Keith Schembri in an attempt to cover Yorgen Fenech's tracks, by passing on information about the ongo- ing murder investigation. Ah, but 'politics pollutes po- licing' in other, far more insid- ious ways. After all, Mary Mifsud was not moved to write her piece by any specific cases involving political impunity. No, she was responding to recent revelations which sug- gest that the situation within the Force may actually be far more… sordid. What started out as an in- ternal police sting against a fraudulent overtime racket within the Traffic section, seems to be now snowballing into something much more sinister and pervasive: some- thing Mifsud describes as a "mafia-style racket, which in- cludes extortion and silencing, indicating a whole barrel of rotten apples […]" If media reports are anything to go by, the police have now extended the internal inves- tigation from traffic police to "everyone from the Rapid Intervention Unit (RIU) and beyond"… and the list of al- leged crimes has outstripped the original overtime fraud, to include fuel theft and (much more distressingly) "[forcing] women to trade sexual favours in return for forgiving traffic fines." The precise extent of this rampant abuse of power re- mains to be seen – at the risk of stating the obvious, it would be unfair to tar the entire Force with the same brush - though we have already been given an ominous hint: "just wait for the racket proceedings to start and a seriously grim picture to emerge, if they're ever held in public." Given that one internal inves- tigation has already resulted in the arrest of over half the traf- fic section… we can only won- der how much of our Police Force will even be left, when (or if) the rest of it is passed through the same shredder. But how much of this ap- parent nosedive in standards is directly down to politics… and how much to plain old negligence and maladminis- tration? Admittedly, it is not a question that can be answered mathematically. Mifsud herself has a stab at it: "The police as an institution never exists on its own: if the 'field' is rotten, then have a re- ally good look at the 'habitus' – governance outside of police headquarters." Significantly, she draws a link with the distant 1980s: "The racket is truly a throw- back to the Lorry Sant days…" And from this perspective, the situation inherited by Abela does indeed start resembling the one Eddie Fenech Adami found himself in, when be- coming Prime Minister for the first time in 1987. Then as now, the police were in a shambles… indeed, the full charge sheet against it at the time (which included at least one murder within the depot itself) makes today's al- legations look rather lame. In any case, Fenech Adami had to take a crucial political decision: whether to throw the entire book at the police over its excesses in the 1970s/80s (in which case, Malta would have been left without any functional Police Force at all); or whether to make a few no- table examples (eg, prosecut- ing the former Police Com- missioner), and try to rebuild the Police Force from within. Either way, it is clearly an indictment of the polluting ef- fect of politics, that a similar decision may now befall Abela more than 30 years later. So the question still stands: did we even need a former po- lice inspector to inform us of what we all already knew: i.e., that something is seriously (but seriously) rotten in the Floriana Depot? I would say that… perhaps we did, yes. For it does make a small difference when the reality of our collective per- ceptions is finally confirmed by someone 'in the know'… someone who can not only see the 'elephant in the room' that is invisible to the rest of us… but also smell the steadily ris- ing mountains of elephant-poo it invariably produces (and which now has to somehow be cleaned up). Technically, Mifsud's article might not qualify as an act of 'whistleblowing' – the author no longer being within the po- lice force, and all that – but it still stands out as a rare at- tempt to break the culture of omerta' within the police corps itself: a culture whereby (in her own words) "whistle- blowing is anthropologically criminal: it breaks all codes of silence. It's loyalty at all costs and omertà, another two mafia red flags…" So, unlike what general- ly happens when the same criticism comes from the in- dependent media (i.e., not a damn thing), it cannot be so lightly ignored when coming from such a well-placed, au- thoritative source. Simply put, the events of the week mark a tipping point be- yond which no one can realis- tically pretend that the prob- lem simply doesn't exist at all… as Prime Minister Robert Abela seems to be implying, with his comment this week that 'Malta has gone back to normality'. Let's face it: a state cannot be defined as 'normal' if it al- lows politics to impede the po- lice from investigating serious crimes. But at least, we do now have a clear blueprint for how to attain that elusive 'normali- ty', once and for all. Abela himself is in a perfect position to achieve it, too. For whatever political considera- tions have so far prevented the police from investigating cer- tain crimes, should no longer be an issue after the recent changes in administration. So he can easily dispel the perception that 'politics pol- lutes policing'… by simply en- suring that the police have all the freedom from political in- terference they need to func- tion properly. That way, if we really were living in the 'state of normal- ity' envisaged by Robert Abe- la… the results would surely speak for themselves. The trouble, however, is that – beyond those 40 arrests, which were non-political any- way – I'm not actually seeing very much in the way of results at all… Raphael Vassallo 'Politics pollutes policing'