An initiative of the National Academy of Public Administration and Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public Policy and Bobst Center for Peace and Justice. Oral History Program Series: Policing Interview ref.: A4 Interviewee: Keith Biddle Interviewer: Gordon Peake Date of Interview: 5 December 2007 Location: Manchester United Kingdom Innovations for Successful Societies, Bobst Center for Peace and Justice Princeton University, 83 Prospect Avenue, Princeton, New Jersey, 08544, USA www.princeton.edu/successfulsocieties PEAKE: It is December 5, 2007, and I'm in Manchester with Keith Biddle. Before we begin I just want to get your permission to begin the interview. BIDDLE: Absolutely, please go ahead. PEAKE: I'd like to begin, Keith, by asking you to talk a little bit about some of the international work you've been involved in. I know now that you're working in Somalia, but maybe talk through the journey that you've taken from a police officer in the U.K. to your work currently in Somalia. BIDDLE: I've been involved in this kind of work on an almost full-time basis from 1994. My background is I served as a police officer in Britain, basically a CID officer. Went to Kent, where we met with Paul Condon and people of this ilk on police reform in Britain. Kent was one of the leaders in bringing in really the police service closest to the public. So I got a background in the eight years I was in Kent in this area. I then went to the Royal College of Defense in 1992 and was very lucky that I was sent on the Africa tour and started to get a feel for things in Africa. I then earned a promotion to Deputy Chief Constable level, actually Deputy Assistant Commissioner in the Metropolitan Police, although I never served in the Metropolitan Police. I was then made the Assistant Inspector of Constabulary in the Home Office. One of my briefs was overseas policing. In around about February 1994, I got sent out to South Africa to be the Policing Adviser to Judge Krickler and the Independent Electoral Commission for Nelson Mandela's election. And there I had a lot to do with the South African police which in 1994 was a pretty horrible organization. After that I left the police service and went into a job in industry and then was asked to come back by the ODA office, DFID, ODA as it was then, in South Africa to assist them to start to put together projects in areas where the South African police had asked Britain for assistance. The main area was in the area of reforming service delivery through community policing. So that's how I came into it. So then I moved on from there. Having done that DFID then asked me to work with Ian Clegg from the University of Wales in doing a synthesis study, an evaluation of ODA/DFID aid to policing throughout the world. I concentrated on Indonesia and various countries in Africa, Ethiopia, South Africa, Namibia and so on. After that was published, almost as we were finishing the report, I was asked to go and head up a commonwealth initiative in Sierra Leone. From there I became the Chief of Police in Sierra Leone for five years, responsible for delivering reform. From then on I worked in the DRC and now in Somalia. So that's basically where I've come from, from serving police officer to becoming a self-taught, if you like, expert on reforming policing in Africa. PEAKE: Thank you. A question about context. One of the things I think is axiomatic about police officers is that in order to be an effective police officer you need to understand the context around you, the political context, the social context, the nuances of context. How, whenever you work overseas, whether that be in Sierra Leone, in South Africa, the Democratic Republic of Congo, currently in Somalia, how do you actually start to familiarize yourself with the context around you? BIDDLE: Well, it's a lot of reading. I usually start with the reports from the Economist Intelligence Unit. I find they give me a good picture of what's going on in the country. Basically it's a trip to the library, contacts, use of the library at the RCDS, dig out whatever I can, find people who have been working there and do some interviews, do some informal work and find out just what is going on, read as much as I can from the Internet, look at the various reports. I find the ICG (International Crisis Group) reports very good. I find them very useful and usually very accurate and very well researched. So I look for as much information as I can find to get the context. Once you get on the ground in the country, you've then got to do a similar process. Probably you'll find that the local media, to start with, are usually pretty good to look at. A lot of it doesn't get thrown on the Internet in places like Sierra Leone and Somalia and you've got to either be careful with it, you've got to filter it, because it's usually written from a biased point of view. Or, in the case of Somalia and Sierra Leone, probably with no truth in it whatsoever. So you've got to learn how to use the media. Talk to diplomats, talk to NGOs, talk to human rights organizations. When I say talk to them, I really mean listen to what they say. You've got to get them to talk to you as opposed to you talking to them. So it's a case of listening and drawing as much information as you can from as many sources in country. You've also got to sit down and listen to the police point of view. I find a lot of people ignore what the police have to say. Usually they've got a fairly difficult task, they've got a tasking from government and they haven't got the equipment or the knowledge or the know-how or have the training that enables them to do it. So you've got to listen to what they all say and then you've got to sit down and analyze that. You've got to try and work out the environments and the context of the environments in which you're working. So that's how I do it. PEAKE: Do you have any specific examples about how you came to gain awareness of a particular situation or particular incidence or particular process that was going on? How did you become intelligence aware? BIDDLE: What do you mean by intelligence aware? PEAKE: I mean aware of what was going on around you, filtering out-you mentioned this filter that you had which you were able to filter out certain information as correct. BIDDLE: Sierra Leone is probably the best example because we were there a long time, from '98 to 2003. I'm just trying to think because it's a very good question, and I did it. If you follow me, I've done this, but I did it over five years in Sierra Leone. So it was a case of day by day, reading everything that's going on, listening to people, watching, taking soundings from the diplomatic corps, taking soundings from the British army that was there and out of view. Taking soundings from the UN, taking soundings from all kinds of people. All the time, it's a dynamic process. The reason I'm having difficulty coming up with a quick pat answer is that it is a dynamic process. A lot of it is just fed into yourself. So it's very difficult to say we learned that by doing this, because all the time, you're automatically scanning the holistic environment, the physical environment, the conflictual environment, the economic environment, social environment. You're scanning that automatically, all the time, and that's helping you to position yourself to move forward. So I haven't got an easy answer to that question. PEAKE: A question then emerges further about context, about language. Sierra Leone, a formerly English-speaking country, South Africa an English-speaking country, but some of the other countries that you mentioned in your introduction where you've worked, English is not the lingua franca. How did you negotiate language difficulties that may have been put up in front of you? BIDDLE: The people that we met in Indonesia for instance, they were all competent in English, the people who were showing us around and that we were generally dealing with. We had interpreters to deal with the lower level people and the communities. The problem with working outside your first language is that you're very much dependent on interpreters and interpreters don't always interpret what you say and they don't always give you the answer that they were given because where you get your interpreters from, they often have an agenda in the debate that's going on, or in the conflict. Certainly that is very much the case in Somalia. Even with people who, Somalis, the Somali national staff who were working within the UN system, although they're very good in English and clearly speak Somali extremely well, I'm never sure that I'm getting the right information back. So you've got to use your intelligence-gathering skills to make sure that you are getting the right picture. So working through interpreters the DRC, "Je parle francais un peu," it wasn't too bad, I had some idea, but I don't speak French to the level that I can interpret; you needed interpreters. But I had at best an idea of what the interpreters were coming back with, so it was possible to work in the DRC although difficult. The context of working in the DRC, you've got to understand the Francophone context. One of the reasons things can be very difficult in places like the DRC is that you're moving into unfamiliar territory regarding police structures and definitions of words like reform. If the Brits or the South Africans, whom I have worked with the South Africans in the DRC, if you go into a Francophone environment and talk about police reform they immediately think you're trying to break the Napoleonic Code system and the Francophone system to introduce the Anglophone system. So you end up with a sort of conflict with other nations from Europe. So you have to choose your words very carefully. Reform is a nice easy word in Britain, it means that we're going to change the way things are done to something better. The better word, to my mind, is development. We're going to develop what's there and improve it rather than change it because that immediately gets you in trouble in the Francophone-. So working outside the Anglophone is not easy. PEAKE: You mentioned in your remarks that whenever you were working with translators you were never fully sure about A) what you said was being translated faithfully and B) what was being rendered back to you was being rendered accurately. Do you have any specific instances that you can recall about when that problem arose and how you went about trying to mitigate or solve this problem, the problem of imperfect translation? BIDDLE: When we started the communications project in DRC in 2004, the first meeting we had between the South Africans and the French, we had a lady, a Congolese lady brought up in Canada as the interpreter. With my limited French I realized she had not interpreted precisely what we asked and on a couple of the answers back she wasn't giving us what was being said. It was particularly important because the French were suspicious of the motives of the South Africans. Not so much the Brits, but more the South Africans. PEAKE: This was a South African project you were working-? BIDDLE: Anglo-South African. The way we did it was, the Brits, we through Adrian Horn, I brought him out as a consultant, he actually designed the radio system, the way it should work. Then we contracted South Africa, who was also interested in delivering communications, to actually do the installation and training and we provided for the kit and designed it. The French were very suspicious because they thought we were trying to muscle in on their territory, if you like. So it was terribly important that things were properly translated. Also the gendarmerie lieutenant who we were speaking too, I knew he spoke good English and he got intolerant with the translator as well. She was making mistakes from a competence issue. Although she had the right certificate she wasn't the right level of interpreter, it was a competence issue. I've seen it done from a non-competence issue in Somalia. Everything has to be done, certainly, with local people and the lower ranks through interpreters. Everybody has an agenda in Somalia. I'm sure, although I cannot be certain, because I don't speak any Somali, I'm sure that we have not been getting the right transfers of information. I think some of that is deliberate. The other week I was speaking to the Minister of Internal Affairs over setting up a seminar to kick off service delivery through community policing and I had to ask the question about six times until I got an acknowledgement from the Minister who doesn't speak very good English. [Break] PEAKE: Just before we broke for lunch, Keith, you were talking about the difficulties of triangulating information from translators. You started off by talking about your experience in the Congo when it was a simple matter of competence, but then you were beginning to talk about instances where they may be a more malign purpose with translation. BIDDLE: What we were talking about, Gordon, was Somalia. I've no doubt it will apply in other places. You were talking about Yemen. Once you're into a language which isn't commonly spoken, then you've got to rely on interpreters, usually from local NGOs and the like. In an area like Somalia where everything that is going on is somehow wound up into the complex, which is the clans, the sub-clans, the sub-sub-clans and the families. Then everybody you bring has an agenda. You've got to be careful that the interpreters are actually working with you and not working against you. It's very, very difficult. You've got to make sure that when you're asking the questions or you're making statements to people that have to be interpreted, that you're speaking, as far as possible in short words, no jargon. The problem you've got is academics are the worst. They're talking in absolute bloody gobbledygook that doesn't mean anything in English, let alone in a translated language. So you've got to be careful that you don't use the jargon of the trade. We're all guilty of it. So it's a very difficult area, one that I'm not sure that we've given enough thought to. PEAKE: So which words would you say are absolute no-no's to be used in conversations that need translations, which police jargon phrases? BIDDLE: I don't know really, probably acronyms that are not internationally known or understood by people. Avoid acronyms, avoid any sort of jargon. If there is a simple English expression use that. Move away-I'm trying to think of one, you've put me on the spot. Can't think of one off hand. You've also got to be careful, especially in the Somalia context, you've got to be careful that what you say in English doesn't offend them. Somalis are very easily offended. If you tell them that their country is broke, nothing works, they've had no government for 20 years and so on, you've got to find ways to tell them that that isn't as blunt as I've just said it, because they actually feel it is improving. So you've got to use language very, very carefully. It's hard, sitting here looking out over the Cheshire countryside to just think of the examples but the principle is use language carefully and economically. PEAKE: I began this conversation about talking about countries in which English wasn't the first language but of course in South Africa and in Sierra Leone English may be one of the default formal languages but it may not be the mother tongue of many people. How did you work around when other languages were used, whether they be tribal languages, regional languages and specific languages where English was not the first language? BIDDLE: In Sierra Leone I became pretty good at understanding the lingua franca, which was Creole, everybody could speak Creole which has about 60% English, a little bit of French, a little bit of Spanish, a little bit of Portuguese and a strange construction of sentences, so I became pretty adept at understanding Creole and I could talk a bit of Creole. But I was better understanding it than talking through it. Some of the guys who worked with us, particularly Stuart Donaldson who was out there to do, communications and press relations, that type of work, he became absolutely fluent in Creole. So Sierra Leone was fairly easy because the lingua franca was 60% English. South Africa was a strange place. You'll hear English spoken by lots of people and you'll see lots of English writing and so on, but English is often the third language of just about everybody. The first language is undoubtedly the tribal language. The second language which is a tribal language for a good number of the whites is Afrikaans and most Afrikaans speakers, have a native language such as Zulu or Xhosa or Sotho as a second language because the person who probably brought them up was the maid and they played with the maid's kids, and so they became fluent in the local language. They learned English at school. So although they sound pretty fluent in English and they write reports in English, if you listen to it and read it carefully, it is not the same as English English. So South Africa is a case where you had to speak very, very clearly and slowly in English and keep it simple. So the tribal language is in Afrikaans-Afrikaans I picked up quite a bit. I went to South Africa from '94 until about 2000 off and on so I picked up quite a bit of Afrikaans and I can follow Afrikaans. Xhosa is fairly difficult, it has that click-click sound in certain words. It's an interesting language to listen to but I've never really mastered any. But there is sufficient English spoken in South Africa that interpretation is not an issue. It is actually the way that you speak that is the issue and making sure, cross checking with anybody That you're speaking to is in the third language, can you tell me what you understood from what I just said? Let's just make sure that we've got common agreement? Are we speaking the