“Necessary but insufficient” also “wrong”. This is how specialists in the field of security citizens define the measures adopted by the Government as part of its plan to reform the National Police.
There are some 14 measures that involve greater control of the agents through the use of security cameras. securityintegrity tests, more training, as well as more guarantees for citizens, with a non-intrusive purification system and the suggestion that the convention against torture and cruel treatment be ratified.
For Alexander Dipreformer deputy director of the National Police, the measure is necessary but insufficient, since it warns of a legal vacuum since the Ministry of the Interior and Police is the body in charge of designing and implementing these policies.
His point is based on the fact that this Ministry lacks an organic law and that the law that created it dates from 1844. “It is an inorganic body, which has no law that governs it and, therefore, it would be adrift as soon as to that”.
Dipré understands that this legal vacuum will prevent the Interior and Police from being able to efficiently carry out its role as regulator, since it will not have a legal body to be able to proceed against those who fail to comply with the policies.
He also questions that the Ministry would not be responsible for faults in the measures adopted, with all the responsibility falling on the agents, something that seems unfair to the also retired general of the Police.
But for the president of the Dominican Society of Criminology, Wilfredo Morathe measures announced last Thursday afternoon by the Commissioner for the Police Reform, Jose Vila del Castillotogether with the Minister of the Interior and Police, Jesús Vázquez in the halls of the National Palace.
“Those 14 measurements are wrong. The simple agent does not know how to carry out his work under these guidelines”. It follows that the orientations based on cameras, monitoring, support lines, use of computers, have already been implemented in the past without working.
He remembers an occasion in which it was decided to equip the patrols with computers and it did not work.
He thinks that with “the announced actions, a cultural change of the police is sought, at the same time it is intended that the police account for their actions and not live closed, that they become familiar with technology, recognize that the cameras have the purpose of implementing techniques of social relationship and understand that technological communication is now the basis of police planning”.
But he warns that these claims are like having a police officer within another police force, which does not correspond to the current body.
Mora understands that if what is wanted is to have a solution to the current crisis that the Police is experiencing, involved in questions about the death of civilians after being detained in their barracks, the alternative could be to divide the preventive work of the investigation.
“These are measures that vanish if they are not part of the police training program, and that can only work through a Police School,” he says.
