An initiative of
the National Academy of Public Administration, 
and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs
and the Bobst Center for Peace and Justice, 
Princeton University




Oral History Program 	Series: 		Policing		
				Interview no.:	A3	






Interviewee: 		Robin Campbell			

Interviewer:		Daniel Scher

Date of Interview:	7 December 2007

Location:		Queen's University
			Belfast
			Northern Ireland			


Innovations for Successful Societies, Bobst Center for Peace and Justice
Princeton University, 83 Prospect Avenue, Princeton, New Jersey, 08544, USA www.princeton.edu/successfulsocieties



SCHER:	My name is Daniel Scher, I'm the Associate Director of the Institutions for Fragile States project and I'm here with Dr. Robin Campbell interviewing him in Belfast and the date is December 3rd, 2007. At this stage I would just like to check with you that we've spoken of informed consents and you signed the legal release. Are there any questions you have about that?

CAMPBELL:  	No, I'm happy, thank you. 
		
SCHER:  	Excellent, so let's get started. I'd like to begin just by asking you about your current role and just getting a bit of a sense of your biography. Would you describe the position that you now hold? 

CAMPBELL:  	I run my own business. Essentially I work for public sector clients and private sector clients and I have donor clients. On the international side I would tend to work with organizations going through major change and I would help facilitate that process. Sometimes I design that process. Also within that I would concentrate on building the capacity, the managerial capacity to be able to deal with the changes that are required, from conflict to post conflict.

SCHER:	How did you end up working in this particular area?

CAMPBELL:	When I was still serving in the police in Northern Ireland I did a Ph.D. in this area and I was the Deputy Change Manager and Director of Corporate Development responsible for implementation of the Patten (Commission) recommendations so I had an opportunity to work on and develop my approaches to what is required for these changes. Taking that and the research I had done previously, I was able to put together a number of methodologies that I was able to use in different environments and contexts. So I started off primarily in change management strategy development implementation but focusing more and more on executive development as a precursor to change management. 

SCHER:	So your specialty within this would be this idea of improving management capacity?	

CAMPBELL:  	Yes.

SCHER:	Excellent. Let's move on to the functional areas that we're interested in. The first area I'd like to talk about is recruitment and that is essentially weeding out the good from the bad. Is this something you've had any experience with in designing strategies to do this?

CAMPBELL:  	Only nominally. I worked in Sierra Leone. One of the difficulties is that organizations that are being developed to deal with the conflict require a different set of skills in relation to post conflict. Then you've got a situation where people are brought up and engrained in the old way of doing things. In order to sort of break that charm, the way they did it in Northern Ireland was to bring in a whole raft of new people with a different mindset. The problem with that is that it costs a lot of money and in Northern Ireland there were significant expenditures in relation to a severance program which let senior people and not-so-senior people leave in order to create the capacity and the space to bring other people in. 

	When you're dealing with post conflict situations internationally, invariably they're under-funded, the people don't get paid very much anyway, there's not very much social mobility because the people aren't that well trained and they're not of a high level of education, so it's much more difficult to try and move other people on and bring other people in and the room for that maneuver is significantly reduced. So I understand from the places I've been that there have been attempts to do that, but they haven't been successful in my mind because of the constraints of available money and finance.   

SCHER:  	So, in your mind, there is this constraint. If there was money provided what would be the best sort of strategy that you would kind of develop? Would this be something-would you use tests? Educational level? A sense of input from community members? How would you design a recruitment strategy-? 

CAMPBELL:  	There are different models. The South African model had people who joined the South African police who had been involved in acts of terrorism. That was acceptable in South Africa; it was not acceptable in Northern Ireland. So it depends on the norms and what is politically acceptable and acceptable to the people outside. Ultimately the determinants of it-But in a divided society it becomes much more difficult in relation to that because old wounds are hard to heal. I think that the criterion you need to have is you need to change the curriculum. You need to keep stuff that you have in the past in relation to functional excellence. At the same time, those things that are no longer acceptable and aren't working, need to be changed. You need to recruit against the core competencies that you believe to be important in the new agenda. 

	Now that means that those people need to undergo psychometric testing, they need to go into some form of assessment center. They need to be able to have the necessary competencies and show the capacity to develop those competencies on line. So you're really taking what is normal in other sectors but actually applying it to that area.  Then within that area there are all the problems of contextualizing it to that particular environment. If you want to bring new people in and you want to do it, then you're going to have to attract new people in. Because if you've got a situation where a police officer in Sierra Leone really has just enough money to buy a big bag of rice for his family, then if you have more education you're not going to go into the police. In order to attract a new person who previously wouldn't have been involved or wished to go into that, then you need to make it more lucrative for them, particularly if you want to get rid of corruption which sits side-by-side with that. So the whole area of recruitment in a post conflict situation in the third world is inherently problematic. 

	I haven't worked on a program yet, in the third world, where there was sufficient money, or sufficient time, or really a full appreciation of what was required in order to deliver the product that they aspired at the start of it.  

SCHER: 	So given that, could you just talk a little bit about what happened in Sierra Leone and maybe where the major failings were because there wasn't a lack of funding-? 

CAMPBELL:	The Sierra Leone policing project was probably better supported and funded than most of the others. You had an organization there of about 9,000 and what happens normally is you get some expatriate officers to come into a team. They do a functional review of the organization: they look at their fleet, they look at their buildings, they look at their training, they look at their weapons, they look at their clothing, they look at all these sorts of things, and they make determinations of what is required. That's okay as far as it goes, but there almost needs to be an anthropological study done in order to understand the context and the culture and the country, never mind the culture of the organization.

	So you get money being plowed into things, for example, you get money plowed into a new fleet without building and changing the capacity and the culture of the organization of a maintenance culture. So twelve months down the line, all these new vehicles are broken down and there's nobody to fix them. 

	Now I know it's a point that seems totally axiomatic, but I've seen it in practice. Almost the last things that get looked at are the intangibles in relation to the capacity of the people to be able to move forward. If we had a situation in Belfast here and we were in a bank, and this bank was going to get merged with another bank, or this bank was going to take on new business, there would be quite a significant amount of time and effort spend on developing the competencies of the people in order to be able to discharge their new responsibilities, but that's nearly always the last thing. They start a training program and start training people in relation to community policing without actually thinking about whether or not community policing, in that context, in that culture, is a good thing or if they could develop it in such a way that they use common words and terms that people there previously have actually had familiarity with and accepted. For example, under community policing there's like a five-part generally a generic model that they use. But within the tribal aspects and relationship aspects of Africa, they actually have totally the same concepts but they call it different things. 

	So they do the functional analysis and they start to import European, Western-European, or American methodologies and then tweak them a little bit. Maybe they do not call it community policing, rather they call it neighborhood policing or local policing, but essentially it's a western mindset for an African problem. I have seen executive development always being the last thing rather than the first thing that needs to be developed in order to build capacity.  

SCHER:	So is that what happened in Sierra Leone?

CAMPBELL:	That's what happens everywhere, I think.

SCHER:	So aside from funding, what would the most serious obstacle be to designing an effective recruitment strategy-?

CAMPBELL:  	A detailed local understanding, first of all of the culture and the history of the place. If we were going to go in to do an analysis of an organization going through change, we would do a full detailed organizational analysis, but we'd also need to understand the sector and if we weren't part of the country, we'd need to understand the country. It almost needs to be a country analysis, a sector analysis, and then a full organizational analysis. Often the organizational analysis is in relation to what their deficit is and in relation to their functional area, for example, fleet or buildings, not the competencies that they have and the competencies they need and how can those competencies be developed, because those things are somewhat intangible. When they come around and the donor is coming around to have a review of the organization that is implementing this, the organization wants to hand them a strategic plan. They want to hand them a fleet management strategy. They want to show them the 300 new cars and new vehicles, but actually trying to prove to them the difference in competency from where they started to where they are now is  difficult to illustrate, and therefore, because of the pressure to show progress, it's a more intangible thing. Therefore by definition it doesn't get dealt with.    