same language sort of thing and get them to reflect back to you what it is you've said. You can then iron out any difficulties. That's the only way you can work. Generally I found that careful communications, making sure you've got the right product to speak to people about it you can get by most places. But as I said there are difficulties with interpreters. PEAKE: Before moving on to talk about specific functional areas in police reform, police development that you've worked on, I'd like to ask you a question about the various different organizations that you've worked for because as well as becoming-entering a new context, a new country, a new political context, you've worked for a number of different organizations. You mentioned DFID, you mentioned the United Nations, you may have worked for others. How have you found working, sort of moving in and out of the different organizations that you've worked for? Are they different in terms of values system? Different in terms of ways of doing business? Are there any lessons that you have to learn from the different organizations that you've worked for? BIDDLE: I've worked for a couple of NGOs, ICTJ (International Center for Transitional Justice). The one I've worked for the most is DFID. I understand their philosophy, it's very clear and they're easy to work with. Most of my work has been done through DFID, often very closely linked to United Nations either to peacekeeping operations or to developmental operations through the UNDP (United Nations Development Program). A little bit of work with UNICEF (United Nations Children's Fund) and UNIFEM (United Nations Development Fund for Women) on the sexual-offenses issues. DFID is a nice organization to work for. It's pretty well run; it's pretty well directed on the policy level from the Secretary of State's office. They tend to be very competent people. I like working for DFID, I'm a DFID fan, so I find them nice and easy. Most of DFID's teaching on the methodology of setting up projects through logical frameworks (log frames) and so on, using basically what I suppose is derived from the PRINCE2 methodology, starting with a concept and working your way through with project management boards, cross-checking what you're doing. I find it a very comfortable environment to work in and you can actually achieve. The UNDP is probably the most difficult organization to work for. Having said that, there are some super people in the UNDP and they're nice people. The problem is it's very rule-bound which is probably something that exists right across the UN family. I suppose if I looked into it and said, "Why is it like that?" Where you bring your people together with so many different languages, many people working in their second or third language, I suppose the only way you can glue it together is through the rule book. But the problem with the rule book is that it becomes an excuse not to do things, for people not to make decisions, not to take risks. One of the things I've learned about developing reforms and also delivering reforms and delivering projects, is that, especially in different conflictual areas, there has got to be risks taken and I find them (UNDP) very risk adverse. So I find working with the UN system not quite as comfortable as working with DFID. DFID will take risks. They will examine the risk carefully but they are prepared to say, "OK, we're going to do this, despite it being a risk, a financial risk, a developmental risk, or a risk because of likely conflicts." The UN system will try to transfer the risk to somebody else. It will try to avoid the risk. As a result they, and you and I know this, we've heard this many times, the UN isn't regarded that well by some of the recipients as being an organization that actually delivers. I think it is because of this need to have a rule book to glue together so many people from disparate nations, disparate cultures and so on. I find it pretty hard to work for the UN, but I'm trying. PEAKE: I'd like to drill down a little bit into that statement that you made about how DFID is an organization that allowed you to take risks, whether that be a financial risk or a reputational risk. Are there any particular cases or examples that come to mind about a potentially risky endeavor that you were involved in that you sought approval for that then paid off or didn't pay off? BIDDLE: First of all, the whole issue in Sierra Leone, on the way that the police reform became structured with myself as the Inspector General of the Police and the project director and Adrian as the actual Senior Program Manager and de facto deputy. That was a risk in itself for DFID, but that was a risk that was taken very, very clearly led by Clare Short herself, who was the first Secretary of State for International Development. PEAKE: Yes, first Secretary of State. BIDDLE: In conversations with Clare and meetings with her she was very, very incisive in her questioning as to why we should take certain actions. Not everybody in DFID thought it was a good idea to go that way. I certainly cautioned against having a Brit as the Inspector-General of the Police and I wrote it fairly clearly. But that was analyzed at the political level, and the policy level rather than the political, by the advisers to the Secretary of State. They weighed the risk and decided to do it. It could have gone awfully wrong. We were very fortunate. One or two incidents if we'd handled them slightly clumsily, gone in a different direction, then they were in severe difficulty. Had I taken decisions that might have led to people being injured, or people being arrested for things that might be seen as human rights abuses, which you could easily do in a legitimate way as Chief of Police. Then because I'd actually signed the pieces of paper to say do that, search that premises, arrest that man, or whatever, then that would have reflected back on DFID and eventually on HMG (Her Majesty's Government). So DFID took that risk, after a great deal of calculation and thought. As I said, I was one of the people who said don't do it because the risks were very plain. At the time we took over we were fighting a war. The IG (Inspector-General) would have to be part of the instrument of fighting, part of the National Security Council, or war cabinet. About a third of the police force was actually fighting almost as infantry which put DFID at risk. Then we came to the risk where we had to say, "Well, look," and I remember going to London and saying, "Look, I need some riot equipment." There were civil servants saying, "No, no, no, you can't have any riot equipment, you might fire gas and gas people. Those rubber bullets, they might hit somebody and bruise them. They might hit people on the head with the truncheon. They might smack somebody in the face with a shield." I'm not joking, this was the level of many of the questions being put. I was asked my view and I said, "Look, you have provided a whole lot of rifles to the British Army to give to the Sierra Leone army, we have got a couple of thousand of those rifles with a bucketload of ammunition for each one. If I have no intermediate means, then I will end up in a very difficult situation because I can ask my people to say, 'Please tell those people to stop throwing stones, please tell them to stop throwing petrol bombs. Please ask them not to shoot again.' Then the next thing I've got is to open fire. If they don't and lethal force starts coming against us, all I can say to my officers is, 'run away,' in which case the democracy that we're trying to support on a policy level is going to collapse. The morale and discipline and development I'm trying to put on your behalf, into the police force-if I have to tell them to run away then they're going to ask me-people will say, what were you trying to do? If I give the order to deal with it with lethal force, meet lethal force with lethal force, then people will get killed and they'll be killed with British bullets fired from British rifles that the British gave to the Sierra Leonians. Won't it won't be a lot easier if I had a few sticks and some gas where if I hit somebody on the head-. PEAKE: This is the riot-control equipment? BIDDLE: Yes, I could gas a few people and put the crowd down and maintain the status quo in terms of democracy and so on. So there was a great deal of debate. I trivialize it somewhat, a great deal of debate, a great deal of papers exchanged on this. The decision came from the British government, Okay, we'll put the riot equipment in. There was a lot of unease from the professional level and the permanent civil service level. The Secretary of State herself, she has always been anti use of gas in Northern Ireland and on mainland UK and not very keen on rubber bullets either. She was very nervous, but they trusted my judgment. I was their man. They trusted my judgment and trusted me to handle it properly and to train people properly. We brought people out to do that training. So DFID was prepared to take that risk. Now, if I look at the other side of the coin, the UNDP side, making those arguments doesn't make a lot of impact on the UNDP people. They keep saying, "No, no, we don't do this." No one will say, well, if we don't equip the Somali police to defend itself, and to enable it to allow demonstrations to go ahead, this is an important aspect of democracy, that the opposition has to have the right to march in the street and so on. If they get attacked by the ruling party, the police should stand in between. The police should be the man in the middle. If you don't have that capability where you can protect your officers and they can protect the people who wish to demonstrate or wish to get their point of view over in public, then your democracy fails. But the UNDP says, "It's not in our mandate, we can't do it. It's got to be somebody else's job." So I've seen DFID take what are fairly fundamental operational risks and make decisions that have enabled the people they've put in the field to manage that risk successfully. That's why I say I like working for DFID. I think they're a good organization. I've seen them take risks which go against the grain, the political grain of the Secretary of State and go against the common sense grain of some very experienced civil servants. They are prepared to listen and they are prepared to take the risk. Now another risk I've seen them take is an economic risk, a financial risk. I used to deal with the communications in the DRC. There the risk was "How are we going to spend 20 million quid, to put communications in for the election?" This had to be done quickly which meant that we had to go for the quickest methods of procurement. The equipment already on offer wasn't going to do the job, and the job was ensure that the police could successfully police the massive pluralistic election which was the first one since the Congo got independence 1959-'60 and proper elections with more than one party, actually competing on an even playing field. So it was necessary that the police have total communications and can move the reserves and they knew what was going on and on the ground. They received local communications and the local commanders to were ale to deploy their personnel properly to facilitate democracy. There was a lot of controversy and the UNDP were also involved in this. They said, "Our procurement procedure is going to take two years to get this stuff." DFID did the procurements in two months and we had the system installed and working in time for the election, well in time for the election and proved and tested. First-class piece of decision making, good risk assessment, good analysis, good decision making. That Secretary of State wasn't Clare Short, it wasn't the same permanent secretary of the team; it was Hilary Benn and Chakrabarti. That team made that decision. The local manager, he was the one who put the paper up to London, extremely well reasoned. I couldn't imagine the UNDP doing that kind of procurement quickly under the amount of pressure that we were all under to deliver for that election. So I can give very clear examples of how DFID is a decision-making organization. It is an organization that assesses risk and is prepared to make the right decision with respect to the risk, and it's an organization that delivers. PEAKE: Thank you. I'd like to move on now to talk about some of the-you've worked in police development, I'm going to sort of crudely characterize this as police at different stages of development and different stages of dilapidation from South Africa, Sierra Leone, Democratic Republic of Congo and Somalia among other places, but in each of those cases there are different challenges that you've had to confront, different stages of police development that you've had to work with. I'd like to first of all begin by asking you about recruitment. Obviously these recruitment strategies that you may have worked with or used are different according to the different stage of police development but I wonder if you could talk a little bit about some issues around recruitment that you've worked with. BIDDLE: You're talking about recruiting people into the police. PEAKE: Yes, and implicit in that is also an element of vetting as well. BIDDLE: Right, a very important issue. The people you recruit in the police are the future of the police and you've got to get the right people. How do you do that? It's difficult. In South Africa despite what people might try and say, the SAP through the '80s and the '90s was multiracial. It was even multiracial in that there were lots of Asians, native Africans and coloreds who were in fairly high command positions. But all of the top command positions, the general positions, they were occupied by white Afrikaners, inevitably very, very Afrikaans. The problem in South Africa wasn't multiracial recruiting; they had to recruit from people who had been trained, mainly in Tanzania as police officers. The same applied in Namibia before South Africa. The model was more or less from Namibia, so they had to bring in people who were from the MK we Sizwe. Not so many came in from APLA (Azanian People's Liberation Army), which was the other organization that was run by the Pan-African Congress. But most of them came in from the MK. The Inkatha almost controlled the Kwa' Zulu police anyway. So the issue there wasn't how to get multiracial policing because lots of people from different racial groups agreed to be police officers and were well paid and well trained. The issue there was integration and to ensure the majority-I almost said minority community-to ensure that the majority community was represented and were able to aspire to the highest ranks. That eventually came about through a period of good training, good recruiting. It was also very much about integration, integration of the police force and the former Bantustans: Bophutswana, Ciskei, Transkei, Kwazulu-there's got to be another one, but at any rate, it doesn't really matter. It was to bring them in and to there were a whole number of places, places like Venda and KwaKwa, that were small police forces. They had to be integrated into the South African police service. It was about transformation. When you work with South African experts now in the police-reform field, they always talk about police transformation because they had to transform from being 11 or 12 disparate forces, dominated by the SAP into a new force, the SAPS (the South African Police Service) which integrated all talents and gave everybody an equal opportunity. So South Africa wasn't really a recruitment problem as such. The recruit training had to be changed because it was very militaristic and very much aimed at maintaining the minority in power. So the training programs had to be rescheduled and that was done through an international training team. A lot more experiential learning, continued learning once people went out from the training schools. One of the things I did was help set up the international training team and then the field training team which was mainly from the Commonwealth, mainly British, but people from India, from Malaya, from Nigeria, from Ghana and so on. This was done with Geoff Bredamere who was then the DFID police adviser. I was basically the police adviser for South Africa working on a part-time basis in Pretoria. We put together these various teams to enable the transformation of the training programs and to ensure that the training continued all the way through. We selected a British consultant (Roger Griffiths from West Mercia Police) who had been on the election team. Roger went back to work for Sidney Mufumadi the Minister, and acted as his adviser on training, recruitment and field training issues and how this would help him to transform from where they were to where they're getting to now. It was a long process. We've to remember it is nearly fourteen years on from Mandela's election and the transformation of the South African Police Service still isn't complete. I think that's a very strong point. There are no quick fixes in the process of police reform. So the recruitment there was entirely different. Now in Sierra Leone, the problems weren't quite as bad as were being portrayed. The argument was that all the police come from one tribe, that's the Limba tribe. Quite frankly, to use the vernacular, that's total bollocks. The next argument was only northerners and Limbas get promoted. Again that was total nonsense. This goes back to your first question. This is a case of making sure that you look carefully. One of the things I had to learn in Sierra Leone is who came from which tribe and roughly what the proportions of the tribes were inside the police and inside society and without anybody doing any social engineering they almost matched and always had done. The perception was, the Inspector-General they all hated. He was