An initiative of the National Academy of Public Administration, and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the Bobst Center for Peace and Justice, Princeton University Oral History Program Series: Policing Interview no.: I2 Interviewee: Robert Bradley Interviewer: Arthur Boutellis Date of Interview: 7 May 2008 Location: British Council Freetown Sierra Leone Innovations for Successful Societies, Bobst Center for Peace and Justice Princeton University, 83 Prospect Avenue, Princeton, New Jersey, 08544, USA www.princeton.edu/successfulsocieties BOUTELLIS: Thank you. I'd like to start the interview by learning a little bit more about your personal background and a brief overview of the positions you held before coming here with the JSDP and particularly how did you get involved in security sector reform overseas. BRADLEY: Arthur, my background started in policing back in 1966 when I joined the former Australian capital territory police, which I guess is a territorial state police force within Australia. At the same time I was drafted to go into the army but they suspended my draft for a period of one year until I finished my probation period within the police. In 1967 I was drafted into the army, did my infantry training and core training with various places in Australia and prepared for service in Vietnam through the Canungra Jungle Training School and then I was transferred down to Ingleburn for the reinforcement wing which is an area where they kept reserve forces to fill in holes if anybody is killed, injured or coming to the end of their service within Vietnam. I subsequently served in Vietnam, I was transferred into the military police because of, I lead one of these police service. I returned from Vietnam in 1969 and was reappointed to the ACT (Australian Capital Territory) police, subsequently into uniform branch. That was based in Canberra. As a result of serving overseas and the two years in the army I was pretty unsettled and applied to work in Cyprus. Naturally the organization did not agree and to settle or reintegrate me with society they transferred me to Jervis Bay which is a territory of Canberra which is about 300 km south of Sydney. There I was in a two-man police station so you managed to cover on all community policing elements, from investigations to issuing sand permits to search and rescue activities, to prosecutions within the policing field. So there's a good solid grounding by working there. Of course, it was only a two-man station. Also getting into the finance elements and actual management on a very small scale. I finished in Jervis Bay around 1974, transferred back to Canberra and back into uniform. I was a duty officer for the city which is on a shift basis. Then did a period in criminal investigations primarily to try to help younger people in service. I subsequently transferred from there to the Juvenile Aid Bureau which gave me considerable interest in juvenile crime and juvenile problems. I spent four years but also part time while I was attached to the Juvenile Aide Bureau I helped establish the search and rescue squad within the city which was responsible for urban and rural activities. Following that period, I did a number of different functions within the policing service. Then in 1976 the Hilton bombing took place in Sydney where the state police force then territorial police force was amalgamated with the commonwealth police in 1979 and I helped set up and establish the one small element of the restructuring to combine two police forces into one which became the Australian Federal Police. Initially my primary focus there was supporting the development budgets. From 1980 onwards, most of my work was associated with setting up elements to combat what was perceived then as a terrorism threat. The one in 1976 was the [Indecipherable] sector. So I worked in operations response division, going around the country working with the military, the state police forces, the fire service, ambulance service, etc. I was writing the anti-terrorist plans for airports and doing assessments for such things as the Moomba gas pipeline, mainly in that security area. In addition to that, I was the operations officer I guess you would call it for managing the witness security close protection, divers, rescue, water police, bomb squads and those elements. I stayed there for a number of years and then was transferred in to what they call general policing division which was then responsible for the overseas deployments, not the liaison posts within the international division that were attached to the embassy but the positions related to the United Nations' work primarily. So most of that then was supporting the recruiting selection, training of people for deployment overseas, but also doing mission assessments, budgets, preparing Parliamentary papers for deployments in various elements. In 1985-86, went on my first UN mission which was to Cyprus as the operations officer attached to the Australian police element. I served there for one year and it gave me a good grounding in the UN work, good and bad elements of it. BOUTELLIS: It was CIVPOL (Civilian Police) back then. BRADLEY: Yes, UN CIVPOL in Cyprus. When I returned from Cyprus I was transferred into the police academy and responsible for the command and management training for 2-1/2 years for senior officers, NCOs. So that's senior and middle management. My element was primarily doing the, teaching operational orders, preparing plans, running the major exercises, drafting, preparing major exercises and making sure all the programs were linked within training. In 1989, I returned to Cyprus for a period of three years or 3-1/2 years, so from '89 to '92, as the operations officer attached to the UNFICYP (United Nations Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus) headquarters, so that was working direct with the force commander, Clive Milner at the time and a former British general whose name escapes me. That position