More clarifications, please!

Usually when one makes a presentation to an audience, the level of interest and retention are washed out in a matter of minutes. I often wonder how much of our Commissioner of Public Safety’s messages to the Rotary Club of Saipan at a recent luncheon meeting were still remembered by those present. It is good to put this issue aside for another time as this kind of outcome crop up often in presentations by other government officials.

This idea about “Community Policing” that our commissioner described would have been helpful if he spent some useful time explaining and defining what this is all about. Is this a “precept” or “concept” he has total familiarity and experienced with? Or is this one of those usual rhetoric and public speaking double talk often employed by one trying to justify ones jurisdictional turf?

It seems that the commissioner is telling the CNMI community that something is not working well in DPS. I expect that as the case in point but if I do not know what gap is between what is in DPS and the value of target outcomes that are the benchmarks for processes or procedures, then how am I to know what the commissioner is talking about? This is just the state of affairs of where we are now at DPS. Now he is introducing projects and programs such as a “police reserve,” “community policing,” “database search,” and others. How did all these come about? Was there an assessment of some sort that led to all these? This is looking more like a shotgun strategy, hoping that something would stick if the blast hits the moving target.

The commissioner noted that state policing is changing; I agree with him on this. But how are they changing? Changes must come as a result of fast-changing social, economic, and political landscape, he said. How so? How does this broad hindsight fit the fight against crime and fear about crime of the NMI community?

Where is the commissioner taking us in the fight against crime? Is the infrastructure of DPS fully equipped to sustain the level of initiatives, strategies, and plan elements that follow carefully considered undertaking? Or is this a process of making the right choices: dumping what doesn’t work, fixing latent defects of existing elements, or dismissing fads that come along the way only because one reads about it in journals or the commissioner heard in passing?

The DPS is exempted by the austerity policy of the CNMI government. The commissioner must always bear in mind that the mentality of the general CNMI public may not be receptive to the idea of farming out policing work to the community. This is another ball of wax to contend with and he should take all the time to map out this virgin area of policing that involves the community. Until we can get some clear understanding of what steps the commissioner is thinking along this line, there is no way that something like this magnitude and virgin undertaking would result in progressive and assured outcome.