also from my reading of the back files, the most competent one they'd had since the last but one Brit. He was a fellow called Bambay Kamara, who they hated, and a Limba. He was closely related to the President, Siaka Stevens, who was also a Limba. So this myth developed that Bambay only promoted Limbas. Bambay only recruited Limbas. Absolutely incorrect. I can give many, many examples of why it is incorrect. The best one is a lady who is now an Assistant Inspector General. She was an Inspector when I met her called Betty Turay and a very bright girl. Her father joined the police with Bambay Kamara. She is Mende through and through from the southeast. When her father died Kamara took on her education, which he didn't have to do. She was 17 years of age, just about to go to university when he took on her education. She wanted to join the police. She joined, and she thinks Bambay was wonderful. There are many examples where Bambay Kamara had actually supported people from the tribes in the southeast, whose representatives said he only ever favored Limbas and recruited Limbas. So the situation wasn't quite as it was portrayed to us in London when Adrian and I went out there in '98. We were told we had to do something about tribal balance and actually we had to do very little, it was already there. So the issue was where to find educated recruits. What had happened, and you find this happens quite a lot in a lot of countries, as a policeman died, his kids became policemen for two reasons. First of all there was a vacancy, they needed a job. But, more importantly he's probably in barracks, inside housing. If the son doesn't follow him, then the family lost their accommodation. So the sons would come in, and daughters, whether they were educated or not, whether they were suitable or not. So we had to find a way that enabled a standard for recruitment. We had to get community approval which was very important, something we learned from South Africa, because the South Africans started to bring people in, is community approval, community elders being interviewed and saying that man, that girl, is good. Then giving them the right training. Then ensuring that you mixed them up tribally, that you didn't-. I actually made the mistake with Kono the diamond-mining area; when that became free of the rebels, I put a Kono as the divisional commander. I very quickly had problems with him because he knew too much about people. So then you got the rumors that his family was being favored and they were allowed to dig diamonds here, there and everywhere. An investigation proved it was nonsense. So I learned from that never to send a Kono to Kono. So the idea in Sierra Leone was to try and find a way of recruiting from right across the tribal spectrum and keeping them together in units that were not from one tribe, that were multi-tribe units, making sure that you got this tribal balance. So that was the issue there. The other issue, and one of the best decisions I made in Sierra Leone, in retrospect-. A Zimbabwean was telling me the other day it was the best decision I made, so I'm not being conceited, was I made a deliberate decision against the wishes of the UN's SRSG (Special Representative of the Secretary General), not to go and recruit thousands of rebels and turn them into policemen. On the basis that most of these rebels had been in the rebel movements, having been often, quite tragically and mercilessly recruited by Foday Sankoh's gang, the RUF (Revolutionary United Front), by Hinga Norman's gang, the Kamajors and CDF (Civil Defense Forces). They had been quite mercilessly recruited as child soldiers, had no education, they were just used to killing people. I actually thought about it and discussed it with a lot of people. I couldn't see how we were ever going to turn them into peacekeepers and into policemen that would support democracy and ever be able to understand so I refused to have them. That didn't mean they couldn't join. If they came along when we had an open recruiting session, there's an examination for people to become police recruits. If they turned up as Abu Kamara from Makeni, registered, passed their examination and went through it, I let them join up. PEAKE: You mean just arrived as individuals. BIDDLE: Yes. But what I wouldn't do is to have 3,000 recruits and try to turn them into policemen. That was the UN's simple solution to blot up some of the youths who had no jobs. But I stood on my own with that and eventually the President, President Kabbah, also supported what I was doing. So in retrospect it was a bloody good decision, although at the time a lot of people thought I was some kind of unreconstituted pratt. But it was a good decision. So we had an entirely different approach. Inside the force, close to the line to recruitment is promotion and appointments. What did happen in Sierra Leone, and often on a tribal basis, but, then again, that wasn't really the motivation. If you wanted to go to a department that was considered more prestigious like traffic, or immigration, or finance, the connecting factor to those three is money and how much money you can take on for your family and your sponsor. It might be an MP or a Minister in the government, or a chief. Then you found that there was lots of bias in that because it was how much they could pay to the person who did the appointments who was the Assistant Commissioner of Personnel. A couple of them I arrested for corruption over this type of thing. So we had to have a fair appointments methodology; we had to have a fair promotion methodology because promotion was often done on the basis of patronage and who paid. You'd get a visiting card from an MP or a Minister that said this man should be promoted to inspector but in the past they'd gone to do it. So we had to stop that kind of patronage. So that's linked to recruitment because if you're going to recruit quality people, they've got to be able to see the path to go forward. Basically Sierra Leone is no different than chaps like me from Manchester who join the police. I had to see that providing I passed the examination, I worked hard and I was able to go through the promotion board contests, I knew I would be promoted. Eventually I reached my ceiling and I wouldn't go any further. So Sierra Leonean recruits have to have the same confidence that I had when I joined the Manchester police in 1962. So we had to work on all of those things as well. Now Somalia is going to be a nightmare. We've convinced the Somalis in workshops that they have to have a recruitment criteria and they've all agreed and they've all signed up which is very Somalia. The first time we had to recruit people they do it entirely opposite. Now the problem there is that you've got to convince the people, the politicians and the war lords, and the people with influence that they have to follow a transparent and fair system. So the jury is still out on what will happen in Somalia. The challenges are immense on that very issue of recruitment. Promotion, we haven't got around to promotion yet. What I do know is that there are lots of illiterates who promoted themselves to colonel and brigadier general because their father or their relatives are wielding power as warlords and militia leaders in the last twenty years. So we have a lot of people who are not suitable who are wandering around, looking like the very essence of a modern major general. PEAKE: You mentioned, I want to bring you back to something that you said about ten minutes ago. You identified that the problem in Sierra Leone was getting the best and the brightest to join the police because it wasn't a multi-ethnic issue, it was a question of getting the most competent to join the service. What actual recruitment strategies did you use to get the brightest and the best into the police? How did you entice them? You mentioned something about a recruiting fair or recruiting drive. How do you actually go about doing it? BIDDLE: This is going to be a long answer. It's a multi-layered process. PEAKE: Be as long as you want. BIDDLE: With many facets which is probably mixing metaphors. The first thing I did, I didn't rush into recruiting. It's a common issue. They've done it in Liberia, I've certainly seen some of it in Somalia. We need more policemen. Yes, they probably did in Sierra Leone. I was under pressure, you must recruit, you must recruit, you must recruit. First of all we had to have a training school that was capable of training people. So we had to build the training school. We built it and then the rebels knocked it down again, we rebuilt it. They knocked it down yet again, we rebuilt it, it took a long time. Also we had lots of problems in the police that weren't going to be solved by recruitment alone and recruitment probably was the last thing you wanted to do and I'm sure I'm right on this. You don't do any recruitment until the circumstances are right. It's not only the criteria for recruitment-. My philosophy was, not everybody was on line with this but eventually I think we won the argument and Adrian followed this as well. We were far better reducing the size of the force. Weeding out the sick, lame, and lazy, getting rid of the corrupt and getting rid of the old people who were just staying on marking time. Because, if you recruit young people, they can be the finest people in the world, and you throw them into an organization that has the wrong ethos, it has the wrong kind of people between them and the top, then what will happen is they become corrupted, become inefficient, become sick, lame, and lazy like everybody else. So the first thing I did was to start to retire people and reduce the size of the force. We were lucky in that we were only controlling about a third of the country, so we didn't need a police force that was big enough to control the whole, 100%. So we went down that line first. Also, what we did before we really went into recruitment, and it was part of a wider process, we started to change the public's perception of the police through what the army would call an information campaign. As I mentioned earlier, we took a chap out who I knew from Kent who had been the press officer when I was there, a Chief-Inspector called Stewart Donaldson, and Stewart then started to train people, including journalists, to actually start to discuss police issues openly, in the newspapers and particularly on local radio. Everybody listened to the radio. You would regularly see people in the streets of Freetown with a radio glued to their ears. Television wasn't the medium, the medium was local radio. So we started to capture the ground. This is really what happened. We tell the story from the police point of view. We'd tell people how we wanted to work with them-how the police were going to change and work with the community and so on. Then we got a very good relationship with the media. The police spokesmen who were trained by Stewart had become trusted as people who would tell the truth. The adage we had is never tell the press a lie. You don't have to tell them the truth, you just don't lie to them. You can be economical with the truth. You can be very economical with the truth. They (the journalists) knew we'd do that but they also knew that we were transparent, we were open and basically we were honest. So we got a warm response from the local radio in particular. So when it came to recruiting, we were able to start and say, now we need some young people to come in, your sons and daughters who are educated. This is how our promotion systems will work. This is how our opportunities will be equalized for men and women. Everybody from everywhere will have the same career opportunities. But basically that was the message. So we started very much through an information campaign which we then moved into a recruitment campaign at the appropriate time. We also started to work on schools. As we developed some of the better young police officers that we had, to become community-minded and community liaisons, we got them to speak to head teachers, speak in schools about the role of the police and start to interest kids in becoming police officers. We also had a big advantage. When we really went out to start to campaign on recruitment, we were the biggest employer available because I had something like 2-3000 vacancies to fill. I could claim the critical mass. As there were no other jobs, we tended to get lots of graduates, lots of people with good O levels, good A level equivalents and people who were articulate and could read and write, which had not been the norm since about 1972. So basically we invested a lot in the information campaign and we thought very carefully about when was the right time to start recruiting. As the number of recruits went up, the training skill grew. We had to be on the investment which came from DFID and from the UNDP. I think the Japanese were the main contributors to that. We rebuilt the training school for about 2 million pounds. Which then meant we had a proper- PEAKE: Two million British pounds? BIDDLE: Yes. We had the equivalent, if you like, of a proper police academy. It was able to do everything from recruit training through to senior officer training. Also, we linked into Leicester University in the UK and to Fourah Bay, the University of Sierra Leone. PEAKE: Fourah Bay College? BIDDLE: Yes, to start doing masters programs. Although we sent some to Leicester and Andrew Willis had delivered some of these. We also had people who then started to do courses, training facilitation was done inside the training school. We had lecturers from Fourah Bay College. So some of them have now managed to get MBAs and MAs since which enables the senior cadre to be better. Some of the people I first recruited in 2001 are now inspectors and assistant superintendents and are doing quite well. So we thought through the whole recruitment issue very, very carefully. My advice for anybody who is going to go into this-if you go into a place like Sierra Leone, then don't rush into recruitment. In Somalia the UNDP rushed into recruitment and recruited people and they never trained the managers and the supervisors. So the next I got them to agree to a moratorium on recruitment so that we can train the managers and supervisors. The same thing applies. If we get good quality people and stick them into an organization that is run by illiterates and war lords with no idea how to manage and supervise, and we can't get rid of those war lords' products that easily. We can't transform them into managers and supervisors if they haven't the skill. Then all this recruitment we've done is wasted because they'll just be absorbed into the problem. In Somaliland in the north, entirely different. You've got a problem there that when they solved the conflict problem in 1991 by deciding they were at peace with each other, and the sub clans took the weapons home. You hardly ever see anybody in the street with a gun; it's usually a policeman. They took the weapons home. They then had to do something with all these militias that we'd corrected. The SNM, the Somaliland National Movement, it immobilized just about all the adult male population. So they gave them jobs as soldiers, prison officers and policemen. As a result you've got 70 and 80-year-old men in the police who sit around outside doing nothing all day. The commissioner himself is about 80. He went to the Herndon Police College in 1954 as a sub-inspector. I joined in 1962 and I'm 64. So I joined, I was 18. If he was a sub-inspector he'd be about 25 in the colonial police. So this guy is 80. His solution to all these old men, sitting outside places, fast asleep, wearing a police uniform is to recruit more people. The trick is to convince him that you mustn't recruit anybody. He's got to retire those people first or make them work. That is what we've really got to work out next year. So it's not just about recruitment. It's about recruiting the right people; it's having the right criteria and recruiting at the right time, for the right reasons. It's not-I think a lot of people think it's simplistic, let's go and recruit. I think it's more difficult than that. PEAKE: I want to home in on something you said there about doing it at the right time and getting the right people, yet, whenever you're operating in a sort of new context, you may not be as familiar with the cues about what makes a right person or a good person or a bad person. So how do you actually, how do you weed out the good from the bad whenever you're designing a recruitment strategy. How do you ensure that person A who is a good potential police officer gets through while person B, who may have a more dirty background gets halted. BIDDLE: Well, that's difficult because generally the advisers, on the level that I've been at, rather than UNCIVPOL (United Nations International Civilian Police), if you're working as we are in small teams from DFID, you tend not to be actually doing the interview. What we did in Sierra Leone, we utilized UNCIVPOL to be involved in the interview process. PEAKE: Like the vetting process for the new recruits? BIDDLE: Yes, to get them involved in the vetting. We set the examinations, we let UNPOL mark them independently. There were no names on the examination papers. We'd have them marked by the CIVPOL and perhaps somebody from outside, university or school teachers would mark them and they had no idea who they were marking. So we got a good appreciation of people's abilities to read and write English and do some simple computation. Then you got interviews. We had to train Sierra Leone's senior officers how to do interviews and interview techniques. We brought people in. They came in from the UK police college to actually teach that sort of thing. Also, one of the things we did, we took a leaf out of the Army's book, similar to what we'd seen in South Africa to say, OK, how