Not a day passes without a story in the newspapers about policemen caught on the wrong side of the law.
NewsDay Editorial
The crimes cops commit range from theft to murder.
Criminal acts by policemen are not confined to junior members of the force only, but also to those at the very top of the hierarchy.
This week alone, a senior officer was incarcerated for facilitating the release of a fraud suspect thereby breaking the Police Act in the most deplorable manner for a person supposed to know better, another policeman was brought before the courts for attempted murder.
The prevalence of criminal activity among policemen can no longer be attributed to a rogue element within the force. It is time the Ministry of Home Affairs took a really serious look at how the force works and the culture that has developed over the years.
Clearly, the economic and political crises that affected the country over the past 14 years have impacted in a bad way on the operations of most arms of government and the police force has been the hardest hit.
The politicisation of the police was one aspect that gravely compromised police work. During the subsistence of the political crisis, officers often acted like commissars for Zanu PF. It is not difficult to explain, therefore, the seamless transition of some officers from the Police General Headquarters (PGHQ) into Parliament.
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As the economic crisis bit, police officers were encouraged to fund operations through money accumulated in the form of traffic fines. Officers saw this as an opportunity to also line their own pockets as official remuneration became useless in the face of hyperinflation.
If the truth be told, the police force began to be an enemy of the very people it was meant to serve. The culture of impunity which saw officers literally getting away with murder has been engrained in the psyche of every policeman, and an aura of invincibility pervades every police camp, corrupting every policeman beyond measure.
Recently, senior officers have been retired from the force for involving themselves in corrupt activities and a few traffic cops have committed suicide when caught red-handed with cash extorted from motorists.
While this shows that the powers at PGHQ are doing something about corruption — and they must be applauded for this — the general feeling is that this will not root out corruption in the force completely.
An entrenched culture cannot be changed in a piecemeal manner; the whole culture has to be uprooted in a revolutionary way. This will obviously be costly and demand the kind of will absent in the minds of the current police leadership.
What is needed is a new police force with a different ethos altogether and, change should begin at the top.