SCHER:	So it's very clear that these types of failings are probably quite easy to identify if you're saying that they're getting a fleet that then breaks down because they have no capacity to handle it. But perhaps looking a bit ahead, and I'm not sure if it is possible or not, what would the types of criteria be, or the standards, that you would look for to evaluate a successful, in this case, say, recruitment strategy? What things would you look for as indicators of success?

CAMPBELL:  	Well, an indicator of success is-there's no point of having a recruitment strategy unless you're absolutely clear on the skills and competencies that are required of the people. You're not going to be clear on the skills and competencies that people need unless you're clear about their roles and responsibilities. You're not going to be clear about the roles and responsibilities unless you're very clear of the strategies that they have to follow. And you're not going to be clear about the strategies they have to follow unless you've done a proper organizational environmental analysis. 

	So you can't just take the recruiting strategy in isolation. It is a part of the engine that will actually be built and engineered in order to fit in once everything else is looked into. So that's why I'm saying, if you understand the country, you understand the sector, you understand the organization, then from that analysis, and from building the capacity you can then have the necessary information to build your recruitment strategy. 
	
	Now as far as having the capacity and the competencies, that's one thing, but then, as I said initially, unless there's enough investment in order to sort of make that job attractive to people who have those competencies, then that's not going to work either. The third thing that I've noticed in these particular areas, there's quite a lot of sensitization required to get people to the point where they're willing to believe in the future of an organization bearing in mind what has happened in the past. It's true in Northern Ireland, and it's been true in Sierra Leone. In Sierra Leone, the police were seen very much as an organ of the state. In Nigeria it's seen very much as an organ of the state, but in Nigeria the force is 327,000 strong. That must be one of the biggest organizations in the world, operating on a shoestring with a management capability which is minimal.
		
	There was a recent thing that Gordon Brown reported in Nigeria. I didn't hear it reported here, that Gordon Brown and the British government are going to redesign and transform the Nigerian police. Well, they better have 500 million pounds in their pocket before they even think of it because that's what it is going to take in order to turn and change them around.      

	So I find that in relationship to the recruitment and relation to everything generally, there's a great talk about what's to happen without a detailed understanding of the steps necessary to do it and the costs that flow from that. 

SCHER:  	That actually segues quite nicely into our next section, if that's okay, which is-you just mentioned about how much money you need to turn the Nigerian police around. So maybe if we could talk a little bit about specifics of training and professionalization that you've been involved with, obviously bearing in mind this kind of broad process that you've spoken about and how important that is.  But if we can maybe get down to just a little bit of case-specific detail. 

CAMPBELL:  	Okay, I'll do that. I'll discuss the Nigerian police but that's actually a project that is ongoing, so I just wanted to be a little bit careful. 

SCHER: 	We'd be very interested to hear about it.

CAMPBELL:	I'm going to tell you but just put a question mark against it. 

SCHER:	Okay.

CAMPBELL:	The Nigerian police said that they wanted to have community policing and as a result of that, there was a project put together called the SJG project, Security, Justice and Growth. Now I reviewed it on behalf of DFID (Department for International Development) and then redesigned the security aspect in relation to it. The difficulty was that what they said that they wanted was not actually what they wanted. What they wanted was, in reality, some training, some assistance in relation to kit and in relation to buildings, and the capacity to be able to go out to the public and make themselves more acceptable by saying they're following a philosophy of community policing. But actually, when you went into it, the behavior of the officers themselves would not be changed by the amount of training that they would have felt was appropriate. 

	So you saw situations whereby on the one hand, after six weeks of training, officers who had come through that had a totally different world view, their paradigm had totally changed, but they were going into a situation where they were challenging their peers on their behavior which they felt was not appropriate, and then getting beaten up in the process. So you get young constables doing this six-week piece of training which fundamentally changed the way they thought about their roles and responsibilities, and how they worked for the public, getting beaten up by their colleagues because they actually said "You shouldn't be taking this money" in relation to corruption or "You shouldn't be sexually abusing this witness who has come through the door."

	Now that's what happens when you start to change things at the bottom as a methodology for changing the training as you go through. Now what happens is they're very happy to have some isolated training, but once you start to institutionalize that training, then what actually happens is you remove their capacity to be able to benefit from it. You also remove the capacity for patronage and you're moving towards more of a meritocracy. 	    

	Now in a situation that has rewarded none of those things, then you're actually asking the turkeys to vote for Christmas. Unless there is something coming down from the top which is a new vision, which is a new mission, which is a new culture, which is a new way of doing things. The difficulty is actually getting into the organizations to be able to change things at the top and the bottom simultaneously and then working down until they meet in the middle. Often I've heard that the most difficult people to change are the people in the middle because they're not one and they're certainly not the other. But the truth is they're, in places like Nigeria, you have not been able to get into the top. They don't want it. You're actually restricting their capacity to reward people that they want to because they think the way they do and they will play their games. 

	So if you have a corrupt head of the organization and you get people down there who are feeding that corruption, then that suits that person to bring those people through. Not in every situation, I'm not saying there are not good people coming through. But, unless you attack-the word attack is actually too strong, but actually it's right. Unless you actually attack the organization at certain points, for certain levers and start to change it in a holistic way, then the level of training in itself, unless it is significant and systematic, will not have that effect.

	The difficulty in Nigeria, on that particular project, was essentially a training solution, but they didn't change the organizational processes. They didn't change the organizational systems. They weren't allowed to. They didn't change the things that would actually mean that if I walk in here and have a change of attitude through training that the system itself does not mitigate against that and prevents me from being able to do that because all they did was, apart from getting young police officers beaten up by their colleagues, was to raise the expectation of a number of senior people who the organization effectively disowned, didn't reward, and ultimately they got so discouraged, that it set the program back years. 

	I don't want to sound like a broken record, but unless you can get into the very strategic level first and get that level of understanding and get that level of commitment and can see that filtering down, I wouldn't touch anything else in the organization. I would get that right and then everything else can flow from it. But if they're only interested in computers and they're only interested in vehicles and they're only interested in clothing and weapons and you see no behavioral change from them at all, what is that going to lead to? And that was the same in every place I've been. It's the same in Bosnia, it's the same in Kosovo, and it's the same in Serbia. It's the same in the Republic of Serbska and it's the same in Sierra Leone and Nigeria. 

SCHER:	I was wondering if we could just focus a little bit, in isolation, on this training program, because it sounds as if it was quite amazingly successful actually if in six weeks it managed to change these people's minds. 

CAMPBELL:  	Yes, yes.

SCHER:	So can I ask, how many people were trained? What kinds of people were trained?

CAMPBELL:  	They would have trained perhaps up to about-they said 1,000 people. I'm not sure it was as many as that. But certainly say that it was, they trained a thousand people and brought them through a six-week course. They called them community police developers. They deconstructed policing to a point and then built it up from a zero base, at each stage working through and providing them with skills and techniques. That was useful and very good, but-it's an organization of 375,000 and they trained 1,000 people at the most junior level who were the most vulnerable. So if you could have said, "Okay, we're not going to provide any aid for you-," I know this is a bit of a draconian approach, but, "you're getting no aid, you're getting no vehicles. This is what you will get if you send a Memorandum of Understanding with you, that at the strategic level we will have your people for a sufficient amount of time, we will be able to assess them, we will put them through-even though they're senior people in senior positions, we'll assess them, we'll give them psychometric tests, we will sort of give them ability tests. We will do that. We have a better program. Those who don't want to go, we will provide them with money, not a lot of money, but some money such that they'll be better going now than staying on for three years. Then we'll deal with the strategic level." 

	Then having dealt with a strategic level for a six week course and all the other stuff at the same time, we'll redesign the short training, we'll redesign the sergeants, the inspectors' training. We'll redesign the intermediate command training, the senior command training, and at the most strategic level. Then allow that to start to filter through the organization and, at the same time, start to build the capacity at the lower end. But normally what happens is, you know, we need vehicles now, we need computers now. 