was primarily working with the Greek Cypriot police and Turkish elements to resolve conflicts across the ceasefire line that was in place at that time. It was really working with the civilian community. I came back from there in 1992 and was asked then to set up and take a team to Cambodia to be the second contingent. So I recruited, trained, selected and took a team to Cambodia as the contingent commander and also the district commander of what they called [Thmar Puok?] district then which was part of the liberated zone, not under control of the government, it was under control of the non-government forces, the Khmer Rouge, the KPLNF (Khmer People's National Liberation Front) forces, etc. The commander of the district which involved French, Tunisian, Indian and German police basically. BOUTELLIS: This was under UN mandate? BRADLEY: Under UN mandate, the UN Mission in Cambodia. I spent ten months in Cambodia during the pre-election, post-election period returning to Australia again and I was asked to set up and take a team of Mozambique. So on return I then recruited, trained and prepared a team for deployment to Mozambique which occurred in early 1994. In Mozambique I was appointed there as a central regional commander responsible for a very large area of Manica province, Zambezia, [and Tete Provinces but based Sofala Province in Beira] and had around 200, 220 civilian police under command there which was rather difficult with the nature of the country. There are a lot of stories I could tell you about the difficulties. Following that mission I returned to Australia and was asked to prepare and set up a team to take to Haiti but by that stage I was too flat. I had been on constant missions basically so I helped set up and prepare the team to go to Haiti but I declined to go. In that intervening period I did work in Brazil, Mongolia I think it was, a couple of other countries. Then in 1995 I was offered-they were offering, within the federal police, they were downsizing and they offered an opportunity to resign and go on early retirement. In view of the fact that I'd been overseas for so long I took the opportunity. I was working in Nepal at the time, just sent a fax back and said yes, I'd be happy to take the position. So I resigned in December of 1995 and prior to resigning I'd been asked to go to head up the police training team to Bosnia for the International Police Task Force (IPTF) so I deployed to Bosnia, prepared a training team of thirty police from different nationalities and prepared the police investigation training program for IPTF. We ran that training across all of Bosnia. At the completion of that I left the team behind to continue the training and I went to Eastern Slovenia and set up the same program in Eastern Slovenia. BOUTELLIS: You were training the teams to be trainers? BRADLEY: Trained trainers to start with and then we had to monitor and make sure the training was [Indecipherable], some elements of the training myself. BOUTELLIS: Training international trainers to train the BiH (Bosnia and Herzegovina)? BRADLEY: Yes, that's right. Following Bosnia I did a couple of other positions with the, I can't recall the exact dates. I worked in Mongolia, worked with the Raoul Wallenberg Institute in Burundi. This may be not quite in sequence. I worked with the International Red Cross in Geneva to prepare and set up the training programs in countries at risk to reduce the threat of violence. That was human rights based. I was trying to get the operational procedures in place where the police forces were probably better managed and didn't get involved in the conflict, using both humanitarian and human rights law. Following that I was asked to set up a new program, this is following retirement, for the Australian aid-funded project in Cambodia, which was rebuilding, assisting Cambodian authorities to rebuild the justice sector. So I was the team leader for the Cambodia Criminal Justice Assistance Project for phase one, an interim period and through to phase two from 1997 through 2007. That was working across thee agencies, the police, courts, prisons and working with civil society NGOs to try and improve justice services in those agencies. Since then, last year, I finished up with that project and had another three months' break to rest up and now here I am in Sierra Leone working for the Justice Sector Development Program, which is a DFID-funded (Department for International Development) program. It's a long history with attachments. BOUTELLIS: Before we get into the core of the interview can you give us a brief overview of the history of the Justice Sector Development Program, when it started and under what circumstances and what is the mandate currently? BRADLEY: The Justice Sector Development Program was a follow-on program from Commonwealth Security Sector Support program that was instituted after the peace within Sierra Leone. It focused quite a bit on providing material assistance, vehicles, communications and setting up the police forces. They also provided opportunities for senior police officers to study overseas and go to Bramshill in London for example. They have a core of good solid, well educated senior management there. The justice sector program is slightly different focused. The first two years of that has been focusing on really trying to find out what is happening within the justice sector area. BOUTELLIS: So it was 2005 to 2007? BRADLEY: Yes, 2005 to 2007. They've been focusing more in the early stages on doing baseline surveys, finding out how things work, what's happening, what's doing. They're doing small projects. There hasn't been a great focus on supporting capacity building within the police or the prisons and my focus now as safety and security component manager is focusing on those two areas, police and prisons, capacity building, with elements of support with equipment to help implement new procedures or implement training that has been given. As I mentioned, the