can we bring the community representatives into this, has he got community approval? The way the Army did it, we didn't do it quite like this, we'd sort of let people know from where they came from, the chiefs, that these people were being recruited, did the chief know anything to their detriment. That was the case of recruiting officers talking to them. The British Army actually nailed up a list. These people want to join the police, is there any reason why they shouldn't. They got through it roughly the same way with some kind of community approval. So all these things; you had to layer them all in. As I say, it is probably the most important thing you do. The problem with using CIVPOL, is a lot of the CIVPOLs around tend to come from nations that don't have a long tradition of the type of things that you're trying to introduce and probably come out of a system that is as old fashioned as the system that you're engaged in trying to change on behalf of the new government. I can give you a good example of this. I had to send for a superintendent and ASP from Ghana who, when we were reducing the number of ranks in the force from the colonial 21 down to something more manageable about 11 or 10, these two were going around telling people in the Sierra Leonean police to object to this. It wasn't the right thing for Africans, we want the right thing in West Africa. So I said to the superintendent and his man, "What game are you playing?" This fellow said to me, "Look IG," they talked to me about police reform in Ghana. They might follow your leads and I don't want that in Ghana. I said, "You're here to help me, not to decide the policy for Ghana." So you've got these agendas coming from these CIVPOLs that wasn't necessarily the change agenda that we were looking to have. The Sierra Leoneans, more importantly, were looking to us. When I say we, in terms of Sierra Leonean, I was the Sierra Leonean IG. So I'm not saying we the British, I'm saying we the Sierra Leoneans because all this was discussed with the President, with the Minister, and with the police council. So we were looking at producing a modern police force that was responsive to modern problems, not maintaining the the colonial era, and the immediate post-colonial era status quo. So using CIVPOL it can be very dangerous. If you read Lord Ashdown's latest book, I think it is called Swords into Plowshares or something like that, he actually comments almost the same. His Views on CIVPOL are almost identical to mine. I've never met the guy and I've never worked in the Balkans but some of the things I've written in internal notes and various little presentations I've done, apparently [Ashdown] could have written my notes and I could have written what is in his book. So perhaps we're on the right lines. There is a big issue of where they get the UNCIVPOL from and do they really understand the context of things that they're actually having to facilitate, a big issue. There's a new guy, I think he is Andrew Hughes, an Australian, in New York, who is trying to wrestle with this problem. PEAKE: A big, big task. One of the things you talked about, you cautioned against rushing into recruitment too early. If I can sort of paraphrase what you said, you said in Sierra Leone you held back for a year or two where in Somalia there has been a headlong rush into recruitment. BIDDLE: Yes. PEAKE: Then you also said that one of the problems in reforming the police is whenever the new recruits come in, fresh-eyed, that they risk going into an institution that may be corrupt or may be susceptible to dysfunction. So how do you inoculate the new recruits against falling into the old habits of the institution; what strategies did you use? BIDDLE: Basically you've got all the human rights training, your anti-corruption training and pointing out the dangers of corruption, what actually goes on. You can do all that. And they'll all pass the test, but when they go out, that's the problem. In my own case, I left the training center at Warrington. PEAKE: Warrington in the UK. BIDDLE: In the UK, when I joined. I knew the law, I knew the basic procedures. I'd been taught how to handle a traffic accident, how to direct traffic, how to do a simple investigation in the four-month course. I was pretty good. Once I went out on the street, the first thing a sergeant says is, "Forget all that bullshit you learned at Bruche; this is how it's done here. I don't know how you get around that culture. I suspect that if you were to go in the GMP today or into the Met-. PEAKE: The Greater Manchester Police? BIDDLE: Yes, you'd probably find it exactly-that's what I was talking about, using jargon through interpreters. So if you went out now into the streets, into the police station in Manchester and recruits come along, someone is going to say, "forget all that you've learned at Bruche, forget all you've learned at Sedgeley Park, this is how it is done in this division. Breaking that kind of culture, all subcultures, is extremely difficult. We couldn't really do it here. So it's very difficult to undo it in Africa. All you can do is say we've got to try and give the old hands the same kind of human rights, anticorruption, experiential learning training, why you don't do these things as we're giving the new recruits. Even then it's a long process. I still see, my successor in Sierra Leone, (Brima) Acha Kamara, who is a hell of a good guy, he's got all the right qualifications, master's degree from Exeter, he came in the top percentile of his senior command course at Brams Hill. He studied in Canada and America, he's absolutely superb. But just reading the Internet, which I do every other day from Sierra Leone, he's still trying to stop policemen taking money off motorists. He's still not cracked it, and I've been out of there for five years and I couldn't crack it in five years. So for ten years we've been drip-feeding people and re-training them and re-training them, but he's still grappling with the same problem of stopping policemen from taking money off of motorists to let them go. PEAKE: You mentioned the discrepancies between what you learn in the school and then what happens on the street so to speak. Were there any monitoring systems that you used in the ways that you attempted to diminish this potential? BIDDLE: We had a mentoring system where people who were parts of the Commonwealth Community Safety and Security Program, went around police stations, mentoring and monitoring what was going on. Also CIVPOL had about 100 people who were doing that. But this is a generational change. If you look at the Brit police now, the Police and Criminal Evidence, it became law on, effective on the first of January 1986. I guess now you've got the vast majority of the force cannot remember how to work without PACE (Police and Criminal Evidence Act). Somebody like me who was trained on the old system, on the common law procedures and the judges' rules, I had to adapt from what I'd earned in the past to what was the new requirement for PACE. I thank God I only had to work in it a year before I became an ACC and it didn't really matter on a day-to-day basis. It was a case of getting the books out if I was required to do something. So that has taken a generation. I think everybody I speak to now is comfortable with PACE. When the law on theft changed in 1968, I'd been in the job six years working on the Larceny Act and I can confess now, I never really understood the Theft Act. I always used the Larceny Act to make it fit what was in the Theft Act. I made the Theft Act fit what was in the Larceny Act. Nothing wrong with that because it was still the law and you could do it. But you find most policemen joined after 1968 and don't know a damned thing about the Larceny Act. So these changes take a long time. I've just given you two procedural changes in the UK. If you look overseas, things have hardly changed since the 1930s. A post-colonial police force in what was British Africa, you'll find that they're still working on police ordinances that were written in the '30s. They were written-you'll like this-in the main written by senior officers who were kicked out of the RIC (Royal Irish Constabulary) in 1921, 1922 when the Free State was formed. PEAKE: The Royal Irish Constabulary? BIDDLE: Yes, and they tended to go to the emerging colonies because the RIC system was actually the model that was used, because it wasn't the community policing model from England and Wales, because we had to keep you guys in order. That's why the RIC, it was comparatively old fashioned to the UK mainland forces for the same reason. So these guys went out in the '20s and '30s and they rewrote all the procedures and they drafted the police ordinances. What happened after the independence in the '60s? They just carried on with the same ordinances. I was in Kampala three weeks ago and I'd been trying to find out what should be the procedure for handling a prisoner in a police station. The Assistant Commissioner got out the Uganda police orders. They were written in 1964. PEAKE: We started talking about recruitment. Now I'd like to talk about something that you have talked about in this section which is talk about training. One of the themes that you've talked about is that you can train as much as you want, but there's a generational change process that needs to take place. There's also a training, whenever it rubs up against context and political surroundings, may only work so well. I'd like to ask you to reflect a little bit about some of the training programs that you've worked on. I mean, implicit in some of the conversations that you've had is that in Sierra Leone you were trying to reorient an entire police services ways of doing business through training. In Somalia you seem to be doing a lot of training as well. What are the-you mentioned this training school that you work on in Sierra Leone in Freetown. So can you talk a little bit about some of the training processes and programs that you've been involved in from the various countries in which you've worked? BIDDLE: First of all you've got to do a training-needs analysis. You've got to understand the context of the training. What can people actually do? What are their skills inside the force? Where do the skills gap? Where are the training gaps? You've got to develop a training strategy that gives you that cradle to grave approach from coming in as a recruit to going out as a retiree. And you've got to make sure that it is delivering the skills that are required to deliver the service on the street. So that is the first thing you must do. I'm amazed, and I learned this when we were doing the evaluation, that not everybody does it that way. They'll start off and say, "We've got to do recruitment, we've got to do this." And they're not doing it in a strategic context. My methodology and the methodology I recommend to anybody who comes to work with me, is that you take a pace back and do the training needs analysis first. You also need to do another analysis. These things don't have to take a long time. You've got to look at the skills of the staff there. Who has the skill to be a trainer? You've then got to go and train trainers. Who are you going to train? So all that has got to be done first. You've obviously got your recruit training with properly recruited people. The important thing, in my view, is to ensure that the people who are going to receive your new recruits are capable of receiving those recruits and delivering the kind of service which is a new service, that the Chief of Police and the government should be putting forward. So you've got to train them. The other people who have to be trained are the vast majority of the force who are going to stay in the lower rank. Like all hierarchical organizations, most people are at the bottom of the pyramid, they're not at the top. So you've got to retrain all the people that are there. You've got to train specialists. If you want the specialism, you've got to train specialists. The most important thing is, in my view, probably after saying they weren't having any rebels, probably the best decision that we made in regards to personnel, human resource management was this, and I can tell you when we made it. I know the date. I have quoted this report quite often. It was the 14th of August, 1998. We arrived in Sierra Leone on the 26th of July. We wrote a paper, Adrian and I, which was about the future leadership of the SLP. It's a real strategic concept list. What we decided is we have to find the future leaders. Our quick contextual analysis had told us, and Adrian and I had been there for a month before in '97, so we had a good idea, our immediate reaction was that the senior officers in place would not be able to take things forward and certainly wouldn't allow anything to change because they had their hands in the honey jar. So we had to say, where are the future leaders? You need a program for your future leaders which I then started to set up on the 14th of August which was to identify the leaders, find the training medium to put them through, not inside Sierra Leone. One of the problems you've got, if you teach people inside a place like Somalia or Sierra Leone that is in ruins, where do you take the student to see the right thing? That is a question that you've got to answer. So that's the question you have to answer, where do you take them? The answer is fairly straightforward. You can't take them to downtown Mogadishu Central Police Station, because that is where it is all going wrong. If that's the model, what will they produce? So you've got to get them out of the country. In my view you take them out in groups, ten to twenty. You train them together in the right things and you start to get them to work together. PEAKE: This is what you did with the Sierra Leone police? BIDDLE: Yes. You find the best students from each one and eventually you take them off to a more advanced course. If you've been selecting properly and you're watching what's going on, then when it is time to move on the people who are not suitable, you've actually got extremely well-trained people in place to come forward and take senior positions because they've been trained over a period of three years, precisely for that, without telling them that's what you're training them to do. So one of the main projects has got to be to start to find the future leaders. One of the encouraging aspects of the situation in Somalia is that the Deputy Commissioner, who is quite a modern bloke, Bashir (Jama). Bashir wants to recruit and train, next year, 200 cadet officers. Now, being an English policeman where we all start at the same level, the theory of the cream floats to the top applies, but it doesn't always work out that way. Somehow some of the cream gets left at the bottom and some of the milk gets to the top in our analysis-I won't name any names. Basically on that principle is how I've been brought up, so I see nothing wrong with the way that I was trained and got to the top and most English policemen don't. But what he is saying is, we need to find good quality young men and women, train them now, because in ten years' time, they've got to be our senior officers. Now that's one of the few encouraging noises I've heard from the Somalis. So in this context-we didn't do it in Sierra Leone because it was small and we could do a single entry. In a larger organization, certainly in the Congo this will apply, you've then got to start looking at bringing in, your one-star lieutenant levels, one pip, lieutenant level, some inspectors, junior inspector, assistant inspector, call them what you will, who come in and are trained to be managers and leaders from the day they join. I think-the leadership issue, the future top leadership, and the force that you're trying to assist to become a more modern police service from what it has been, a colonial mess that is still working on 1930's legislation and orders--then you've got to select your leaders as part of your HR training policy right when you get in. People say, "What was the best decision you made?" I say the best decision was the HR decision, rather than keeping the rebels out, that was a gut reaction decision. The other one was much more considered, was the right thing. People say to me now, "Where did you find all these people who are at the top in the Sierra Leone police force?" Because other than Kamara, who was an Assistant Commissioner, the man who is now at the top, the Deputy, was a Superintendent. The Assistant Inspector Generals, one of them, certainly, Betty was an Inspector. Buck was an ASP, Moigbe was a Superintendent, Murray Langer was an ASP, Assistant Superintendent. So they were just lieutenants when I found them in 1998, 1999. Most of them were down at lieutenant, warrant officer level. PEAKE: So how did you actually find them? BIDDLE: Personal observation. A lot of work that I had to do, that had to be done-. I say me, because I was the leader and wearing the uniform, I had to go and do the leadership bit; a lot of the brain work and the support work was done by Adrian and his team to ensure that we gave them the right kind of documents that were easily understood. We spoke earlier about communication and through interpreters-. Even though we got good Creole in most of them, good in English, giving them dense documents wasn't the answer. You had to give them some nice chatty documents with bullet points. Adrian and his team did all that work for me. But I spent a lot of time doing presentations to groups, the biggest about 300 on Saturday mornings. I was trying to speak to every member of the force and to take their views. We'd also given them all a handout with a piece of paper and an envelope that they could return their views in. The cynics at the top said, "They can't read and write, they won't write anything sensible." The significant