	So there's nothing wrong with the training, it's just that just 1/375th of the organization at the lowest level isn't going to cut it. 

SCHER:  	Last question on this, and this is something you've touched on in saying there's never enough funding for this. Have you ever come across any cost saving, or low-cost programs that have worked particularly well in this particular area, or is that something you don't find? 

CAMPBELL:  	I think there are programs; I think you can cut down costs if you do your homework. I think that essentially you're not wasting your. Secondly if you can develop programs that are in tune and coherent with the local history and customs and what people want, then this thing will start to move by itself. I'll give you an example. In Nigeria, one of the things that they're now trying to do after the redesign is to pick some stations, maybe two stations in each of the state,s and totally redesign the station-redesign the training, redesign the processes, redesign the way they deal with the public, redesign their work with their communications, the whole gambit. The idea there is that the public will be much more involved in the development of that and will then build up a level of expectation that will move to the next station, the next division along and they'll want to know, "Why can we be treated like this in this station, and we're not treated in this way?" So you start to build up, if you like, the community expectations and the community voice behind that. You don't have to go out and redesign every single division in the Nigerian police. But, what you can do is you can go down to a level of depth where real change is developed and then provide the necessary levers for that to be sort of pushed out.

	The difficulty with that is that if you do that, on the most basic level you've got to go and provide them with pens and paper, because they don't have the necessary things in order to do that. But I do think that it is a question of getting to the necessary depth and the necessary breadth to build a critical mass so that they can take it on themselves.  They have a model on how to redesign it, they are the people trained in relation to it, and you would then hope that as more and more money becomes available, not just from donors, then they'll roll that out. But they'll only roll that out if the federal level or the strategic level sees that as a way forward. So I think a balance between breadth and depth in the right places will grow a change, which costs much less than some of the approaches that we'd had in the past, spending X million pounds on vehicles in Sierra Leone.   

SCHER: 	Excellent. That's very, very interesting and if it's okay with you I'd like to move on to our next section which is the failure of integrating and amalgamating different security forces. Often there comes a post conflict sign, the private militia is the armed wings attached to big men. Have you ever been involved in integrating these sorts of forces?     

CAMPBELL:	No, well, in Sierra Leone, they had a part of the police that was so paramilitary that that needed to be redesigned. It was already part of the police, it wasn't the militia, but it actually acted as a militia for the President. So that had to be really taken apart and put together again in Sierra Leone. It was the SSD I think they called it, Special Security Division and they came in then the OSD, the Operational Support Department. They had levels of accountability and training actually to make them operate in a way. One of the aspects of that, and this relates just to that situation, was to provide them with graded response. So the first option that they had in their repertoire  wasn't just to shoot somebody in a riot situation, it was to be able to deal with them in a non-lethal way.

	In Nigeria they have these things called vigilante groups. Now on the one hand, vigilantism has a connotation where you go out and kill people. They say that this is not that thing, but actually they do go out and kill them, and sometimes in a very brutal way. But because the police themselves don't have a level of acceptance by the community, the community people themselves then take on board this mantel. Then there is a very real dilemma for people like DFID as to how to legitimize that. How do you legitimize them within a process which brings them into the process and therefore makes them have to conform to certain norms, while, at the same time you are seen as funding the groups which themselves are involved in acts of violence?

	I have been involved in that, but not like private armies or private militias becoming part of the police force. I haven't really had any experience in that.  

SCHER:	I'd be quite interested actually to talk a bit more about the Sierra Leone case where you were involved with that in some sense. 

CAMPBELL:	Okay.

SCHER:	So where did the call to transform this particular unit come from? Was this something from the government or the community? 

CAMPBELL:  	Basically it was part of a thing called the CCSSP, Commonwealth Community Safety and Security Project, something like that. I think that was a 12 million pound program, provided by the British government to help the Sierra Leone police after the war and the subsequent conflict that they had there with the Westside Boys. That was mainly providing all the things that I've talked about in relation to vehicles, etcetra. Up until that time there was a group, I think maybe over 1,000 to 1,500 strong that were called the SSD. Basically anybody who opposed the government-that's maybe exaggerating there- but they were used to sort of put down quite brutally anti-government or anti-presidential matters.  Then they basically, what needed to happen then-actually it was good, they did it the right way, they actually trained them, reorganized them.

	The training was important-the vehicles, the weapons, the close combat drills,--everything to provide them with a repertoire of skills that was non-lethal but lethal if it needed to be. They actually had to have a level of-the consultants almost needed-I think maybe they went too far, but they almost needed to have a level of influence within the OSD, that they almost took on, and some would say did take on, almost managerial positions within that in order to make sure that within that, the others were acting properly. Now I think there's a fine dividing line. If you're a consultant and you're working through your client, trying to advise them the best way forward, if you go over the line where you're actually starting to make executive decisions, then you're in a sticky wicket. I think there was some of that. But I can see, in retrospect, that they felt that they needed to take very sharp hands on it.

	In essence, after the training, the redesign, and everything else, if there were problems, they were dealt with in a much more measured way. Within the police, the OSD then became more acceptable to the general police family. That's the first part, and the second part was they became more acceptable to the general communities which they served. They'd had a different colored beret, they had a distinctive uniform-I'm not sure if that was a good thing. But there was certainly a development of trust in them, whereas before people were frightened of them.  

SCHER:	There are quite a few things I'd like to pick up. First, was there any sort of vetting program? Were all the members of this unit retrained or were any excluded who had particularly bad records or anything like that?

CAMPBELL:  	I don't know how many fingers were in this thing. But when you apply new norms and new structures, there are some people who are just not going to cut it and they're going to have to go. But I think the majority of people that were in it were actually, were in it already and were re-trained. There was obviously some slippage and some waste. But they also brought in officers who had just qualified as police officers, straight into the unit to break down this notion of elitism. Now, on the one hand, that was good because you brought new thinking in and people weren't tarnished with the past. The other thin is you're putting somebody into a specialist's position without having two years to learn the basics of the policing craft. 

	But it was a case of breaking it down and trying to build it up again. That's actually a model for the whole thing. You really do, it's a long-term thing. You really do need to get into it and understand it in such a way and then almost help them to deconstruct it. But in environments where money changes hands and that sort of stuff, that level of corruption it's inherently difficult. Not only that, if the police officers themselves at the senior level are corrupt it's difficult. But if their political masters are corrupt, it's doubly difficult. 
 

SCHER:  	Sure. Just to bring it back a little bit to this, was it SID or SSD? 

CAMPBELL:  	They initially called it the SSD and then it became the OSD. There was a Special Support Department and then it became the Operational Support Department.  

SCHER: 	One of the things that I've heard a few times is that this idea of reintegrating whole units is a bad idea. It sounds like they brought in some junior officers to kind of dilute the influence. You said it was a measure-they needed to deconstruct the unit. What other measures were taken to kind of break those kinds of organizational ties that already existed within the group? 

SCHER:	Okay. There's another thing I wanted to pick up on. You mentioned that within the broader police family that they started to have better relationships. Were any formal institutions created to facilitate this, like an ombudsman's office or-was there any way of trying to get this unit to integrate more fully with the other pieces-? 

CAMPBELL:	No there wasn't. It was very much, I think-I wasn't directly involved in it, I was the change management consultant in relation to that but all of the accountability mechanisms were internal. I think there's a bit of a trick missed there because I think it would have been important for those officers to actually go to community groups, go to community meetings, go to whatever mechanisms that were set up and actually explain their behavior and what happened to the community directly. Certainly, at the time that the program stopped, they hadn't done that at that stage. But I think that if there's a unit that has a bad name in an organization then they must be made accountable to the public on a direct level. Whereas the local police commander might have to go to his local police liaison committee, then the equivalent officer from that unit must go as well and explain his actions.

SCHER:	Something else you mentioned was that they focused on getting junior officers who had the right mindsets. Were there any attempts to create a kind of lasting institutional system that would handle the promotion issue?

