Comment: How do you solve a problem like the Maldives Police Service?

Today marks 79 years of Policing in the Maldives. Pity, that it has become so controversial an issue to appreciate.

A mistrust of the Maldivian police and security services has been ingrained in me for most of my life. I grew up with stories of arbitrary arrests, brutality in jails, and the concept that the police were not there to protect and serve my interests, but those of their immediate superiors. In fact, one of the fundamental things that I had to accept in 2008, after the country’s first multi-party Presidential election, was the idea that the Police were no longer ‘enemies’, or even the ‘golha-force’, but very much part of the apparatus of state that any government had to take into consideration. It wasn’t an easy task.

Controlling my body not to shudder at the sight of a blue camouflaged uniform and black ankle boots, and understanding that not every arrest the police made was arbitrary. Most of all learning to trust the police took time, commitment and a lot of stubbornness. Maybe that sense of apprehension and mistrust went both ways.

No doubt, the prospect of a MDP government would have filled most senior police officers with a high sense of foreboding. After all, these were the very people that they had seen on the other side of an investigation table, inside a jail cell and on the street loudly confronting them at every given opportunity. Let’s not take lightly the extent to which the police were a political tool of Maumoon’s authoritarian regime, and as a result, that they were very much a product of the democratic reform process in the Maldives at that time.