issue was that 95% of the returns came from people who were in the lowest ranks. PEAKE: Is this how you started to sift out who was worth-? BIDDLE: Yes, so then you start, who is this person? I remember this, Betty Turay wrote about ten pages and most of it was questions, it wasn't what are you going to do about this? This is a problem, how are you going to deal with that? So I sent for her and said, "OK, tell me about yourself." Then I recognized her. At one of these big meetings she was in the middle of the room, in civvies, and I didn't know what rank she was, she just gave her name. She'd taken me apart a couple f times. So I said to her, "OK, I think you should come and work with me." She said, "What do you mean?" I said, "You come and be one of my staff officers." She said, "I don't think I will." I said, "Yes, you will". And so she became one of my staff officers and I saw more of her. I saw various people like this at various times, they would stand out and be prepared to stand up and ask difficult questions, tackle difficult issues. In meetings that we had which were workshop-type meetings on how do we improve investigations, or how do we do this. We'd do these all over the country. Then you see these people standing out, making presentations. We'd say OK, the next 15 are going to Brams Hill. PEAKE: Which is the police college? BIDDLE: We used Brams Hill. PEAKE: In the UK? BIDDLE: We used the UK. We had some of the courses in South Africa, in Botswana, Canada, Malaysia, and we sent individuals on those, and America. Again, from the same sort of selection criteria. We'd say, "OK, the next 15 to go." The deputy at this time had decided he was pretty clever. He realized that what was going on was actually people being trained to replace him. So he wasn't very helpful in this. In fact, he didn't even want to take part, so it was basically Adrian. The woman I had taken on as the personnel director, a very articulate lady called Kadi Fakondo. We'd sit down and say, "Right, who are we going to send?" We'd find 15 or so, send them off to Brams Hill. Then we'd get a report from Brams Hill how they'd done and report from Leicester who validated the, moderated I think is the academic word, moderated their essays. So we had a good idea of how much original thinking was in them. Also Andrew Willis debriefed them all. PEAKE: So a lot of this is very much a kind of personal relations and personal mentorship approach that you adopted? BIDDLE: Yes. But it is sort of a policy plank. I think it's a fair plank. PEAKE: You've talked about some of the do's in training. So do make sure that you identify a leadership cadre, do take them out of the country, do spend a lot of time sort of mentoring, personally mentoring. Are there any don'ts with regard to training? Whether it be don'ts with regard to basic training, don'ts with regard to leadership training that you would-things you wish you hadn't have done? Any things that shouldn't have been done that you'd like to pass on? BIDDLE: Well, on the training side, there's nothing we did in Sierra Leone, where I had the most hands on that I wouldn't do again. One of the big don'ts in my view, it's not everybody's big don't, is don't over drill them. There's a tendency, and it's a historical tendency, that comes from the way the colonial police officers were recruited in Lusitanian Africa, in Francophone Africa, Anglophone Africa, was the bottom ranks were treated as soldiers. And so they drill them stupid. They spend at least half the course at least on foot drill, drilling them stupid. So I say, "You don't drill them stupid." That doesn't encourage them to think. I know when I was drilled I could do the drill, but I stopped thinking. It didn't teach me to think. So I say, you don't drill them too much. You've got to work out the balance. They've got to be able to stand up straight, they've got to be able to work together, barrack together in groups, to go from point A to point B. They have to get used to working in teams of 20 or 30 because once you start getting them on shields, you saw the paramilitary or military drill, is the basis of how you work with your shields and your truncheons and your gas and all that. So the big don't is don't over drill them. The tendency for the host you're serving, is that they want to drill them because that's what the British colonialists did. They didn't teach the bottom ranks not to do anything other than what they were told. So if you shouted at a Sierra Leonian, "What are you doing?" he'd say, "Yes sir." You'd say, "Why have you done that?" "Yes sir." That was the only response you could get: yes sir. PEAKE: This is in Sierra Leone? BIDDLE: Yes. I think it applies in a lot of other places as well. It was just a case of yes sir, yes sir, no thinking. The officer asked me why it must be yes sir. If you drill people to that extent, then all your good work in recruiting quality people with a good education is gone just like that because they're drilled. Also, don't treat them the way that you wouldn't treat yourself. I found them at the Sierra Leone training school making them go out and chop wood and take it to the staff for them, for their families to cook on and then they didn't get fed on food. Just things like that, silly, petty stuff. That had gone on from colonial times. So I say, you don't drill them, you don't treat them like you wouldn't like to be treated yourself, you treat them as adults. You treat them as people who have got to assume responsibility. If you look at the British system, the power isn't vested in the senior officer, it is vested in the bottom. I know, although I became fairly high up, I never had more power than I had as a constable. My power to arrest and search without warrant were pretty extensive as a constable. If you look at the laws in the countries that you're going to including the Francophone countries, the power is down at the bottom in terms of how things are done. So if you want them to exercise those powers responsibly, you must treat them responsibly and as responsible adults when they're in training. So there are the don'ts. In Somalia, which is different, you've got to do the basics. You've got to do your training needs analysis, you've got to do your staff skills analysis. You've got to have a curriculum that enables you to develop a person into the type of police officer that the public wants. If you do these public perception exercises-they'll all tell you they want a policeman in their village who looks clean and smart, who can stop problems before they happen, can arrest bad people and when they arrest them treat them properly and take the case and prosecute it properly in court. So that's what you've got to try and bring out. You don't bring that out unless you've got a proper curriculum to do it. So the don'ts really are these-don't embark on training until you've done the analysis and you've written the curriculum to produce the type of police officer that is required. So those are the main don'ts I think. PEAKE: One more question on training. You mentioned earlier on, I think you had a twinkle in your eye when you mentioned this, all the reports and guidelines that are written about police reform, you said by academics. Yet a lot has been written about how to do training, elements to incorporate in training, etc. In your experience, your own personal experience, based on actually having developed training programs, did you use any of this information and/or, if not, where did you get the training backbone from? BIDDLE: I'm not a trainer, I'm a detective. My trade in the police; I'm a detective. Policemen are like any other profession if you like, if you take a lawyer you'll get some lawyers who specialize in contract, some in trespass and others in crime. My specialty when I was a detective, I wasn't a trainer, but I've been a user of training. So you've got to rely on selecting. We haven't talked about this. You've got to rely on selecting the right people around you. If you're going out to lead a project into a nation that requires help and has asked for the help, if you go there, you've got to recruit the right people. The training adviser is a key position. You've got to spend a lot of time looking at people as to whether or not they've got the right level of skills and whether they can think through the strategies. So you've got to rely very heavily on your training adviser. Things that you look at-I mean, you read all this stuff, it's all there and most of it is valid. I haven't seen anything that is not valid. You put human rights in, all that sort of stuff has got to go in. But you've got to rely on your lead trainer, your training management expert to say, "Look, these are the keys," and do the analysis. Your job at the top is to approve the analysis. So yes, I'm a bit of a cynic, being 11 plus O level failed, I'm not like you geniuses, I'm a bit of a cynic on these things. There are lots of people who have never trained anybody, who have never gone in the field and tried to get a policeman to do anything, they've become experts. A lot of what they write is valid. I read some of it sometimes. Somebody has got a nice little booty out of writing that for some magazine, but really it's not that clever. But if you look at it, I think most of what I've said is common sense and is covered by a lot of the academic research. You've got to rely on your educationalist, your in-house educationalists to put together the courses. Your job as the top guy is to say these people must be trained to be able to do that job, in the right way and in the right quantities at the right time. So I think you're very reliant on the people that surround you and that is very important. You've been around a lot of these projects and I saw a lot of this when I did the world-wide evaluation with the University of Wales, there are some people I don't think they ought to let out. I wouldn't let them out to play. PEAKE: These are people who were doing training? BIDDLE: All sorts of things. They've been out there and you say, "Why is this guy here? What were his qualifications?" When you speak to the counterparts and the clients, they're not happy with the performance. You wonder why they were selected. That is very important. Selection of the people who go out to help in the training is very, very important and is something that shouldn't be overlooked. I don't think we've always got it right, including DFID who, as I told you, I think are wonderful. I don't think we've always got in right. In Sierra Leone we were lucky. I'd done a project, Adrian had done aprojcet. The training adviser was David [Tingle], who is now Sudan I think. David had done training projects in Bangladesh and in Uganda. So we had people with some Africa experience who had an appreciation. The rest of them came from Commonwealth countries. The girl from Zimbabwe I had worked with in South Africa, so she was good. The Canadian had been in Haiti and had been up in the Arctic working on community policing with the Inuit. It was a fantastic story. The Sri Lankan had been involved in police reform outside of Sri Lanka. So we were lucky that we had a fairly good mix and a good team to start with. How that team was put together I don't know because I was rung up and said, "Will you go next week?" I think they tried everybody else and they refused. So I don't know how they put it together. I'd never worked with Adrian Horn before. Adrian is one of the most brilliant blokes I've ever worked with. But he's got an entirely opposite set of skills to the skills I have. PEAKE: Can you expand on that a little bit? BIDDLE: Adrian is a very good thinker, he's a very good technician. He's got good physical communication skills, good computer IT skills and a mind that can sort these things out and put them into context. He's also very good at path finding and things like that that I'm not good at. But his background in the police was that he was more in the management services, force research, force planning process and in the national inspectorate. Whereas, I was in the operational arm and the investigative arm. So when you put our skills together, we're actually a good team. I could cheerfully have been Adrian's deputy and Adrian could easily have been the lead and would have been delighted to have me as his deputy. So, although we didn't know each other-the first time we really met was at Lancaster House the morning before we flew out. So whoever put us together, I hope, I guess it was Jeff [Brademeir]. Jeff will tell you how he did it, they blended the skills. The person with the support and soft skills and me with the type A kick-'em-up-the-ass skill just came together nicely. So after that then Adrian and I put the new team together which followed the first taskforce. What we did, we spent a lot of time thinking about the type of person that we needed and then where can we find that person. We spent a lot of time recruiting and making sure that people fit together. If you're in these environments, you've got to get on with each other professionally. It doesn't matter that you don't want to go and have a pint with each other or somebody wants to go to church every Sunday and you don't, that's not important. But when you come together to work, professionally, as a team, that you all gel and work together and that you can deliver on the same wavelength. So we spent a lot of time in Sierra Leone trying to pick the team. You don't always have that luxury. Certainly in South Africa I didn't have that luxury, a lot of people were just sent. In 1994 we weren't anything like as sophisticated as we are in 2007. So a lot of people came. One of the things that we did in South Africa on this selection which ended up with advisers being selected, is after we designed the projects, we then advertised widely for some one to come. We involved the local representative for safety and security of the local Minister from the Free State, brought him over to the UK and he sat on the interview panel with Sue Wardell] from the office, myself, and Jeff [Brademeir]. So when we selected an adviser he was acceptable to the Minister and we gave the Minister ample time to ask him any questions he wanted. We didn't pull him in and say, "You must ask this question." We said, "You ask questions of this person and you develop it." Pepi Kamgar from the Free State was very, very good. PEAKE: This is the Minister? BIDDLE: The Minister. And Graham Matias was selected because he was head and shoulders above everybody else and he fit in with the Minister. Two years later when the Minister went, Graham then found it difficult to work with the new Minister, perhaps less than that. They ended up becoming politically identified. In the two years he made tremendous progress. Now, another project, I also had, I was in the unique position of setting both up and then I evaluated them. One of the other projects in South Africa, the appointment was made in a different way and it was never as successful. PEAKE: So pick the right people for the jobs. BIDDLE: Yes, and also make sure the counterparts are involved. We did this to a degree in Sierra Leone with the first Minister, (Charles Margai). We took the CVs to go through it and he said I'll leave it with you because I trust you. All the people we brought, he had to admit they were all good quality. We discussed the CVs with him, why we were looking for that particular position, why that particular skill set that that person fit. It is very important that the consultants or your team, that they don't just appear as a fait accompli. You have to really have discussed it and talked it through with your counterparts before then. They're the people who are going to make the change happen. PEAKE: Can we take a break for a few minutes? [Break] What I'd like to do is talk to you about management. You mentioned previously in some of your remarks that it was important to get the promotion system correct, the recruitment system correct, but I'd like to sort of divert the conversation a little bit to talk about internal managerial processes within the police services in which you worked, getting managerial systems right. By that I mean systems of accounting, systems of personnel, elements like that. Can you talk a little bit about some of the processes in which you've worked in terms of actually instantiating management capacity within the police? BIDDLE: Yes. In the UK? PEAKE: Overseas. BIDDLE: Right. Let's talk about Somalia, because we're going to put it in there. Last week, before I came home yesterday, I was grappling with a system of how do you pay the police, because that's fundamental. The one way of counting the police is to count who you pay. They tend to turn up with the money. How do you do it? It's a major issue. The bigger the police force, the more difficult it is. In the Congo this is a hot potato as well. How would you actually register all the police? Once you've registered them, what are you going to do with the register? The other question you've got to answer in my view is this, you've got to find everybody who says he or she is a policeman. Now in Somalia, there are lots of people who claim to be the police who have never been recruited into any police force, certainly not into the national police force. But they claim they do the policing in their village because the government abandoned them and the police are no good. So you've got to ask, "Are you a policeman?" You've got to register them. This goes back to recruitment. You've then got to have an authorization system. So you have them all on the register, but you don't authorize them all to do police duties. You've then got to say, "These are the criteria that you have to have to go to the next stage or you're out." If they go out of the system then they have to go into some kind of DDR (Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration) system. So