CAMPBELL:  	Yes.

SCHER:	Can you talk about it?

CAMPBELL:  	Basically, there were situations where people were promoted through on that old unit who had never done any examinations, who didn't go through the proper promotion process. Now one of the difficulties that you had, you had some very good officers who were illiterate and they didn't need to be literate in as much as their view, because they're actually holding the pass. In this particular unit, at the time of the war it was very instrumental in saving Freetown from annihilation from the RUF (Revolutionary United Front). So they needed to relax some of the absolutes in relation to the ability to sit down and knowledge of the law. They needed to make it contextual. But they put in, I believe, a number of safeguards that would ensure that people were able to come through. That officer could never leave that unit and go into the general police because he just didn't have the skills. But you could bring him through to a point at which you've developed his skills so that he might have been a constable who could proceed to the inspector level. Now he wouldn't have hacked it in the UK or anywhere else, but he could be a very effective inspector in that particular environment. 

	Then when you take people who could serve anywhere and bring them in-you're bringing them in, taking them out, bringing them in and taking them out- you have this cross fertilization of experience and new ideas. It's a bit like under the old RUC (Royal Ulster Constabulary) where previously, the special branch was maybe seen as inviolate, but you started to bring in and promote CID (Criminal Investigation Department) officers who had detective experience into the special branch, and send special branch people out to try and have a cross fertilization. That's what they were trying to do, although in a fairly embryonic way in Sierra Leone. 

SCHER:  	Do you feel that that was working?

CAMPBELL:  	I think that from the time I was there I think it was working. I haven't been there for a number of years, but I think it was a good call. I think the only way to sort of reintegrate is to break down the barriers, get people who were in out, get people who were out in. At the same time have a balance where you're maintaining the organizational capability within the unit against the new dispensation. 

SCHER: 	Okay. I wanted to bring us back to something you mentioned when we started talking actually about voluntary severance packages. Is that something you've encountered anywhere else to, as you say, get rid of the old and-? 

CAMPBELL:	No, there's no money. First of all, it's an uphill struggle to convince the senior members of an organization that they need to go, particularly when they're holding off for grim death, maybe they're close to pension. Maybe they feel that they're not going to have enough money to be able to live properly. They're not going to be able to support their families. So the only way that you can entice people out who can't cut it, is to provide them with an alternative. I'd say Northern Ireland, I have not come across-the situation in Kosovo at the moment, where I'm also working, the Minister there, the Minister of Interior has said that there are far too many peace officers and he's right. You have maybe 500 police officers working on administration whereas they should be out on the beat and the people who are doing administration are civilian staff.

	So they actually need to reduce their numbers right the way down. But in order to do that you need to spend. You need to spend in order to save. I guess what's going to happen there, from what I think, we're just going to make them redundant, give them a small amount of money and send them on. That's going to have quite an impact on the society there in general. 

	So apart from Northern Ireland where there was money made available, a substantial amount of money made available over a substantial length of time, I haven't seen it anywhere else. It's absolutely essential. 

SCHER:	That's a really good point at which to perhaps take a break. 

SCHER:	Okay, this is the second part of an interview with Dr. Robin Campbell in Belfast. The next section we're going to talk about is internal management, things that include promotion system, disciplinary system, record keeping, basic account management, enhancing those sorts of capabilities within a new police force. Is this something you have any experience with?

CAMPBELL:  	Yes.

SCHER:	So what are the significant management problems that you encountered in the first place that required enhancing of capabilities? 

CAMPBELL:  	Well you can talk about it at different levels. At the very elementary level, there's a difficulty in relation to what people in the West would consider to be basic policing skills. In Sierra Leone they had a program called Back to Basics. That really focused on some very elementary things in relation to the way they dealt with prisoners. You get situations where someone is arrested for a minor traffic violation and in eight days they're still in jail, and it's a pokey hole at the back of the police station with no light, no ventilation and no sanitary provisions. All they've done is maybe something that here you would get a fine over. Things like police notebooks where they're keeping an accurate record of the incident so that evidentially they're made at the scene, therefore they can't be changed. In many ways, the stuff in the police is only a partial sector of it. 

	I mean, ultimately, I believe, and this is just a slight tangent, but you will not create the conditions for economic wellbeing in a post conflict situation unless the people feel safe and secure. They will not feel safe and secure unless they feel their borders are secure, their airport is secure, and all the security sector stuff that is important. At the same time there's all the internal stuff in relation to feeling safe and secure in their homes and free from harm.

	Now, if that situation is not dealt with, then the chances of getting economic stability and also economic regeneration-because people aren't going to be able to put money into things if they feel they're going to get robbed blind. So the whole notion there of policing, both security sector and mainstay policing creates the conditions whereby these other things can develop. Now, that's what happened in Northern Ireland. From my perspective they actually held the line. 

	But the difficulty is they can only be partially successful. If they start to arrest people who should be arrested, and if they start to be able to bring people before the courts but the courts themselves cannot cope with that increase-. In many instances there with Sierra Leone, files went missing, people were recommended for prosecution, they were well connected and all of a sudden the file would go missing. You have a situation there unless you redesign the whole criminal justice system in relation to prisons, in relation to courts and stuff-. 

	What has happened recently is that over the last few years donors have recognized that. They've had justice sector development programs. I worked with one in Guyana. They have SSAJ's - Safety, Security, and Access to Justice. Even the program in Nigeria was supposed to link policing in relation to justice. So while we're talking here primarily about policing, policing is a key constituent to move from conflict to post conflict, and from being part of the problem they need to be part of the solution. But if they are re-engineered on their own without the wider re-engineering, then that's not going to work.

	Then you have a situation in relation to policemen on the ground starting to collect the proper records, starting to protect people who had been arrested and bring them before the courts in a back-to-basics way, and that you had a total block. Once they go into the other part of the justice sector system they can't cope with them. So even though you're building that level of capacity, it is not having the same effect because it is hitting a block down the road.

SCHER:  	Okay. What countries have you worked in on this particular topic?

CAMPBELL:  	Sierra Leone and Nigeria. They were more sector-wide. 

SCHER: 	Okay. But your role within the sector-wide transformation was within building capacity in the police?

CAMPBELL:	Yes, but also in places like Guyana where I worked, we were trying to redesign a justice sector strategy. See, the difficulty is that the police in some of the places-and it has taken the UK a long time to get to this point-they see their responsibility for a section of the process. They don't have responsibility for end to end processes so if it's rubbish in, it's rubbish out. I'm not saying they don't care about the quality they give to the court, but once they hand it over, that's it.

	Now you've got that situation in a third-world country, then that is really problematic. Therefore, some of the stuff we're going to talk about now in relationship to developing the internal capacity of the police needs to be put against the fact that that needs to roll on to the internal capacity of the courts and the prisons, and probation, and parole and so forth, including the courts.

SCHER:	Fair enough. There is the idea that the context in which it is taking place is of fundamental importance. But, with that said, what are the types of nitty-gritty details that you've worked on within the Sierra Leone police force? Are these things like reforming disciplinary systems? Rank structure? Creating incentives for personnel?

CAMPBELL:	Let's take those in order. Disciplinary systems, yes. Where I was before there, the disciplinary systems there were not open to scrutiny to the extent that they needed to be and the fact that the level of consistency might not have been there. Then there was a necessity to be able to set up a discipline structure and train police officers to be able to investigate complaints against police. 

	In the Northern Ireland situation, because it was further on, you had a situation where you had an ombudsman for police complaints. I personally think that was a very good idea. I used to be the deputy head of internal affairs in the RUC and I think that move to give the investigation to a totally independent body was absolutely the right thing. But when you have a situation where you don't even-I mean, that's just so far beyond, then what you need to do and what was done in those countries was to train police officers to investigate complaints, to set up complaint systems and then to run proper disciplinary tribunals that officers then were brought before and had to be dealt with before. That, again, is a key part of accountability and relation accountability for their actions.

