19 December 2011

Institutionalizing Community Policing in Timor-Leste: Exploring the Politics of Police Reform

East Timor Legal News 19/12/2011 Source: The Asia Foundation Nélson De Sousa C. Belo, Mark R. Koenig, Edited by Silas Everett Occasional Paper No. 8, December 2011 - A brief paper that examines the development of the Polícia Nacional de Timor-Leste (PNTL) over the last decade, which has been a core focus of the international community as well as successive national governments. As capacity has been developed at both the individual and organizational levels, the need for the PNTL to develop into a community oriented police service has been stated regularly. Despite this prominence in international and national rhetoric on police development, demonstrable progress toward making community policing a cornerstone of policing in Timor-Leste has been very limited. The political leadership of Timor-Leste is very focused on the issues around the police and the need for police reform. As a vague ambition rather than an immediate priority, community policing is chronically under-resourced, with the most recent FY12 budget leaving out its funds for training completely.



Download the full paper here.

East Timor Law Journal - Towards the rule of law in Timor-Leste.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The sad reality is that the efforts of UNPOL to raise PNTL capacity have largely been a FAILURE.

That is because all the rhetoric on both sides masks the fact that the vast majority of PNTL officers are reluctant to change their ways. So a lot of policing is similar to POLRI strategies.

And millions of hard-earned taxpayer dollars from wealthy countries have been wasted on UNPOL.

As they say: "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink".

Anonymous said...

Agree fully with the comment about the unwillingness of PNTL to adopt a community policing philosophy.
However, not all UNPOL come from countries that practice community policing or even subscribe to the rule-of-law to the same standards set for the PNTL.

There is failure on both sides and unless the fundmentals are considered from the outset, then it is difficult to achieve the desired effects of community policing.