material support before was more focused on high rank rather than capacity building. BOUTELLIS: You mentioned the baseline services that were done. What were the main challenges identified? BRADLEY: I think I've read probably about fifty or sixty different baseline surveys. They're all focused in different areas. Some have been with the police, say for example the most recent with the police was one looking at the role and function of the criminal investigations and crime intelligence, the Special Branch functions. That was undertaken last year. As a result of that, a series of recommendations were put to the Executive Management Board of the police, have been adopted and they are in the process of implementation. Similar things with developing police professionalism. There was a survey done and report, recommendations made in late '96 which last year we started to implement those recommendations to try to lift the accountability of the police and the professionalism right through, so looking at internal investigations, complaints and discipline procedures, appellant procedures, to try to improve the quality of the service, the accountability of the organization. The prison service is being pretty well neglected right throughout this process. They've been provided minimal support in terms of infrastructure. They were also supported under the peace building program with construction or renovation of some prisons and provision of vehicles. But in terms of capacity building, they've been basically neglected. There has been a change of management this recent month. Now they have a new management team in place where hopefully they can progress quite quickly. BOUTELLIS: So the JSDP arguably looks at security sector reform in a holistic manner. How has the police reform related to justice reform and prison sector? BRADLEY: I think the police really have a foot in two areas. They're in the security sector for sure, but primarily in public safety, community safety area as well. So there's two distinct areas where they're operating. The police service as far as the community safety and security is primarily focused historically on security, internal security, which is natural in post conflict situations. Once that security has been established and normalization of economic activities and you're now trying to look at investment and economic growth, the focus needs to change to providing community safety, an environment where investment can take place, where the rule of law is being implemented and adhered to. Now the focus is really trying to get down to the community level with community policing initiatives being more closely tied to the community. In this case here they're establishing police community partnership boards. One of the success stories with the SLP, Sierra Leone Police, has been the establishment of the Family Support Unit which was not a justice sector initiative from the project, but it has been built upon by the project and has been fast-tracked for more places to be established. It has built up a lot more trust in the community because they respond to community needs in things like domestic violence, teenage pregnancies, children at risk. It has given the police a better exposure. Within the prisons historically they have been a punishment-based organization. You're confined, secure and punished. The philosophy now is we're trying to change that to a corrections-based philosophy so it is more based on rehabilitation, reintegration with families. This is going to be a major challenge here. It has strong support of the government, but often in countries that have been in conflict, the community does not have the same attitude as a more forward-thinking government. Here they expect people to be punished when they've been committing crimes. BOUTELLIS: We'll probably come back to some of these issues through the functional areas, but before that, you've been involved in a lot of instances, from the time you were with the general policing division back in Australia in preparing Australian police to be deployed in UN missions and overseas postings. You've also mentioned a number of induction training we can call it. Can you describe some of these and maybe reflect on lessons learned from these experiences in developing this training and delivering. BRADLEY: I think the Australian Federal Police, formerly the Commonwealth Police and the State Police forces had a long history going back to the early 1960, when they supported the UN's intervention in Cyprus. So there had been a history of learning coming through. Bearing in mind Cyprus is a long way from Australia and the conditions there are different. It's a small island it's contained, there was a ceasefire demarcation line whereas the missions that came after that changed. You're looking at country-wide, internal stability rather than trying to keep forces apart. That was more challenging in a lot of ways. The training and development, I guess the most challenging part for me was trying to understand, trying to get a proper process in place for recruiting people. One of the lessons learned out of my first deployment to Cyprus, I couldn't understand there was quite a bit of conflict within the contingent. When I came back and talked to our psychiatrist, I said, "Why was this conflict?" We sat down, we went through each person's profile. One of the problems that we came up with was that everybody that had been recruited and trained for that particular mission there were all extroverts. So we had plenty of leaders but no followers. But in the recruitment for subsequent things we tried to balance things out so people were psych tested, they were prepared before they went away. They had good background, good training, properly equipped. What we introduced there was rather than the administration buying uniforms and equipment it was left to them to design their uniform and equipment, chose what they needed for a tropical area where we have a dry