we're starting to go into your wider SSR (Security Sector Reform). They've got to go into a DDR system to get an alternative livelihood because they can't be a policeman because they've only got one leg, they can't read and write, they're a criminal. We suspect that they're going to end up on the war-crimes tribunal, whatever. They're just not suitable. They're too old. So they've got to go out into some kind of-they've got to have a soft landing into some kind of DDR system, some kind of alternative livelihood provision. Then the ones that you authorize you then give them a police uniform and say OK, you're going to be a policeman, but not full time, not permanently. You then have to go to the next process which is certification. Certification only comes through training. So if this fellow says, "I'm a colonel," he still has to go through the training. He either goes through the management and supervisors training you've set up. You have refresher training for ordinary police officers. At the end of the day he has to pass that. If he fails, he doesn't become certificated. There has to be some kind of body that says, OK, you can go back into training and perhaps after another month he'll make it or he's never going to make it in which case he goes back into the alternative livelihood bill. Once you get certified, then they become career police officers. They are the people that are going to go forward and stay in the police the next 20 to 30 years. So you've got to have some kind of personnel management system that enables you to register, authorize and certify them into career police officers. Now how do you do that? It's a massive task. I'm just in the process of having trained six teams to deal with the Somali police, which I don't think it's enough but it's all we can afford. PEAKE: Six teams of Somalis? BIDDLE: Six teams of Somalis because the place is so dangerous. Some of the places where these people work, where you've got to go in the workplace place and register them, it's so bloody dangerous that you can't send international staff in. But without that kind of data base, you could be paying anybody, anybody at all. Already we know that if someone has died and was in the police, there are elements in Somalia who think that his widow, orphans, are paid in perpetuity and I think they even think it should go to the grandsons and great-grandsons, as long as the international community will keep paying. So there's a messy problem there regarding pay. Like all police forces, police forces overseas, the majority of their assets are personnel. If you take a UK police force, the sort of non-personnel parts of the budget is about 20-25%. So if there's going to be and fiddling, it's going to be done on people because that's where the vast majority of the money is. So you have to have some system that enables you to immediately capture the data of all these people. I was quite amazed actually because the guy I think is going to be employed, he brought in a laptop with all this stuff on it. One of the things on it was a digital fingerprint reader. The AFIS part of his system identified fingerprints just like that. Together with Paul Condom, we bought the first dedicated system for a police force in England. It cost us nearly a million quid, and it couldn't work as fast as that little thing. So I suppose technology has moved on in twenty years. So basically there's that point. You've then got to have a system that enables you to pay the police. People say well, you know, it should be easy; there's a paymaster. But the paymaster is more bloody bandit than anybody. It's not only in Somalia and Sierra Leone, it's all over, even places where conflict isn't an issue now, they have massive problems in paymasters skimming money and inventing people. So you've got to produce foolproof ways of paying and the only foolproof way I know is to do it by fingerprint. A person comes to the paymaster, he has to stick his finger on the digital reader and it says Gordon Peake $200, there's your $200 dollars. And if somebody comes and the fingerprint doesn't match, they get locked up. You've got to bring accountability into the paymasters and remove the ghosts because for every ghost worker that they have, that is a cost that is on the government of the host country, let's just set the international community out of it. If you pay $200 or the equivalent of $200 to somebody who doesn't exist and it is in somebody's pocket, that's $200 the government has to raise from revenue. So every one of these ghost workers is a drain on the government, which then makes it difficult for the government to keep the electricity on. To use Sierra Leone as an example, the government couldn't run the electricity. They had lots of money that was just disappearing, not all in the police and the army, a lot of it was in education and health. There were ghost schools, ghost hospitals, not just ghost nurses and doctors and teachers, but complete bloody schools complete with capitation accounts for desks and chairs and God knows what, false pupils and everything. So all that money is then taken away. Who is affected at the end of the day? Not the fat cows, it's the poor men and women at the bottom of the pile who are trying to eke out a living. So it's very important that you get all these things right. It's not only the police, it's the whole public service. That is a massive problem. If you're sitting at the top of one of these organizations trying to manage the transparent handling of money, there's your biggest headache, it's a massive headache. There's no easy way other than to keep checking at it and going. So registration, certification, are all important. And insuring that the way that you pay is right. The next thing is you get a procurement scheme in that is transparent and manageable and verifiable. Again, it doesn't go down very well because you either took the business to your relatives or you get some money to a friend of yours because they give you 10% of what's charged and you write two false bids underneath under different names. That means that you're charging 10-20% more than is necessary which again is more money out of the government which means they can't turn the electricity on or can't afford to educate kids or can't afford medicines for the poor. So this accountability thing, it's not just a case of being able to count the beans accurately yourself, there's also a much deeper issue underneath it which is about ensuring the accountability to ensure that money isn't siphoned off from important projects like health, education, electricity and social welfare. PEAKE: How did you do that in Sierra Leone? You mentioned earlier something about the traffic cops still not-. BIDDLE: The answer is: with difficulty. We did a registration exercise with the accounts in general and we got rid of a lot of our ghost workers. Procurement then became a problem because we started to procure a lot of stuff outside of the Commonwealth, DFID's scheme, with government money. That then became a problem. There was no transparency in the procurement. So it was a constant battle. Part of your leadership if you're the Chief of Police or the leader of a project, virtually if you're like the de facto Chief of Police or you're sitting along side him, one of your main things is to ensure that the money is properly accounted for and is not misspent, is not stolen. Now, in respect to corruption, petty corruption, traffic and this sort of thing, detectives taking bungs it's a massive problem. If a fellow is taking, say, $200 a month, by just holding his hand out on street corners or I'm going to arrest you and people keep giving him a few dollars here, a few dollars there and he gets a couple of hundred dollars a month. If you increase his pay by $20 a month, that's no incentive to stop him from taking $200 a month. For the police to be paid at a level that stops corruption, it would bankrupt most governments. So that isn't the answer. I think the answer, and we started to develop this in Sierra Leone but I ran out of time and hadn't quite got the money but they should be pursuing this. You've got to make the vocation of a police officer so valuable they can't afford to lose it. Now, the simplistic way and you'll see this written and you'll here it said is pay the police better. As I said, if you give a fellow $50 raise this month and he's earning $200 on the street, well, he might only take $150 instead of $200 but chances are he'll continue to take $200 so it won't make any difference. And there's no sanction on him. In most places in Africa the homes, the women are very important. The agenda comes into this. The women are important. Most Africans respect their kids, want their kids to do well. So my thinking on it was this. Give him a few bob more if you can. Keep on increasing his dignity. Give him a decent house. Make sure his kids get educated free. Make sure he and his wife, one wife, because some of them have more, but one wife, and one set of kids, get full medical treatment, free. Then you say to him, "Look here, Mr. Peake, if you go out and I catch you taking $2 off a motorist for petty, minor offences, you'll be arrested. Not only will you be arrested, you'll be charged immediately before a disciplinary court and the only punishment will be summary dismissal. You will then be evicted from your provided accommodations. Your school fees will no longer be paid and your wife and children will no longer get free medical care." Then I think you will stop nine-tenths of it. Then what you've done is you've put some value into the vocation. The women are going to say to the men, "Don't you go taking a couple of dollars on the street because your four children and me, we can't afford not to have education; we can't afford not to have medical care and we need this decent accommodation to live in." I think the accountability on corruption, I'm sure I'm right-if we were able to build that kind of resilience into the police through giving them fringe benefits that are too valuable to lose, then you'll start to clamp down on it. But giving them just a few bob more for wages won't. So how you actually develop that, because that is very expensive-if all your barracks accommodations have been flattened, if your police hospitals have been flattened, your police schools have been burned to the ground by the rebels and the rebel army, to rebuild all that infrastructure and retrain all the professionals who sit in it and do it is very, very costly. But I think at the end of the day in terms of accountability and countercorruption, that will be money well spent. Now whether we can do that in Somalia or not, it's in the work plan to start to add value to the job with that in mind to how we eventually tackle corruption. PEAKE: You mentioned [Indecipherable D17:54 ? books] on accountability in terms of corruption, but I'd like to draw you out a little bit about accountability mechanisms that you've worked on in terms of police actions other than corruption. Let's say for instance potential instances of police brutality. The officer is not performing well on the job. What internal mechanisms have you worked on developing-we'll be talking a little bit further more about external mechanisms but really focusing now on internal mechanisms. BIDDLE: You have to have a fairly-you need a good discipline situation, a good discipline regime that can be worked. But the important thing is this. If the station sergeant, if you just take the UK, we're going to surprise you people sometimes, [Indecipherable] in the '50s and '60s. PEAKE: Us Irish people? BIDDLE: Yes, especially Irish people. It wasn't unusual. Now, if you had a strong station sergeant who didn't permit it and would deal with it if it happened, it didn't happen. If you had weak supervisors who either turned a blind eye or took part in it, then it became the sort of subculture in that station. So the answer on that kind of accountability you go back to your training, the need to train supervisors and managers. One of the trainings that you give them is on the administration of discipline and the enforcement of standards. They're the issues. They're the issues in all police forces. If you look at where things have gone wrong in this country, how often are the inspectors and sergeants complicit to what is going on? So the world-wide problem of policing is how do you keep control of the people under your command? Likewise, if you as the senior detective are bending the evidence to suit your case, then the people who work for you will bend the evidence to suit their cases. So this is all about professional standards, it's all about leadership, it's about having good training and also the points you made about the valorization of the profession is this, that it is about actually introducing professional standards, probity, human rights, all these words you can throw in, to prevent that kind of corruption; it's just another form of corruption. If you're bending the law and beating confessions out, or just beating people for fun, then that is another form of corruption. It's not monetary corruption, it's power corruption. So all that can be controlled by good supervision and good management. It's about selection, it's about training. PEAKE: And is it from your experience in Sierra Leone and maybe elsewhere, DRC, how do you go about inculcating that sort of good professionalism, that good management and supervision that you've identified as being key. BIDDLE: Example, good training, good procedures and checking all your procedures to make sure that they're right. What I was saying to you, in Uganda trying to find out exactly what the format was of the persons-in-custody registers, in the colonial police. It's easy to lose one sheet than it is to lose a big book. It's all these kinds of things that you've got to start putting back. Old-fashioned procedures, we don't need them in the western world because we do it all on computers and everybody is computer literate now. Even old ones like me can use a computer. People automatically will put things in with a computer, but there, in the developing world, we're still in the paper and pen era. I mean paper and pen systems that will work everywhere. Computer-driven systems only work where there is a reliable stream of electricity. So you've got to come back and put in some of these old methods. The reason you had these methods that came out of the colonial police which came out of the Irish police and the British police was 19th century accountability. So people didn't disappear into the bowels of the barracks in Dublin or into a police station in London or Manchester. Someone had to account for them. The other aspect that we haven't spoken about, and it's a very important one, is the importance of the justice system because the justice system provides some of those checks and balances, and the need to have lawyers who are prepared to work and go into police stations where people scream for help. Not a popular profession I wouldn't think in Mogadishu at the minute, but they weren't that popular in Manchester in the '60s and the '70s. PACE changed all that in the UK. Now you have solicitors who are involved in just about every interview. People still say the same things. I'm told by a judge that I know, one of the fascinating things he found about PACE is when he heard the tape recordings, they sounded just like the records of detectives used to say they heard. They'd say, "he said, I said." He said it just sounded like that. All these prisoners used to say, "I never said that." We at the bar began to thing that they didn't. Then when we heard the tape recordings, we knew they'd all been lying to us before. So PACE changed everything in the UK. Something similar to PACE at the right time will start to change it, but it's the justice system that has to change. If people can be locked up and never appear before a court for three months if a case never ends, which was the problem in Sierra Leone. They'd adjourn it and adjourn it and adjourn it and the person would stay in prison for four or five years while adjournments were going on. Then they'd complain of not turning up one day so they'd release him. He'd done his four years without ever getting to the end of a proper trial. If the justice system fails, then all the measures you put on the police will fail. If they don't actually set the person before the Court and explain their actions. PEAKE: The question I'd like to move on to is to talk a little bit about, I think the phrase is external accountability. So other systems that have been set up to supervise the police. By that I mean, whether that be in the Ministry, the Parliaments or down, very down to the community level, setting up community fora where members of the community can interact, work with and provide guidance and input to the police. We've sort of, almost like an accordion, they're very different, but are these areas that you've worked on? Maybe first of all talking about ministerial and parliamentary accountability over the police. BIDDLE: Well, it's all there in theory. If you look at the colonial legislation for the Anglophone places, there was always accountability through a body, a governor's committee or a police counsel. There was always accountability, it's whether or not it ever worked. You can write a wonderful legal accountable system. Let's forget Somalia because there's no real system up there. There's no real government. But what we've done, we've convinced the police and the Ministry to introduce what were called police advisory committees. They're called that because eventually they'll grow. But basically what they're doing at the moment is what would be called independent police station visiting. They're going and looking at prisoners and looking at conditions, how long they've been