	So you're actually developing an accountability measure where the officers have to go before the community and report why a certain action was taken. At the same time they're being accountable to a discipline code which may or may not have existed before. 

SCHER:	Okay.

CAMPBELL:  	What was the second one?

SCHER:	Any incentives for personnel to do their jobs well? Any reward systems within the force?

CAMPBELL:  	Once you start to put into some sense, and Sierra Leone was difficult, but they were trying to move towards a competency framework. As part of that competency framework that's then linked to staff appraisal and those staff appraisals are then linked towards promotion. So if you want to get promoted there, then within the promotion criteria, your last three staff appraisals will form part of that consideration. The difficulty is trying to break the culture whereby-. Within Sierra Leone, for example, they have this thing "me no bad man." So they don't want to be seen to be running down a colleague, which will cause the colleague not to get promoted and cause a bad feeling between them. 

	It actually takes quite a long time to be able to get them to be willing to be honest on assessment in relation to that. But those were the sort of things. You bring this in, you're going to be evaluated against it. Anybody makes complaints, you're going to look at it properly, but if you do your job right, and you're not being complained about, and you have the necessary competencies, then you will get promoted over somebody who is just related to a big man.      

SCHER:  	Fair enough. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about basic management skills and records keeping and accounting systems, information systems basically. Is that something you've worked on in Sierra Leone or in Nigeria? 

CAMPBELL:  	Primarily in Sierra Leone. The difficulty with those systems is that there's an expectation on behalf of the organization being helped, that those systems need to be immediately computerized when the systems themselves-. Normally you start to introduce the systems-all you're doing is digitizing waste. Waste within the organizational processes. Often time needs to be taken in order to actually map those processes from start to finish. The difficulty is that those are skills that are not readily available to a lot of consultants who come to do that work. So if they wanted to build something in relation to IT, we did that, and there were teams that were working on that. They were working on that in relation to fingerprints, they were working on that in relation to family units, to specifically train people to deal with offences against women and children. But there wasn't a level of mapping of the stuff that was necessary in order to then move to the point where you could digitize it through a computer. But actually you're digitizing something that has value. It is a hard thing to be able to say, "we're not going to start doing this on this computer until we've done it, mapped it, and it's tight. Then we're going to put it on computer." 

	I haven't found much evidence of that. There tends to be a jump straight into setting up IT systems, a jump straight into set it up, without the necessary rigor in relation to work that had been done before, and if it was done anywhere else. But accountability measures in relation to the organization, for holding people to account, the necessity to have management meetings, management briefings. If you go to the strategic level- there were many instances where they would formulate a plan, but the discipline of holding to the plan was something that was hard for them. 

	Somebody came up with an idea we should do this, and it was going to cost-I don't know 5 million Naira  or whatever it is in Sierra Leone, Leones. They would go down that line without-somebody said, "hold on a second. This means you're going to jump this priority from 13 to 1, just because somebody has brought this problem up at a meeting." The difficulty managerially was holding them to a managerial discipline, that they would continue to focus on what was important and their priorities and stick to that and not just be blown about by every wind of doctrine when somebody comes up with a meeting this week with something new, and they say, "Okay, that will go straight to the front of the list." 

	Within that then, managerial-the normal managerial roles in relation to planning, policy, and delegation, all hit cultural problems in relation to it. The notion there that delegation doesn't mean abdication of responsibility was a big problem. You get to the stage under the old system, once you told somebody else, you're going to forget about it. Then the blame culture comes in. So there's not a sort of managerial ethos, whereby I'm asking you to do it on my behalf but I'm going to come back and check on it. Then this leads to a problem that they had in relation to it. There's no real history of supervision. There was no real history of the importance of leadership. 

	What you would have had in Sierra Leone is everybody turning up at 7 o'clock in the morning for duty. That was the only time they were briefed. So it wasn't like there was another section coming on at 3 and another section at 11 p.m., everybody came at 7. And when they got tired, they went home. So actually, breaking them into 3 shifts, and coming at different times that they were needed, was a huge thing but yet so simplistic you wouldn't have thought it was even necessary to talk to them about it. That was a problem of supervision and a lack of managerial understanding and ability.  

SCHER: 	When you said that breaking them into shifts was a huge thing, obviously in terms of a fix it was a huge thing, but was it very difficult to accomplish? Were there a lot of obstacles to that? 

CAMPBELL:	It was difficult to accomplish because it wasn't what they were used to. A lot of people came into work earlier on and just left. Nobody came up and said "Well, where is he going?" or "Where is she going?" or "What are they doing?" With the fact that there was a shift in the system, then people had to start and they had to finish at a certain time. Some people who went off early had to stay the full time, other people who were there for 14 hours every day, it was a job getting them to leave the police station because they felt they were so institutionalized in being there, they were going to get into trouble if they weren't in the police station. 

	So some very basic managerial abilities that you would take for granted just weren't there and almost became cultural. A cultural change program, out of something anywhere else, would be nothing more than a transactional problem. 

SCHER:	Something that I wanted to pick up on that you mentioned was increasing accountability. There are two things in particular that I'm quite interested in. First, were there any programs put in place to reduce the petty corruption that makes the public lose confidence in the police? Things like setting up road blocks and collecting tolls from citizens, those sorts of things. That's the first thing. The second thing is reducing brutality on the part of the police. 

CAMPBELL:	I'll give a Sierra Leone example and then I'll give a Nigerian example for each of those. As far as vehicle check points and taking money, there was a lot of sensitization that went on by putting posters up in police stations and saying things like "Bail is free. You don't have to give the policeman money in order to discuss bail with him or her." Secondly there were posters and sensitization around communities explaining "You don't have to give police officers money at vehicle check points; you're not required to. And if you are required to, please contact this number." Then there was the ongoing training and the emphasis on greater supervision which would stop this.  

	The difficulty was that in Sierra Leone primarily, people were looking for-police officers were looking for money at road stops for their own benefit. But in Nigeria, you have a situation where the government sends the police different budgets to headquarters but it doesn't come out of the headquarters. It doesn't go down to the state level, and it certainly doesn't go down to the divisional level. So you then go down and you go around all the divisions in a particular state and you ask them, "What budget do you get from the state?" They say they don't get anything. 

	So they have maybe two police cars there, they're falling apart. They need parts for them. They need fuel for them. You say, where do you get this money and they clam up. They get the money because they send their officers out to vehicle check points to take 200 Naira off everybody who goes through the check point to buy fuel for their vehicles. I'm sure some of it is going into their pockets. Some of it is going into the pockets of the divisional police officers who are in charge of the stations and divisions, but a lot of it is actually going to try and keep the thing moving.

	It's hard to be too harsh in your criticism of that when they don't get the money. The question is, where does the money go to? When it goes in the headquarters it doesn't come out. Now, under the new IGP (Instructor General of Police) apparently the money is coming out now. But it's a systematic problem in Nigeria because the money is not getting through to the officers on the street. And it's a systematic problem in Sierra Leone because officers were skimming off the top. 

	In relation to violence, in Sierra Leone, they started a process of post incident review and those post incident reviews would then look at such things as what happened, why did they happen, what was the police response, and was the police response measured? Talking to members of the community and talking also to police. Now the difficulty with the Sierra Leone project...the good thing with the Sierra Leone project is that there were only 9,000 police officers. There was quite a substantial full-time commitment of consultants there working with them. In Nigeria it's nothing like that. 

	I've told you the numbers in relation to Nigeria. But in the last three months in Nigeria, 70 police officers have been murdered. There has hardly been a word about it. But what is even more disturbing is that 700 civilians have been murdered by police. Now the police will say these were bad boys who were shot in acts. Almost every day you hear of armed robbers taking on the police. The police radios are analog, they're not digital, so if you have a scanner you can listen to where they are. You go down to Lagos and the criminals are taking the police on. There are fire fights there all the time. 