area, so that they had ownership of their component from the start. The other thing that was important too, having worked with the military, was making sure that we were basically self sufficient from the time we landed because UN missions traditionally are under-resourced from the start. It takes them probably up to a year to get properly equipped. So without-the only exception was vehicles. So communication, all equipment that we were going to require to run a headquarters and operation were basically prepared and taken with us. That meant everybody had the equipment. The second thing is, looking at the threat assessment for each of the individual countries we prepared, made sure we had proper medical training for the people involved, particularly in preventative health. There's no sense in deploying people if they suffer illness through stupid things like malaria. So we put people in a three-month medical training course, two people on each of the missions I took away. They came back with lessons learned from that and trained the rest of the staff so everybody could give the injections, everybody knew how to help each other and knew how to recognize symptoms of fatigue, sickness, all those different arrangements. That reduced the risk quite significantly when you went into the field. The training similarly, we tried to work with the military quite a lot with joint training. In any country we were being deployed to we utilized the services of the respective embassy, for Cambodia the Cambodian embassy for example, African links. Then going into countries formed strong links with the embassies in Cambodia, Mozambique or South Africa or Zimbabwe as it turned out, regional embassies as well. Often in the countries where there is no home support, the neighboring embassies can provide it and they're interested in what you're doing, it's safety and security issues. So it was good deployment. I really think the Federal Police by giving people a task and allowing them to get on with it made it a lot easier rather than being given a kit and saying go. The recruiting and training selection was much, much stronger. BOUTELLIS: It is often said that one of the keys to effective policing is intelligence and situational awareness. It is often difficult to prepare for policing in a foreign environment. You mentioned earlier that you had some stories from the context of Mozambique, you may have from some of the other countries, what are some of the lessons? BRADLEY: It's interesting. We relied heavily-because the missions I've been on, you couldn't do a pre-deployment assessment. We relied heavily on the military assessments for the intelligence before deployment for what's in the field. For example in Cyprus you'd work with the people there and they'd share the intelligence within the police services, particularly related to their own area of responsibility. In Cambodia it was much more difficult because we were working in Khmer Rouge territory and the biggest threat for us was from Khmer Rouge. I had, I think, six vehicles ambushed, last while I was up there. This is in one district. So we set up our own internal intelligence system there, making sure we had established good working relationships with the community. That's where really people from Tunisia, who were very good. They learned the language quickly, were good at the grassroots level. We recruited and used as interpreters, people who had good background knowledge of the area we were working within. We recruited and used people basically as intelligence officers. They were tasked with it while they were out there to run a checkup. The most important I think was the community relationships. You were going to restaurants in Thma Puok with the lady in charge of that particular restaurant would say it's not safe for you to move tonight. Similarly, I used to meet weekly with the Khmer Rouge General Prum Sou. He would give you an indication of the times when you should not move, or the Colonel [Sreng] would give you the same things, it's not going to be safe to move tonight, don't put anybody out. The other areas working with us, the military intelligence on the ground, we had strong relationships for example with the Dutch Marines in that area. They also had their intelligence, so we had regular weekly meetings on intelligence, what was happening within their communities. Of interest in the 15 months that the two contingents, the Australian contingents were deployed in the northwest of Cambodia, we investigated more then 360 violent murders in just that short period and that's one district within a country. BOUTELLIS: You mentioned difficult context in Mozambique, did you have any particular-? BRADLEY: Mozambique was slightly different. At this stage I'd sort of changed from being a district commander to a regional commander and had much more responsibility there. The interesting thing there was I was given the opportunity of two weeks of briefings and observation, the opportunity to meet with the people who had been on the ground there for say six months, which is mainly the military. Most of the intelligence came from the military on the ground, sorry, from the military intelligence units operating with the UN. They had a better grasp of things that were going on. When I was deployed it was the same thing. They were trying to set up community-based information systems so you'd get a feel for things that were going on, particularly pre-election, how they felt about security because the major responsibility was to make sure that they feel comfortable but also making sure that the police were treating them with respect and not getting engaged in intimidation or causing problems in favor of one political party or another; they were actually neutral. That's not necessarily easy, not necessarily easy at all. So the intelligence side there is two pronged, one is the formal systems with military intelligence, police intelligence systems, and the second one is the