in custody, whether they're regarded and so on and reporting on this. It has been quite successful in that they found all sorts of things wrong. Where it has been a failure, nobody has put anything right. PEAKE: This is in the UK? BIDDLE: Somalia. No one has put anything right, not because there's no will to put it right but because there's no money to put it right. The security environment is so bad that they can't put it right. But we've started to build that kind of external accountability mechanism there. In Sierra Leone, the accountability was fairly straight forward. The President was the top person, but he was assisted by a Police Council which advised the President on all matters of policy. I mean, it's set out in the Constitution, in the '91 Constitution, what the Police Council is responsible for. It is responsible for all promotions. Now, when I was managing it, the Vice President chaired it and the members accepted that I would advise them on who should be promoted. The problem with it in the past is that they'd used that politically to appoint their own supporters and their own family because that can be manipulated. But the intention of the drafter of the Constitution was that the Inspector General and the Deputy were members of the Police Council, would be the professional advisers. But the way it's written it gave them the opportunity. So all policies, all changes of policy and everything, went through the Police Council for the pleasure of the President. So that's where it came to. Where the difficulty came is that the Minister had no role. He had no constitutional role in causing accountability on the police. He didn't answer in Parliament. In the original Constitution he did, but it was a Westminster style council, Parliament, and the ministers sat in Parliament. But in this one it is an American-style model where the ministers don't sit in the House of Representatives or the Senate, they're part of the executive, not part of the legislature. So it's very much an executive, legislative and judiciary-type constitution. His problem was he was a member of the Police Council, he wasn't the chair of it and he was immediately out voted. If we didn't want the Minister's vote to carry, the deputy and I had two votes, he only had one out of six. If we could carry the Vice President, which we usually could, and he had the casting vote, we'd always win. So the Minister was almost bloody powerless. I tried to correct that but the minister was at one time was a favorite, then he went stupid and got himself sacked and the next Minister I didn't want him to have any power anyway. PEAKE: Why? BIDDLE: We did that with discipline so that we could change the discipline and make it much easier to administer and much fairer to the officers because they all-the military discipline from the colonial times was finding him guilty, give him 14 days in barracks, in the guard house, it was military. So we had to break the militarism part of it and, at the same time, make it easier for us as the police force managers and the Police Council to manage. So that was the situation. It was a model that worked except the Minister was out on his own and had no real power. There were always conflicts over it because the power of a criminal investigation lay with the attorney general and the power over finance, the Inspector-General is the vote controller, was answerable to the Finance Ministry, not to the Minister. So it was always a bone of contention. So anybody who is going to write new legislation has got to solve that equation in Sierra Leone. We're going to write the legislation with the Somalis. We've got a similar kind of American-style model. We need to ensure that we've got the right lines of communication and accountability through the political level. Now externally, the other part of the external one is that the judiciary has got to be capable of ruling on accountability issues in the police. In Sierra Leone, the judiciary was extremely weak, self-serving and corrupt and that hadn't changed by the time I left. From what I read it's not changing very much now despite DFID having this big Access to Justice program; there's still a long way to go. In Somalia, the justice is nonexistent. The first attempt to get it going, the President just unlawfully sacked the Chairman of the Supreme Court. They've accused him of some embezzlement and locked him up. Everybody is jumping up and down; I said, "well, what's the evidence?" Before you say there's no evidence you better read it. I suspect that Abdullahi Yusuf isn't completely stupid and he will have stolen some jelly beans somewhere. So you've got this all broken down in Somalia. Then in the DRC, because of the struggle there, the military have become involved in military courts, are all over the country, doing all sorts of things and there's got to be a complete reconstruction of the justice system before it can start to be an arbiter on accountability issues. If you look at the general models, in all these places, the Chief of Police is responsible for the operations. The government is responsible for policy and finance. Where the problem is, although you might want the government to be involved in your operations, your operational problems, in that they understand why they've got to increase finance, they understand why they've got to increase the number of people, buy more vehicles, etc. You want them involved so that they're giving you support, moral support as well as financial and physical support, you don't want them interfering and saying arrest that man, irrespective of the evidence. There's a very subtle difference between political involvement and political interference. It's almost a tissue paper divide. You want them involved, but you don't want them interfering. Where I came, a fellow crossed it a few times in Sierra Leone, which usually were where a stupid journalist wrote some of the most outlandish stories that were untrue, insulting Ministers, insulting Presidents. They'd ring me up and say, "go and arrest that journalist" and I'd say no. But my deputy, who eventually became the IG, Acha, said you can do that, because you're a European and you can go home. I have to live here, I've got to find a more conducive way of doing it, and it's a problem for him. It's a problem for the indigenous Chiefs of Police that they just can't say no. If they say no in the same way we'd say no, there is no judiciary. If you look at the legislation in the UK where the Chief Constable said, "I'm sorry Minister, we're not doing that," who wins? Never the Home Secretary. In all the cases, the judges will say the chief constable is responsible for the operation and he has to make the operational decisions based on the facts and the evidence which are tested in this court. It is not for you as a politician to tell him he must arrest somebody. PEAKE: Something I was reading about before this interview was about these community forums where systems are set up where the community, sometimes for the first time, definitely for the first time in a long time, get to meet and interact with the police. Have you been involved in setting them up and do you have any reflections about how well they've worked? Something I read about them is that they have a pretty short shelf-life, people get very disinterested in them quite quickly. BIDDLE: Yes they have a very short Lord Scarman thought this idea up in his bath one night and I don't think the evidence was there to justify it. I cannot be quoted as going against the wonderful Scarman Report. But the Scarman Report came up with this in the UK and police forces spent, I mean in Kent we spent a fortune. We virtually had to threaten people to go or go and take people out of the pubs to make sure people were there. No one was damn well interested. Then you've got the odd place where people were interested. Usually that's where the difficult areas were, e.g., Moss Side in Manchester, Lambeth in London, [Hanndsworth in Birmingham and so on. So they have a short shelf life in areas like where we are now. I don't think anybody complained about the police, we don't know who our policeman is, we never see one. That would be the only thing. People are going to say why haven't we got any policemen patrolling around here. We don't see him. PEAKE: In Congo and Sierra Leone were you setting these up as well? BIDDLE: Now, in South Africa, the way they set it up in South Africa, basically because of the white professorship there-. PEAKE: What do you mean by that? BIDDLE: Before 1994, all the people who were able to travel and study policing tended to come from the white community. In the Diaspora or were traveling into the Diaspora, and they studied community policing in places like Holland and Denmark and UK and Canada and America and came back with this very rosy view that if you had local community police forums then that would solve all the problems. The MET police set up the Western Cape and did it extremely well. There's a community police forum everywhere. The only thing is it became extremely politicized, extremely bureaucratic. What happened was the ANC, most of the white professorship were ANC, they insisted the ANC wrote it in the Police Act of about 1996, or '95 perhaps, where they ended up with a national community police forum, provincial ones and then districts. So they ended up on different levels. They became so bloody politicized, but they had to be run in a certain way and they were very rigid. Not only were they politicized, they were rigid, they were bureaucratically rigid. The Dutch put something similar into the area around Johannesburg which has been PWB (Program of Work and Budget). The Swedes did something I think in other parts that were equally as rigid. Certainly they weren't working in Britain by this time. By '94, as you said, the shelf life had overtaken them. The lesson for people who were actually helping with police reform is don't only take systems from outside, develop the systems there. So they became too rigid. People would say, "Oh yes, but we're the community police forum." It was even down to every street, every village had a community police forum. Then they say, "We'd have a neighborhood watch" and you'd say, "yes, great, neighborhood watch, wonderful thing. But neighborhood watch to people from the South Africa National Civics Organization meant that we're watching you and if you offend the code, whether the code be the law of the local political code or the local hoodlums' code, then we'll find you guilty and necklace you under the guise of community policing and neighborhood watch. So there were lots of problems in formalizing this. In Sierra Leone we decided not to formalize it, but we decided that it was necessary that the community had a forum-. PEAKE: You mean politically necessary? BIDDLE: Yes, politically necessary, it's also operationally necessary. Although I can criticize Lord Scarman, he was right in some respects. It was operationally and politically necessary for people to be able to meet with the local police and discuss local problems. So we decided, and the person who led on this wasn't me, it was Acha Kamara, something he'd learned at Exeter in the police college, ways to develop partnerships. What was submitted and we approved in the management board which ran the force, chaired by me but all the chief officers were in it, was that we would allow each divisional district commander to approach his community and say, "we need to get together." Then it developed from that conversation. So in one division the superintendent in charge of the district was the chairman. PEAKE: Do you recall what division that was? BIDDLE: I think it was A division. Just to give you an example. It varied all over the country. You'd have one where he was the chairman and his staff officer would be the secretary. You'd have another one where a local person would be the chairman, never been in politics in their life with someone as the secretary who had never done anything like that before. The district commander went along and reported what was going on and answered questions. You'd get another one where an MP assumed the chairmanship, or a chief assumed the chairmanship. So we had no rigidity in the system; we allowed them to form themselves. A lot of them were extremely successful. One of our most difficult places was Kissy in the east end of Freetown. There was a very powerful lady there called [Hadjah?] and she'd run everything. Kalii Sesay, who was the chief superintendent in charge, very good police officer, he let her run everything, he reported to her, he discussed things. She was the biggest supporter of the police in the end. At Waterloo a very similar situation with a local politician called [Sam Cole] who got a grip of this. It was the first place we tried it. He started as a mayor, a local politician, he made it, almost a county council issue, made it very formalized with minutes and so on. But it still worked because that was what the people in Waterloo were comfortable with. So we went for a model that didn't have the rigidity in it. In Somalia the plan is that the police advisory committees, and I said we chose the name carefully, will form that kind of partnership. The way into it is through the independent [courts that we ?? Indecipherable] visited. Then we've got to say to the commander, look, you've got to form some kind of partnership to get dialog, consultation and understanding with local people and we'll see if it will develop in Somalia. It may be more difficult in Somalia because the clan will want to run it. So we've got to see how it pans out. But the plan at the moment with the deputy minister, she likes the idea of letting each one, in each area, formulate its own process. So that's how it came in Sierra Leone. It came on the back of this local needs policing. PEAKE: What's that? BIDDLE: Basically what happened is we distilled-that is, Adrian distilled as much of the work as he could find on community policing down to its lowest common denominator because one of the things about community policing is that it has been made extremely complex. PEAKE: You mean the phrase 'community policing'? BIDDLE: And the theory of it. It has been made so complex, so confusing by the amount of academic research that has been done on different conflicting things. But if you look at it, all you want is a police force that behaves in your locality in a way that ensures and is accountable to you for the way it polices your community. But it does that, it makes use of the national standards and guidelines to be trained and get support and so on. So basically local needs policing is policing which is acceptable and accountable to local people but delivered in accordance with national standards and guidelines. Now that was Adrian's work. How that came about was that a lot of people immediately we landed in Sierra Leone in '98 said, Oh, we've got to have community policing. Some of the people on the commonwealth team are banging the table, "Let's have community policing." I said, "I don't like it." They said, "Why?" The simple answer was I was a detective and I'd never done it, I suppose. I said, "No, I don't like it, tell me what it means." There were about half a dozen Sierra Leoneans in it. I said, "What does it mean to you?" No one had the same meaning. I said, "Look, you can't go to a group of people who have had no police force for the last ten years and say, 'Oh, we're starting community policing.'" If you don't know what it is and you don't know what it is and I don't know what it is. I said, we've got to have a think about this. Adrian, who was one of the "we must have community policing" fans, said, "Yes, you're right." He came to my room about 1 o'clock one morning, banging on the door, "I've got the answer." He came out with this 1-1/2 page paper which is the best thing I've ever seen written on community policing. It gives you a place to start which is where they started in 1829 basically. PEAKE: In the UK? BIDDLE: Yes. It takes you back to 1829, and you've then got to build it from there. So that's how we came to that in Sierra Leone. It wasn't one man's idea, nothing like that. It was the realization that I facilitated by saying I'm not having any until you tell me what it is. But no two people could give me the same definition on how it worked. So that's how we came to it. Then we went to Waterloo which is a nice little village outside of Freetown, old colonial village. There was an old chief inspector there who seemed to be respected by the community. We talked to him about it. We talked to this guy [Sam Cole ?] and said that's just what we want and then went off like a house on fire and developed it from there. So that's how we got into that. PEAKE: You mentioned some of the "do's" about whenever you're setting up these police community forums. I realize they have different appellations and names. Are there any don't whenever you try to set up these forums which are meant to interface between police and the community? BIDDLE: The first 'don't' is you've got to let them know that they do not run the police force. They do not give orders to who should be arrested. They do not make operational decisions. That's the decision of the local commander through his chain of command. You've got to ram that down their throats to start with. You make it quite plain that they're not going to get any money for doing this. Once you start giving them money then they lose sight of what they're there for and they start becoming money collectors for themselves. So no money, it's voluntary, for the good of your people and you don't give orders. The thing you tell the police is you do not ignore them. That is important. One of the things we learned in the UK is once the shelf life went that way, started to go down, then the amount of listening and notice that the