CALL FOR GREATER POLICE TRANSPARENCY

ONE government minister is highlighting the need for a Police Complaints Authority that “works”.

Minister in the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Investment, Marsha Caddle, highlighted the need for greater transparency to instil a greater sense of trust in citizens.

“There is a notion that calling for greater police accountability means that you don’t like the police. Let’s be real. There is a notion that if you say, ‘I want to know what happened to that young man who went into that police station on that date’; and that if you support calls for transparency and investigations into accounts of police brutality that you are anti-police. That could not be further from the truth. I think it is the opposite. I want the police to be trusted by citizens because if they are trusted, it makes them more effective at their jobs and makes us all safer.

“So we need to have a Police Complaints Authority that works, that responds in a timely way. We need to have a culture, a tradition, a practice that if there are questions around any kind of police activity that those questions can be easily answered with records, with evidence that we make this business transparent, because suspicion and mistrust destroy societies,” she said.

Caddle noted that while it was important to put the necessary resources in the hands of the police to ensure they could carry out their role, the most important resource was a relationship with the community.

She told the Lower House yesterday as it brought forward a resolution on Black Lives Matter, that all institutions of the state should be transparent and held accountable for any misdeeds.

“I as a minister of Cabinet want us to use every single tool at our disposal to keep me accountable, because I detest the notion that people who come to serve in political life cannot be trusted,” she stressed. (JMB)