informal systems where you're using the community. You get a lot more information. Naturally there are links through the local police as well but often they're not sharing the intelligence as much as you would expect unless there's going to be some gain, personal gain. BOUTELLIS: Now we can turn to the indigenous police, the polices that you've worked with, in building the capacity of the local police basically and looking at different areas. The first area of interest is recruitment. Have you been involved in helping with recruitment strategies or vetting of police forces? BRADLEY: In Cyprus they had well-established-it had been a former British colony and that was well established. There was no issue there. In Cambodia, when I worked there, as I mentioned, it was not under the control of the government. There was no police, no courts, no prisons. There were basically no medical services. The community would walk back across from the refugee camps and were reestablished without a police force established. So in conjunction with the team that were there before us and our team we recruited, trained 1,010 police, provided them with uniforms and worked with them on the ground so they were deployed in the same vehicles we were deployed in. So basically we were supporting them, trying to encourage them. That proved to be quite effective but because this was only one district that we were operating in the whole country, this process wasn't taking place nationally. After the elections it was then adopted as a good model. They then started to train police in the other regions. The interesting thing about that, as a result and through the Peace Accords, the 1,010 police we recruited and trained, of which we only trained 600, were assimilated into the national police force. It took a lot of arguing to get that. I think from my point of view, the interesting thing that you don't see very often, the UN actually funded us, supported us with funding for the recruitment and training of these people, providing uniforms. That provided a significant boost for the community. They weren't paid at all initially. I think it probably took about twelve months, fifteen month, before they actually got any salary, but they were happy to do it on behalf of the community. I wouldn't call them a vigilante group. They patrolled their area of responsibility, down at the village commune level on a daily basis. Some of them would walk out 10-12 km to the edge of the road, be on the side of the road in the morning to provide their status report on security and then they'd return and another person would walk the next day. Or they'd ride a bicycle. Some of them would have motorcycles. It was interesting, the motivation was there to try to improve things. In following on, if I can go on and perhaps take the next step, I finished there in '93 and came back in '97 to find that there were 65 or 69,000 police in Cambodia. I then worked with the personnel department of the national police to try and work out what was happening. They did a survey across the police force and 11,000 of those were cut off the payroll because they were just ghosts or relatives, relatives were stepping in positions and just not working. But I found there, you couldn't influence that next stage, rebuilding or running the project. It was very difficult to influence the recruiting process in a culture where nepotism was rife. You pay for your position. If you wanted to join the police force in 1997 and you wanted to be a traffic member, reputedly you had to pay more than $1000 to get your position. Then if you wanted to get on a certain intersection, you had to pay money. So it was very difficult to influence those things in those early stages. Eventually, probably five years later, the recruiting process was put up. That was more as a result of working within the training department, because they realized they didn't have good quality people. Then we helped the training department and set up a strategy to rebuild themselves, to prepare and conduct training, and also recruiting of people. BOUTELLIS: It was an unarmed model of policing? Community policing? BRADLEY: The people, where I was working in that area? BOUTELLIS: The original? BRADLEY: The original were armed. BOUTELLIS: Armed? BRADLEY: Yes, AK-47s, pistols, rocket launchers. BOUTELLIS: That they brought themselves. The uniforms were brought by the UN, but they were bringing the weapons. BRADLEY: Those were their own personal weapons, from their house. Mind you, they didn't have a lot of ammunition. You'd check some of the clips at nighttime because we had people securing the perimeter, you know, they might have one round of ammunition. BOUTELLIS: So it was a multinational UN CIVPOL mission? BRADLEY: Yes. BOUTELLIS: How was the curriculum for training designed? How were the strategies designed? Where were they coming from? BRADLEY: It's interesting because each organization is different. I think that's one of the things that the DPKO (Department of Peacekeeping Operations) has learned, that while some countries have a good training program in place, other countries don't have any training program, so people are not prepared, they're not equipped to be deployed. That was one of the unfortunate things. When you went to Cambodia for example, same in Mozambique, the first thing they do is take you on a driving test. A lot of people fail the driving test. The capacity to read and write-Mozambique for example is Portuguese, the language, Cambodia was Khmer. For myself as part of my preparation, two of us went to a Khmer language training course before we deployed to Cambodia. For Mozambique I think it was two people had either Spanish or Portuguese recruited. We knew we had people on the ground from Spain and Portugal that could be utilized as interpreters. They were part of the intelligence process. Coming back to the training, training used to be country by country basis. Now they've set up some of these regional