divisional commanders took of them, went down faster. So eventually you got to the system for each [Indecipherable] would say what happened before, where nobody talked to anyone and it was just a waste of bloody space. So you've got to guard against that. So the don'ts are fairly clean. PEAKE: Something that you've been talking about, mostly in reference to Somalia but in reference to Sierra Leone also, the Congo, is the relative weakness of the state vis-ˆ-vis other elements that may be within the society. So you've talked about the weakness of the judiciary in these places and you've also talked about the strength of other mechanisms like informal groupings. You mentioned clans, sub-clans, etc. So actually developing a police in these sorts of environments is very difficult because not only do you have the basic challenge of setting up an institution, you also have the challenge of working with other policing mechanisms that may have more legitimacy. Let me put it another way, how do you set up a police service? How do you reform a police service when in the context in which that police service is working there are other groupings that provide access to justice and dispute resolution. BIDDLE: What I was going to say, I was just trying to think how to put it. First of all, you can't reform a police force or develop a police force in a vacuum. We've all learned this. If you look at some of the work that was done in the '80s, they go ahead and do the police force and nothing else. Britain has been as bad as anyone. So you've got to do the police force in the term of the wider part of government. Policing is part of good governance-or good enough governance. It can't be done just for the sake of the police. It can't just be done for the sake of taking criminals to court. It's got to fit into a government structure and you cannot reform the police in a vacuum. So justice has got to go, local government has got to go. There has to be improvement in social conditions along side it. In a lot of these places the army has got to be put in check, it has to be put back to what its role should be. Basically the army should be looking after the integrity of the country's land, air and sea space. They're there in case of war and trained for war and be available as a resource under certain protocols. It's not there to do the policing. In a lot of the places the armies have become too powerful, they've lost sight of what they were there for and they're all over the place interfering in policing. So to get the police going in that kind of environment which we had in Sierra Leone, in Somalia you've got every rag tag and bobtail pretending to be a soldier and in DRC the army was all over the place doing all sorts of things it shouldn't do. So you've got to say, OK, the army also has to be reformed if you're in that situation, you've got to have the security sector. So you can't do a police force by itself. Where it has been tried it doesn't work. One of the criticisms in Sierra Leone with DFID, and I'm not sure whether it's valid or not, because it did a justice program and it wasn't very well run. It was managed by the British Council and they employed a local lawyer to do it. It turned out to be not very effective. What they really needed were some judges who could dispense justice quickly. So they had actually done the military in terms of retraining the military, setting up a proper Ministry of Defense with accountability. They had started on the judiciary. They had started on the police. There was some work going on finance and audit and so on and anti-corruption. So it's a bit unfair to criticize. But there was criticism that the police got too far ahead of the judiciary. That wasn't the fault of the police; that was the fault of the people running the judiciary project. So you've got to bring all these factors together because if you let the police go too far ahead that will make it difficult for the judiciary. If you don't do something with the army and they're all over the place claiming it is their responsibility which is the problem in the Congo, in Kinshasa it's still a problem. Then the army will come and take over without by-your-leave or anything. The President, if he thinks that is a good idea, he'll sign off for the army to go and do it. You've actually got to do all these reforms in some kind of simultaneous equation. PEAKE: In a place like Somalia though, you mentioned that there hasn't been a sovereign functioning state there for I think twenty years you mentioned and there hadn't been a country-wide police service for twenty years. So in that intervening period policing would have been carried out by clans, by sub-clans, by groupings, etc. Presumably that same type of dynamic also happened in Sierra Leone. So is it, how do you instantiate the legitimacy of the police in an environment where there are other venues that people already turn to for safety, security, and access to justice? BIDDLE: I'm not quite so sure that some of the research you've read is quite as accurate as it could be. I'd like to read some of the questions that have been asked. In Sierra Leone, as the rebels pulled out, the police were welcomed back by most people as they were a representative of stability and were seen as the government returning. Slowly, I'm told, since I've not been back since 2003-I'm told that slowly people are turning more to the police than to informal methods. People will go to the chief, they'll go to the local section head, but that shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody. It's not because they don't like the police force that's there today; that's how they always did it. The tradition was that matters were taken to the local elders for solving. The colonial administration brought in the secular-it's time to talk in terms of religion-brought in the formal policing and the magistrates courts and the district officers. They didn't come in till the 19th century. Before then people took their problems to the local chief. The Brits then formalized the chieftain system for that to take place. So when they come up with this research, I can see where they get their answers from. I'm not being critical per se. But they get their answers from there because that's the way things were always done. Now, if you withdraw the police because of 20 years of war, in a lot of places the only people who protected the people from the rebels in Sierra Leone were the police. The police paid extremely heavily for it. There were 900 dead in the war; 300 in a week in Freetown were killed. They were the only people who stayed, maintained some semblance of government order, some semblance of law and order. That doesn't mean they weren't corrupt and they weren't taking money off people, but if they hadn't have done, they wouldn't have lived because they weren't being paid from Freetown. You take Kabala: It was behind the enemy lines for about nine years. Those guys still had their uniforms when we finally got into them. They were respected by the people as being the only government agency that stayed. So they're not quite as ill-respected as you think. OK, you can go down into parts of Pujehun, parts of Bonthe and parts of Moyamba where the Kamajors were active. They'll tell anybody they don't like the police. Why don't they like the police? Because they're bloody killers and the police were the only people who were going to lock them up. Hinga Norman, who was my Minister, was their leader. So if you've been, after 2002, 2003 to do your research and you go down into Mende territory, I can write the answers before you go. They'll say, "no, no, can't trust the police. They were on the side of the Special Court, they're on the side of the government, they don't listen to us, etc. etc." When they were doing the policing, when the police weren't there, when they had to withdraw or because the Kamajors themselves had killed a lot of them, that's why Norman was locked up. Then they were the police. If you asked the average person what was it like under these Kamajors in Mende land, it was pretty bloody awful. These people did summary executions, something the police didn't do. They might have taken a few bob off them, but they didn't take them down the back of the boat sheds and kill them. So I think that some of this research that is being done, may be giving the wrong picture. I'd like to see what the questions they asked. How do you get the police back in? When the police go back in they have to go in looking the part and they have to behave the part. Part of it is an information campaign which we said earlier. It is making sure that when the police went back into Makeni, we said the police had come in, this is why they've come in, this is what they're going to do. We put quality people in charge and said, "Do that and nothing else." If you look at some of the press reports from Sierra Leone which I read on a regular basis, you'll see that the police are doing some of these things and are respected. In the last election the police behaved neutrally. Now, I know they behaved neutrally because my guy from the PDP (People's Democratic Party) said they were biased against him. The fellow who is now the President said they were biased against him and the Vice President who was running for the ruling party said they were anti ruling party. So all three of them said they were anti them. What the IG said is, "We've been doing our best to ensure that everybody has a say and there has been fairness and there has been no fraud and no violence during the election." They were generally successful. The people relied on them at the election and they certainly relied on them in the 2002 election. So I don't accept that people never go near the police. You just have a look at the number of cases that the police charged the court in Sierra Leone. How many of those were generated by policemen without a complainant? None. There are very few cases where there is no complaint from a member of the public and the police have to act. All armed robbery cases that they take, there's someone, at the bottom, there's someone who has been robbed. Every theft somebody owns the property. Every assault somebody has been assaulted. So someone goes to the police. Do you go to the police every five minutes? Do the researchers go rushing down to the police station every five minutes? Or do they resolve some of their local disputes themselves? Also, a lot of the things that they go to the police about, the police will tell them, we don't deal with that any more, go see the chief. Because a lot of it is land disputes and civil disputes which the police in the past got involved in. Some of the very people who do this type of research say the police take money for settling these cases, it's not their job. So one of the things we put through to them is send people to the right organization. Send them to the local district officer, send them to the regional minister. Send them to the paramount chief. Don't deal with civil matters yourself. So I think that some of the research is probably right. They probably got the right answers from the questions they asked, I'm not sure they're in the right context Gordon, starting with your very first question. I'm not sure that they've looked at the context as it stands in 2007. They've not looked at the context of where things were in 1997. They've got to look at that continuum, that continuum of change. Probably in 1997 in most of these areas, there were no policemen to go to. You went to the local CDF or RUF commander and if you were lucky he'd deal with it; if you were unlucky he might just have killed you instead of the person who offended you. PEAKE: Thank you. BIDDLE: A bit of prejudice. PEAKE: That put me in my place. What I'd like to do is try to wrap this up with one question and then I'll leave you the opportunity to make some reflections at the end. My final question is about money. One of the things that has been a theme throughout this interview has been you saying well we would have liked to have done this but we didn't have enough money; or the court didn't have enough money or the police didn't have enough money or the initiative didn't have enough money. So there is almost this tension between what we want to do and what we can afford to do. Sometimes at the same time there is this sense that the systems that we put in place, the police systems we put in place are too expensive for most countries to afford and sustain in the long term. Do you have any reflections about this dissonance between what we want and what we can afford and how to manage those expectations? BIDDLE: It's a big dilemma for anybody who is managing a big organization. I think you've got to be careful you don't give them something they can't afford to sustain. But the problem we've got, we live in a globalized era. If they watch it on television, they'll see, in any developed society somebody rings for a policeman and a car comes. Policemen come and they deal with it. So the average person thinks that that is what they should have. Now, if you go, you raise expectations by creating police partnership boards, community police forums, when they say to the local commander, you take too long to respond, he comes back to the office and says, "They say we take too long to respond. We haven't got any vehicles." So the police force has then got an imperative from the people at the bottom to have quicker response. Now how the hell do you do that? That is the equation you've got to square. If you tell the local commander, from Macclesfield about 10 miles away, if I ring 999 now, and wanted a response, probably it take 10 minutes at the earliest and he's got cars. So how do you satisfy public demand? That is a problem, it's a sustainability problem. You've got people now demanding faster service and more accurate service and a better quality of service when it comes. People will not tolerate no service. Even in countries where they don't pay any rates or any income tax, because they all watch NYPD Blue and all this rubbish. So you've got to deal with that paradigm. You've got to deal with the paradigm of globalization, it's affect on people's perceptions and what they want. So finding a police force these days that's cheap and manageable and can work with no transport, and work without modern communications equipment is very difficult. The more transport you have, the more revenue you've got to find because of fuel and maintenance and so on. Once you've got the transport as it wears out you've got to replace it. They're massive issues. I don't think any country can now get away without having a police force that is able to answer calls for distress and help from its people. So I don't think there's a cheap option. For the donors and I understand this very well, for the donors they say, this is going to cost us a fortune, we can't afford this. All we're doing in actual fact is replacing what was already there before the conflict and what we, certainly the British, the French and the Portuguese, the Belgians didn't do very much at all, certainly the major colonial powers, what we put in place to enable people to live their lives in peace and the pursuit of happiness. I don't know how we can get away with doing it on the cheap. Now you have all this local police and they'll do it, it was-that's feudal England. There's been no way that we could have had local policing in the same way that we had it before 1829, since 1829. I don't think as we help nations like Sierra Leone and Somalia, the DRC especially, to move into the modern era, we can expect them to work without a sustainable and efficient and effective police force. PEAKE: Thank you. I look at the clock and we've been talking for three and a half hours. Before we wrap this up, I've been firing questions at you, but I wonder if there's anything that you feel that you haven't said that you want to say before we end. BIDDLE: Yes, there's one thing. It comes from Sierra Leone and it came from South Africa. It is not entirely evident in DRC and it doesn't exist in Somalia. That is determination from the top to transform the police from how they found it to how they want it in the future. Mandela in South Africa and the ANC had a plan before they came in office and said, "This is how we want the police." They stuck to that plan and never varied from it. So what has happened in terms of transformation in South Africa has political backing from the highest level. Our success in Sierra Leone, if people regard it as a success-- that was a little bit of a presumptuous statement, now, wasn't it? -sort of comes from President Kabbah, the former President Kabbah. He asked the British government and the Commonwealth to help to transform his police force and change it. He asked the British government to appoint someone to run the police force for him while they got things sorted out. He signed off on the general strategy right from the beginning, right from the beginning of August 1998. He signed off on the strategy, same as Mandela signed off in South Africa. (Joseph) Kabila in DRC, lip service. There's no real grip and enthusiasm to reform the police. In Somalia we've yet to see any political drive to reform the police. So if you're going to be successful, one of the main ingredients that we haven't talked about is political support from the top, interest in what's going on and a determination from the top to see it through to the end which certainly existed in South Africa and I think still exists in Sierra Leone with President (Ernest Bai) Koroma. PEAKE: Keith Biddle, thank you very much. BIDDLE: It's a pleasure, Gordon. I enjoyed that. Innovations for Successful Societies Series: Policing Oral History Program Interview number: A4 ______________________________________________________________________ 40 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