	The difficulty is that there is not the level of control of post incidents that there would be anywhere else. So there's almost an acceptance by the police. I'm not saying they're not concerned about it, but 70 officers, we've lost 70, that's terrible; 738 civilians, well-you know what I mean, hard luck. That's the difference between the two. 

	Now, the President of Nigeria has asked, as I said, the British Prime Minister to help in relation to that, but unless there's a level of input to that in relation to things like post-incident reviews, and a willingness of the police themselves to set an example and to actually do something about that, then that's not going to go anywhere. You get a situation in Nigeria where people make complaints about the police. They go to the ministry and the Chief of Police can just ignore them. The Chief of Police is not held accountable; therefore his officers are not held accountable.  

SCHER:	One of the things I want to ask about which you've kind of touched on is this question of police morale, police in this instance coming up and perhaps not willing to regard 730 civilian deaths in the same light as 70 police officers. This might be a problem in a new police force, perhaps in Sierra Leone. Are you familiar with any programs to increase police morale when you're actually trying to build that sort of spirit up?

CAMPBELL:  	Speaking there as an OD (Organization Development) consultant, any significant change that you have in an organization is going to affect people on two levels, it's heart and pocket. So you've got a situation like, for example, in the RUC where the decision was made to change the name. That decision was absolutely right. You can't have a situation if you say this is a Coke tin but we put Pepsi in it, therefore it's a Pepsi tin. You're going to have to change the name; you're going to have to change the wrapping. But that had huge implications for the wives and families who had been killed as police officers. Therefore there was a real need to be able to manage that process through communication, visitation and everything else, in order to affect those things that affect the heart.

	At the same time, once that heart thing has been dealt with, people are concerned mostly how it affects their pockets and whether or not they're going to have enough money to feed their families in the third world. So the issues of communication-and communication for me has always been the pure cousin in relation to these change management programs. If you can have the right communication with the right messages, supported at the top of the organization with the right behavior, then you're going to get a situation where you can get people to move past the heart and the pocket issues and actually buy into a thing. Initial stages might mean that they're going to have to work harder for the same money, or maybe even less money and be able to make that commitment and that investment in the future.

	It was tried to a certain degree in Sierra Leone, but nowhere near enough. You find there when you go and you have a fixed budget and you say, "We want to spend a tenth of this budget on communication and morale" and all of a sudden, very quickly, that goes to the back burner because they need vehicles, they need guns, they need everything. It's a crucial aspect. I've never been anywhere where it has been done sufficiently.  
	
SCHER:	That's all very interesting stuff. I was wondering if we could move onto the next section which is enhancing external accountability and effectiveness. So basically enhancing...police officers and forces may be quite good at responding to their own managers but making them more accountable to civilian and government authority, is that something that you've worked on? It feeds into the communication issue I guess. 

CAMPBELL:  	In the Northern Ireland context I was involved in the work initially that established the police ombudsman. I believe, from my experience, that police investigations, must be investigated by non police officers, or retired police officers or whatever you like. But it's not going to work unless it's done independently. Ultimately, if you look at it, what happens really is you take an organization that oversees the police and if the public cannot put their trust in the police, they will put their trust in the oversight as a proxy for the police. Now, if the investigation is done by the police, how can the police be a proxy for the police? You need to have a system of accountability that affects police complaints. If there are changes-for example as there was in Patten, there was an international police commissioner who was responsible for overseeing implementation of Patten. The difficulty with that is, I think at one time there were something like seven oversight bodies of the police. If you're a company and you have your shareholders and there are some stake holders, you haven't got seven bosses in relations, you have a board, you're the chief executive officer, you work to the board. But here you have a police board, you have an ombudsman for police complaints. You have a security ombudsman, you have somebody else, and it all becomes, from a managerial point of view very, very difficult. 

	But I believe, from my experience, very strongly, that there are certain things that need to be properly in place in order to assure accountability. In Nigeria we have worked to develop a community police steering committee which has a voice that can force the chief of police to be able to listen to the views of the community. That has been an uphill struggle. In Sierra Leone they had-I forget the name of it-but they had a police board, they didn't call it a police board, but really they were fairly important. 

	So the police need to be accountable to an independent body, not the government. I believe that they need to be, there needs to be a level of accountability to the government obviously and to the law, but there needs to be some form of proxy body that the public has confidence in that can call the police to account, should it be a police board or a police authority, and there should be an independent investigation of police complaints. In addition to that, in the UK you have the situation where the central government has a police inspector and they go out and they review. So there needs to be a body of review of organizations against some form of common standard. In Kosovo and then Bosnia and Serbia, they all want to get into the EU so there are EU standards in relation to that. But it has been said before, policing is too important to be left to the police alone. There need to be robust accountability measures in place. They are one of the hardest things to put in. There are countries that have never been held accountable before, have only been responsible to a President, and having sort of been an organ of the state. They actually feel that they are losing control of the situation to somebody else. That is very, very difficult. 

SCHER:  	There are a lot of things I'd like to talk about, but just for now, if we could talk a little bit about the community police steering committee in Nigeria and what type of organization this is. Could you just describe the body?  

CAMPBELL:  	We recommended there that there should be an independent body, that the police should not chair it, and that they should only be members of it. But that required the acceptance of that by what they called the Inspector General of Police. Not this one, but the one before. What they did is they set up a police steering committee and within that police steering committee they embedded some donors and really kept a very tight reign on it. It has just recently been launched, been devised and there are a lot more NGOs on it. There is a lot more community focus on it. They will now increase the call for the police to be able to explain their behavior and how things are going. Now it is only in relation to community policing. It is not in relation to day to day policing in as much that it is a policing board and they meet every month. They say, "What's happening in crime here, what's happening in traffic here?" and all the rest. But it's a start. It is the first mechanism whereby the IGP can be held accountable for what is happening in regard to community policing in Nigeria.

	There was a previous mechanism there. There were a couple of other organizations set up by the state, they just ignored them. The Police Services Commission was one, just basically ignored them. Then the Ministry for Police Affairs, in relation to police complaints, primarily ignored them.

	Now the steering committee has been brought about by pressure of donors. It hasn't been brought about there by the government, it hasn't been brought there by an act of Parliament, but there is an act of Parliament being developed in Nigeria which would incorporate a lot of that best practice. There have been two presidential commissions in relation to policing in Nigeria which are there. But the policing bill has been there for two or three years and the presidential commissions have been two or three years old. But actually getting them from that to formulating a bill and then a law in relation to that seems to take forever. There's so much negotiation and watering down along the way to make it acceptable to all the interested parties. 

	But it is very clear from everywhere that I have worked, that the history of these organizations is that they only work well if what has been required of them is enshrined in law. If there's a bill and an act, or a law, that specifies that they must do that, then they will. But in lieu of that, if it doesn't call them to that, then there can be judicial review. There can be the courts, whatever, they're very reluctant to go down that road. The junior officers are very reluctant to exercise discretion because they have not been allowed the discretion. While they think certain things are wrong, they will not have the capacity to say what they are for fear of victimization. The Nigerian police work on fear. 

SCHER: 	I guess, following on from that, what is the information system that you would envisage this body using to collect information about the police so that they can respond appropriately? How are they finding out about incidents?

CAMPBELL: 	There needs to be an infrastructure of community groups throughout. So if you have a situation whereby-you take Sierra Leone, you divide them into six, and you decide that within those six there are six core community group meetings with the local and divisional commander. They will then call that divisional commander to account in relation to policing in his area. But representatives of each of those six in that particular, call it a state, it's not a state, but a state within Sierra Leone, like Freetown for example. Then they should meet with the person who is in charge of policing and discuss as representations of all over and then certain representatives from the whole community should meet at the federal level. 

	They should have the ability to call on reports of the head of the police to explain the situation. They should have the ability to be consulted for views with regard to police behavior. They should also have some form of monitoring role in relation to police expenditure and have the capacity to sanction the senior police officers if they feel that they're not doing their job. Now that's totally new and a huge step forward. But unless the public has those rights enshrined in law, then who is going to protect them? The police who they're calling to account? That's like putting them in charge of-like judging their own case really and that's a difficult situation. 