training for UN peacekeepers which I think is a good thing. I think there's one now in Pakistan for example and that's a good thing. BOUTELLIS: In terms of the curriculum that was used to train the 1,010 local police, how was it designed? BRADLEY: That Arthur was the subject really-if I could go back to Pol Pot era when the refugees went across the border, where I was deployed in the general policing division that was supporting these overseas deployments, we actually put two Australian police into the refugee camps together with American and Swedish police. They set an internal police force to police the refugee camps because the Thai police were not interested in coming in there, there was too much conflict. So they basically secured perimeters. Then the internal policing was done by Cambodians who had been recruited and trained. In the refugee camps they wrote their own laws. So basically what we picked up on was the work that already had been done in the refugee camps. Those people came back, utilized some of those police to become police within the district. A lot of them were dispersed over the country but the ones that came from that region, we utilized their skills. For example, my chief of staff, Sreng Davonara, he had trained in the refugee camps to be a policeman, probably on a three weeks, one month course. So it was quite effective when it came to working. The method of operation was probably more slanted towards not the civilian process in the common law process of policing like the laws that we have rather than the French-based system. Unfortunately within the policing it was very difficult because if they arrested anybody and put up a case file, we couldn't recruit a judge to hear the cases. We had one that was located within the district but because of the threat to life and limb as a result of hearing cases, he refused to take on any cases as opposed to working in the refugee camps. He was quite happy to hear cases in the refugee camps. So you could see the security situation was not good where we were working; he felt more comfortable in the refugee camps. Also the prisoners that were incarcerated in the refugee camps, when the refugee camps were closing, they were transferred, we facilitated the transfer of them, because most of them were major crimes, more than murders, we facilitated their transfer from refugee camp prisons to the Sisaphon prison which was then in the state of Cambodia. BOUTELLIS: You've been involved in various training of national polices in different places and the JSDP program here is also doing some of this capacity building, programs run by the international community are often very expensive. Do you have any cost-saving suggestions from your experience? BRADLEY: I think the first thing is, if I may comment on the training in general, I've seen, I've had quite a few years of working in these systems now, a number of countries try to implant their own systems, bring over a training package, run it. It is appropriate for Western democracies, that run in their country. But in the country they're trying to rebuild, the training is not relevant. It's not relevant to their laws, their systems, their procedures at all. If I can give you an example. I was working in CJP, Criminal Justice Project, and one of my, I used to tour around and stay in the provinces two or three days a week. One of the judges from K‰mp—ng Cham province met with me one night. I asked him about training he had received a couple of weeks before, it was run by the Americans. He said it's crazy, the Americans have come here now, trained us for two weeks on the jury trial system. We don't have jury trials in Cambodia, it just doesn't work. I think the important thing is to make sure that training is designed and developed within the country, utilizing their own people who have knowledge of their laws and not brought in from outside, because there's no ownership to it. There is a reluctance. When you leave your rules and your procedures and your systems leave with you, even if you're here for two weeks. Whereas what we found, there was a great deal more acceptance-. The other comment I'd like to make too, historically post conflict most of the police training is focused on human rights. I've met people who have had fifteen human rights training courses. Bearing in mind in Cambodia there were no procedures for police courts or prisoners, they were absolutely operating ad hoc right across the country. So the first thing there was to sit down with them and write procedures. You learn from international agencies, but write their own procedures. Those procedures reflected international law, particularly the human rights elements of it. After training you meet up with the police maybe three months later and they'd say this is the first time we've been told what we can do complying with human rights now. Before it was just thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not torture, thou shalt not bust people up, thou shalt not pilfer. So there is a great deal of reward and benefit in sitting down with the people and actually preparing materials in the country with them rather than bring solutions from outside. If they're not locally owned and developed her it just doesn't work. That's why I think that the CJP project was so successful in Cambodia and probably this project will be similar because things are locally prepared and done; they're not trying to impose things from outside. Learn from others, but homegrown solutions. BOUTELLIS: Can you give a specific example of what kind of things were prepared with the Sierra Leoneans? BRADLEY: I come from a common law background in policing like British or American systems. In Cambodia it's a civil law system similar to the French. But I've been there, like the power of arrest is different. If you make a complaint in England you take the complaint to the police. The police can then go and investigate. In the civil law system, the process is you take