Huh?

About two weeks ago, the Commissioner of Public Safety issued a press release outlining his vision for the transformation of the Department of Public Safety. The commissioner’s views on serve and protect appears like an executive summary of a lengthy report on crime fighting. I am glad that the commissioner is serious about his mission to making changes in the Department of Public Safety. The commissioner suggested that crime fighting is like a three-legged stool. While he emphasized “the community” as one of the responsibility centers, we need to find out from the commissioner how this entity would tie in with the other responsibility centers he ascribed in his manifesto. In other words, it is time to get down to the details of the rubrics so that each of the legs of the stool would be positioned for the eventual processes of transforming public safety in the CNMI. If the commissioner does not put these into a working document and plan, his idyllic manifesto would be nothing more than rhetoric. We should now ask the commissioner for the details of his vision. As the old saying goes, the devil is in the details.

The other problem with the commissioner’s manifesto was the difficulty in reading it. Applying the Flesch-Kinkaid readability formula indicated that the readability level of the press release was close to a graduate degree. Using the Smog Readability Formula also show the same results. The commissioner may have missed the opportunity to express his point of view effectively because the majority of the general public may have lost interest in what the commissioner had in mind. After carefully analyzing what percentage of the general public that read and understood the commissioner’s press release, it is not surprising that only 10 percent of the total CNMI population read and understood the commissioner. If we look closely at the education level of the workforce in the Department of Public Safety, it is not surprising either that the commissioner may have written to himself as only a handful of the staff may have total comprehension as to what the commissioner was saying in his manifesto. This is troubling but, nonetheless, the commissioner for sure has his work cut up for him.

Until we are able to figure out how the “community” can pitch in, and translating what the commissioner presented as his mission, we should wait for the commissioner and the Department of Public Safety to take us to the next step. And, so let us do it.
[B] Francisco R. Agulto[/B] [I]Chalan Kanoa, Saipan[/I]