SCHER:	Perhaps at a lower level, have you been involved with any kind of community consultation like policing forums?

CAMPBELL:	Yes.

SCHER:	Obviously linked into this kind of broader system. What is your experience with those types of organizations?

CAMPBELL:  	I think they work very well. I think they go through almost a phase one, mutual mistrust. I went to one there in Nigeria some time ago and it was hailed up to be the new way of doing business. At the end a woman brought up a complaint and criticized the police and the police commander basically shouted her down at a community forum meeting. Apparently it was much worse than that beforehand. But I find that once you give the community a voice, and once you pick the right police commander to respond to that-and I saw it in Sierra Leone, some of them were first class--then they build up a level of support with the community to the extent that they're getting much more information from the community, the community feels happier with them, and there's a level of interaction. 

	Now, you need to be careful so it doesn't drift into almost neighborhood policing and then into almost neighborhood watch and then into vigilantism. But if it's properly controlled at that level, that's the form of a bedrock that can then be taken and then extrapolated up the organization to the very senior. But that's the sort of working level and I saw some wonderful examples in Sierra Leone of the police and the community working together, running fetes together, collecting money for the police, giving the police money for equipment, in a really humbling way. If the police officers are trained and they're open to this new idea, I've seen them take to it as the most natural way because they see it's a better way of doing business from a purely pragmatic point of view.       

SCHER:	One of the things that we've encountered is that sometimes there's difficulty keeping community members interested in coming to these policing forums and staying involved.	

CAMPBELL:  	Yes in downtown Belfast, yes in parts of London, but I've been at community meetings there at Sierra Leone where you couldn't get through the door. The people would stand for four hours, without a seat, and talk this thing through. They feel that they've never had this voice before and there's such a need for it; there's such a thirst for it. So things that a lot of people here wouldn't be prepared to put up with-because the middle class lifestyle is they want to go home and watch television-these people are really, really involved in. It's such a humbling experience to see that. So as far as Nigeria and Sierra Leone are concerned, I haven't seen a problem with that. I haven't had much experience with Bosnia or Serbia, but in Kosovo it's very well supported. 

SCHER:  	In Nigeria and Sierra Leone, are you aware of-I think it was Sierra Leone, you said these kinds of systems were set up in all six-.   

CAMPBELL:  	It's generally six areas, I think it is six areas, yes.

SCHER: 	Was that how they did it in Nigeria too?

CAMPBELL:	No, what they've done in Nigeria so far is they have these vigilante groups and they're trying then to legitimize them and bring them under a level of control so that they don't have the excesses and they work with that. So there's a pre-existing structure in Nigeria in these groups. So they're working on that. That's called an informal policing structure. They're trying to work with those in Nigeria. In Sierra Leone they didn't have anything. 

	The Nigeria one, we'll get to where Sierra Leone was a few years ago. It's just that they're actually coming from almost a more militant stance, then we have the local business man, we have the local commerce, we have the local education people. Those people were all flooding in to the Sierra Leone system whereas some of these other people there, not that they're bad people, but they tend to have a very hard line view  and they're starting from a more difficult position.

SCHER:	Are there any models that you use particularly or that you think are particularly good? You said the Sierra Leone case is good, what model was it drawing from?

CAMPBELL:	I think basically the recommendations from the Patten report, set up district partnership boards. They set up local debate forums. I think it's the best model that I've seen so far. In fact, I gave a presentation to the strategic command course, I did the strategic command course in 1998 and I think I gave a presentation in 1999 or 2000. One of the guys who was on that then became the Chief of Police in Sierra Leone and he actually used some of those recommendations for setting the stuff up that I was subsequently involved in. So they used the Patten model.  

SCHER:	In setting up this type of thing, what would you say are the major obstacles?

CAMPBELL:  	The major obstacles there are getting the police to a point where they're going to accept criticism, that they actually feel that they are duty bound to be able to respond. When that was introduced in England it was like section 105, 106 of the-I forget the name of the Act-but it was actually in legislation that they have to do it. It is legislation here. So it goes back to the Police Act. If they know that they're responsible for that under the Act-I mean, you shouldn't need the Act, but you do need the Act-then you have a lever there for getting them to behave in a way that they need to behave. That provides the impetus that they know they need to do it and then you can get the right people in place. 

	Second, there is still a level of mistrust initially that the local police need to go there and-I'm not saying they should act willy-nilly, but they need to have quick wins. The public needs to see some quick wins, that there's a change in attitude here, that they will give them confidence to be more and more trusting. It doesn't take very long, but once the public feels that they are actually being listened to and the forums are taking their point of view and they do believe that, I've seen them actually respond magnificently. But it is a level of trust building between the two parts. 

	I think that these other accountability measures that are also in place are also confidence-building measures that the police are actually responding to and being held accountable for their actions. So it is a whole little edifice of accountability, both local, with national and with these other mechanisms in place. If you have espoused intensions and relation to community consultation groups and there isn't the infrastructure in place right up to the very senior level, and you don't have people investigating complaints properly and holding to account here, then they won't believe it. But if they see it as a proper strategy, then, I think, my experience is that they're going to go for it.

SCHER:	That's great stuff, thank you. I'm keeping an eye on the time and I think what I'd like to talk about is non-state security actors.

CAMPBELL:  	Okay.

SCHER:  	I think that's something we spoke a little bit about. In some of the areas that you've worked in, have non-state security groupings been present and what is the type of form that they've taken?

CAMPBELL:  	In Sierra Leone there was a move to try and bring in people who had been involved in the RUF and some of the other organizations. While they had the International Criminal Court in Sierra Leone, there is an attempt to bring people in and reintroduce them back into the community. So there's all this community integration business that was going on there. The police didn't get themselves so much involved in that but actually they should have done and up in a part. I haven't been in any situation whereby we have taken ex-combatants and then introduced them into the police force.  

SCHER: 	Okay.

CAMPBELL:	I know they did that in South Africa but I have no personal experience of it.  

SCHER:	Actually what I was wondering more about, you spoke about like these vigilante groupings and that type of thing.

CAMPBELL:	Yes.

SCHER:	I'm quite interested in the relationship between those sorts of non-state security groups and the existing, the state-managed groups.

CAMPBELL:  	Okay. There has been no real attempt, coming from the Nigerian police, to be able to engage with and manage the situation as it affects informal policing structure groups up until the last few years, I guess the last couple of years, whereby this has become more of a priority, but it is a priority through donor pressure. 

	The Nigerian police, for example, as in many places, look at these people as infra dig. They use them for their own ends when they have to because they can say they have nothing to do with us. At the same time, they don't want to be so closely associated with them that if something goes wrong for them, then that is going to reflect on the police force. What is happening in Nigeria is an attempt to be able to-through the Community Policing Project-legitimize them, train them, have them properly registered, have statements of behavior and a credo in relation to what they can do and what they shouldn't do. The establishment of an IPS Liaison officer in each division who will work with them, who will go around and talk to them, and the registration of these things, maybe with the state government. So those are the sort of main mechanisms that have been used to involve them. The idea is that they will be taken from there and then moved into more of a community situation. But you get these guys going out every night with like pick ax handles and patrolling their own areas.

	What we're trying to do in another project there is provide communication that they can contact the police directly in order to sort of reduce their input and then bring the police in relation to it. But the police have been pulled kicking and screaming a little bit in relation to this. If it wasn't for the people that are involved in the community policing project, and those police officers that have gone through the courses and have dedicated themselves to actually changing the Nigerian police, a lot of these community groups would not really have surfaced properly because at the federal level and at the state level they're not really seen to be as important as they should be unless the state commander actually himself takes that on board and moves it forward. FCT (Federal Capital Territory) is Abuja of the state capital and the CP (Commissioner of Police) there has gone out. What is happening is he's going to a place, a local area, a market or whatever, and then starting to have a question and answer session with the local population. So it is moving forward, but there's no strategy at the federal level in order to do it, because they're not required to do it against the Police Act because the Police Act hasn't been implemented for the last three years.