a note of the complaint that then goes through a hierarchy to the prosecutor, he determines the offense and then issues an order to investigate. There are really significant delays in that process. So bringing in a process where it is common law based in a civil law country or vice versa is very difficult. That's why some of the training doesn't work. BOUTELLIS: Moving on to the next area is the integration or otherwise called amalgamation of services. You've gone through this yourself as you mentioned through the restructuring of the Australia police. You probably witnessed also in Cambodia where you had sort of a regional police force that was then amalgamated, integrated. What is your experience of having lived through it and having also witnessed it in other countries? BRADLEY: I think the first thing with any restructuring, Australia is an example, in a democratic country, sophisticated with all the elements of strong management teams and things like that, it is still traumatic for people. It is even more traumatic for people when you've got conflicting sides, trying to integrate it. If I can give you the example in Cambodia, in the final months of the period there, we actually brought police from the state of Cambodia up to Thmar Puok to train with the people that before that they were fighting. The biggest thing that we learned there, and this again, having a background in training and having finished at the police college a few years before, the first thing you do is these ice-breaker exercises, where you give them challenging tasks. These again are based upon adventure training. It's not just simply pieces of paper and cardboard, but physical tasks, moving barrels of water across a big channel of water. You give them a few pieces of rope and a piece of board or nothing at all and let them find locally things. That forms teams very quickly. We did that through forming-making sure from the start they were forming groups. The other thing is letting them self-manage their program. Basically again it was a lesson learned out of a long history of working in training. They run the training school, so they're responsible for the cleanliness of it, making sure the meals are ordered, for the accountability of people coming in to'ing and fro'ing, for parades in the morning. So it is all managed by themselves. What you're looking for is trying to pick out the leaders by rotating the responsibility on a daily or weekly basis, trying to identify leaders who in the future could be pushed through and utilized. The most challenging thing with that training is the recognition that in post conflict situations there's a lot of illiteracy. We're still continuing to learn, it's difficult. One of the challenges here in JSDP is going to be working in some of the prisons where illiteracy is a problem. So trying to make sure that procedures and systems can be very visual. Not comic book, but making sure you have things that are charted or in support of written procedures. There are actually charts that could be put up for searching prisoners or their properly admission programs. It just makes it so much easier. Probably projecting the level of materials you're preparing and the level of training to the level of education that the people have that you're working with. BOUTELLIS: One of the challenges you've identified in the Sierra Leone Police as part of the JSDP is the accountability. There are some mechanisms of internal accuracy that have been ongoing for a while, the CDIID (Complaints, Discipline, Internal Investigation Department) for instance, the complaint investigations. What is the JSDP focusing on now? Is it external accountability mechanisms? BRADLEY: Yes, it is probably a three-pronged attack there. The first is supporting the CDIID, internal investigations, to build their capacity. The second, the biggest challenge in there is that it is not seen as a good position. People don't, even myself as a policeman, feel a threat with internal investigations came knocking on your door. What we're suggesting here is to try to make it more attractive for people to serve, that everybody who want to go to senior management rank should do time in internal investigations. So if you want to go up to superintendent for example or Assistant Inspector General, you should have at least spent one year in internal investigations. So it is part of their career path. Again from background and experience, if you're managing, you need to be able to manage the good things in life as well as the challenges in life where discipline is a problem, or corruption is a problem, or bad behavior is a problem. That's on the first level. The second level is working now with the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Inspector-General of police. I've been here six months, one month ago after going through this whole series of problems and press reports and things like this, there has been a change in attitude. I'm not saying it's from my pressure, but there has been a change in attitude and both the Inspector-General and the Minister of Internal Affairs have requested a feasibility study on the establishment of an independent police complaints body. That was part of my terms of reference, but the tactics of how to achieve that is a difficult part. You don't go out and spell it out but you put the problems amongst in the areas that are key and then let them make the decision in the end that it is a good idea. The third area that is really at the grassroots level within policing is the police partnership boards where they're working with the community. The community holds them more to account because they're working with them on a weekly or fortnightly basis, identifying problems. Then if those problems are not fixed, the community is calling them to account. Then we have all the oversight ones like the press, the NGOs, the courts, monitoring in different areas. But the key to the police are probably those three. There are plenty