SCHER:	Are these groups primarily in borderland areas where police presence is low?

CAMPBELL:  	No, everywhere. They're like a more extreme version of a neighborhood watch, but instead of watching everybody's houses and keeping an eye on them, they go out on patrol. There have been instances there where they've caught people who have raped, but instead of turning them over to the police they actually keep them. It's not an easy problem.

SCHER:  	This is probably bad terminology, but are they effective?

CAMPBELL:  	Very effective. They're very effective. In the UK there was this-there used to be-I think it was actually, I looked at the research but the chances of coming across a burglary or a robbery the old home officer search used to occur once every fourteen years, a police officer will do that, but that's changed by proper criminal intelligence and targeting and hot spots and everything else. But essentially, if the people in the area know you because you all live in the area and everybody is watching you, and you know that if you step out of line there are going to be a couple of guys coming around the corner with a baseball bat but you know you won't see a police patrol for the next three hours. And the chances of seeing a police officer on foot patrol is very minimal because they don't have the proper communications. Then these are going to have a much more impactive role to play than the normal police provision. But then, if those things are corrupt, you get situations in Nigeria where if you murder me you'll go to the police, but if my family will pay the other person-. If you murder me but you give my family money, no problem, just let it go. 

	So the whole informal policing structure is a very, very difficult one but a very effective one because the people will say to you, "I go to court and this man is convicted and he goes to prison, I don't get any money, I have a family to feed. So if he doesn't go to prison but I get 5,000 pounds, I'm sorry my husband is dead but I've got to feed my children." So, from that point of view it's very difficult. So the only way to do it is the way they're doing it in legitimizing them, training them, and bringing them into the police family for want of another word.  

SCHER: 	I'm a little bit unclear. So what sort of form are they considered to be? You said they're going to be registered with the government. So are they going to be registered members?

CAMPBELL:	Yes, registered members. Think of a community group that needs to be registered as a group and then have a liaison officer working with them from the local police who they themselves have other members of the community patrol actively the streets at nighttime and, if necessary, will have recoursed the violence.   

SCHER:	State mandated-. 

CAMPBELL:	State mandate, yes, in as much that it is actually there. The only way, they haven't got the numbers to stop it. If truth were told they don't want to stop it because it's reducing crime, the public are feeling safer. It's a question of actually policing that situation in a way that you can control it and legitimize it. But yes.

SCHER:	That's very interesting. Are any of these groups linked to local leaders or traditional leaders?

CAMPBELL:  	Yes.

SCHER:	What is the structure?

CAMPBELL:  	I mean, if you get situations, if you're in the bush in Nigeria and you are in a village, then the village will primarily take care of their own to the point there if a member in the village does something, then the local community-and there can be a formal policing structure within that village-then they will shame that person. If you stole something, if you stole a loaf of bread, they'll put the bread on a string, they'll wrap it around you and you'll walk with it for the next three days with the stolen properly around your shoulders and be ridiculed and shamed. It's a bit like restorative justice at its most basic form. At its most difficult form they'll take you out to the limits of the village and kill you. 

SCHER:  	Okay. 

CAMPBELL:  	But traditional leaders know this. Some of them are operating under ordinary law, some of operating under Sharia law in the north. Once you're sort of involved in the Muslim aspect of stuff, the retribution can be pretty swift.

SCHER: 	That's really interesting, I hadn't heard much about this Nigeria case. I'm aware of our time, so I just want to ask you one quick question about donors. 
.
CAMPBELL:	Yes.

SCHER:	Are there two or three mistakes that you might commonly observe that international donors or international consultants make when dealing with local host country personnel?


CAMPBELL:	Nobody is sort of saying, "This is the problem in relation to the police, we're all around here, have a locus in relation to the donors, let's jointly develop a program whereby we will get a holistic, synergistic review back." Not review, but a return on our investment. So you get all these programs and there's duplication of work, there are holes in the work and there could be so many opportunities-. They talk about donor collaboration, they maybe have a meeting once a month in with the host country, we're doing this and we're doing this. But at the design stage, where it is so important, if donors would say, "Our intentions are doing something for Sierra Leone, let's all get together and decide what we're going to do over the next five years and work together." It doesn't happen. It doesn't happen. That's the biggest mistake they make.

	Secondly, another mistake they make is that they don't bring people in as consultants that have the necessary skills. You get a situation for example where say, I have a consultancy and my consultancy has available to it, through my knowledge, through my contacts, 300 CVs from police officers from a wide range of stuff. Then I get a phone call from a large company who says, we want to go into consortiary arrangements with you. We want for you to give us assistance in relation to-policing assistance in relation to this justice program. Okay, now, at the end of the day we can put the recommendations up and then they take these CVs and stuff, but the people aren't really vetted. Or, much worse, what they do is they put good CVs in and then they get the contract and then they don't employ the people who were involved in the good CVs to start with. So the people who are actually involved on the project are not necessarily the best qualified. 


SCHER:	Excellent, thank you. Last question and then we'll finish up. You've spoken a lot about things that you consider to be very important in this area. Just maybe to recap on that, if you were writing a handbook for people involved in reforming civilian peace services, what kinds of topics would you consider to be the most important? We've spoken about a few things here, but what would be, in your mind, the most important areas to consider?

CAMPBELL:  	First of all, and this is repeating some of the stuff I said earlier, but first of all there needs to be an understanding of the as-is, a current understanding of the situation on the ground. Invariably that needs to take longer and be more detailed and more robust than the way that it currently happens. 

SCHER:  	Okay. 

CAMPBELL:  	Second, there needs to be an understanding of what the to-be situation is, the desired situation. If there is going to be an understanding of that, then they need to be able to think through how that would look in practice, bearing in mind their understanding of the current situation. Now, you take, for example, something like community policing. Now community policing is seen as an opportunity to create better involvement in relation to the community and almost to help the organization become more democratic. So it's a democratization process of the local police. There's well-documented work in the states from a major ethnographic study which showed despite the protestations otherwise, all it was, was reorganizing the power to punish of the near and a methodology for managing key stakeholders. It wasn't about police reform, it wasn't about changing police attitudes.

	So if you're going to come in and you're going to have these methodologies that you have in mind, then you need to be very clear that they actually work, even that they actually worked in the places where they say they work, before you start translating them into implementation down the road. I feel very strongly that often what happens is the people get these things whether they want them or not, whether they need them or not, and whether or not they've been vigorously tested. The rule of research in this whole area is very poor and often or not, I'm not saying this for all consultants, but often or not, people implementing these things or consulting on these things are not themselves reflective practitioners. They replicate what they did somewhere else, sometime else and maybe change a few names and protect the innocent. But actually, it is not a contextually fundamentally designed response to a particular problem. I think that's the next thing.

	The other thing is that I've harped on about is there needs to be a fundamental organizational diagnosis starting with people and competencies. I think if you get those things right, and if there are enough accountability mechanisms in place and people can start trusting you, there is sufficient good will from people wherever I've worked to carry it forward. But the difficulty is that there is-it is short-termism in relation to all of these things. Yet the police are seen as such a central view for the future that the cost of it and the concerns and relations, insulting the local population, not being sufficiently culturally sensitive, mean that we push it to a point and then we pull back. 

	A last though on this, if Bill Gates was giving money to Nigerian police, first of all he would give sufficient money, and if they weren't responding he'd take his money away. Now, the British government won't take their money away and they won't give enough money to start with. So it's one thing or another, we need to be more like Bill Gates.   

SCHER: 	Well that's a great note to end on and thank you very much for your time. 
Innovations for Successful Societies					Series: Policing		
Oral History Program							Interview number: A3
______________________________________________________________________





25
Use of this transcript is governed by ISS Terms of Use, available at www.princeton.edu/successfulsocieties


Use of this transcript is governed by ISS Terms of Use, available at www.princeton.edu/successfulsocieties