of bodies there keeping them accountable without calling upon any corruption commission, ombudsman, etc. BOUTELLIS: We've looked at a number of different areas, now looking into broader reform process, security sector reform process in Sierra Leone. The JSDP is based on some of the priorities identified, are there some major challenges that we haven't talked about that you'd like to mention? BRADLEY: Yes, I still there are probably two arms within the police force, within this one here. If we look at the Operations Support Group they're very much for public order and there is still a perception that public order is a big problem. It's interesting here when you look at people's complaints, how they're handled differently, whether they're resolved through the courts, whether they're resolved through community dispute mechanisms or resolved at the chieftain level here. You can see that there are challenges. But to put an armed police group in immediately is difficult. If I take Cambodia and the use of what they call the flying tigers or the military in land disputes, people are shot and killed simply because they're complaining, it's the wrong tactic. Working with the Secretary of State in Cambodia we went through quite a few traumas there. There were seven people shot in one incident in a land dispute. The same week there were eleven shot in a prison escape. When I went in there we used to meet regularly, once, twice, three times a week, sometimes once a week, once a fortnight. But when it came to this he was significantly concern. There's a problem of command, there's a problem of management. I said first of it's a problem of policy. You can't put these things down to the poor old operator on the ground. If you look at the policy of the military being deployed on land disputes armed, they have no other choice but weapons. The policy of deploying military really is not appropriate, it's a civilian conflict and the process should go through the courts. If you looked at the policy in respect to the prison escape example, the policy of deploying firearms inside the confines of a compound is wrong. We spoke about this before. They need to be kept outside the compound, it's too easy. So a lot of things come out of those sort of conflicts. The biggest thing is getting the policy right in these elements so you don't get circumstances where people are killed or injured through inappropriate use of resources, meaning military resources rather than police resources. BOUTELLIS: From your long experience, are there any innovations or experiments that you in your current position or previous positions, that you think merit more attention, things that have been tried, success stories. You mentioned earlier here the Family Support Unit success story. Are there others that you can think of right now? BRADLEY: I think if I go back to working with the UN, one of the things that, I don't think there have been lessons learned. I've been on those missions that I mentioned and one of the problems with the UN is that the lessons learned are never transcribed to the next mission. I think I've been involved in setting up and writing administration and operations manuals probably for three different missions because from the previous mission nothing is carried over. So there is a loss of corporate knowledge there. In respect of initiatives I think here, the one that I really like with the JSDP is the community based resolution processes here, they're using here the Market Women's Association. That is I think reducing a lot of the tension and conflict with all levels which normally would get into the courts, involve the courts. The Family Support Unit is probably similar to a lot of democratic countries being set up with a lot more sophistication. Here it is providing a tremendous opportunity for women to have a voice, a place to go in post conflict situations. There's a lot of domestic violence, there's a lot of alcohol around. Now we're seeing drugs, similar to the experience in Cambodia and elsewhere also coming on the scene. The biggest challenge I think here is now trying to handle the juveniles. If you look at the bulge in the juvenile population that is going to take place over the next few years, same in all countries in post conflict, there's a youth bulge in statistics, trying to address those people. That's where I think the important thing of things like this initiative of the police partnership boards, community policing where you're getting down and getting to know people. Looking at the other alternatives crime prevention is being sort of left behind and now the Criminal Justice Project wasn't part of the first phase we were working on. Then we conducted a crime victims' survey at the end of the first phase. As a result of that we realized that 96% of violent crimes against women, domestic violence, sexual assaults, etc., were not being reported to the authorities, no action. There were no community-based mechanisms to try and resolve those, such as the Family Support Unit. Similarly, crimes against the poor were not being addressed. Ninety-eight percent of the crimes were against poor people, whether it be stolen motorcycle, bicycle, cows, livestock, were not being reported to the police because they had no trust in the police. So getting the police down to the community policing level, walking and talking with the community, can build so much trust and it also can monitor and assist in resolving these problems with young youths and juveniles because you get to know them on a first name basis. From my experience, if you can speak with people, particularly young people, in the end they'll turn over, they'll become your best informants. Not that you're trying to recruit them as informants, but they'll just tell you things that are going on and then you can use that intelligence appropriately. BOUTELLIS: One last question if you'll allow me. You already mentioned the importance of trying to transfer UN lessons learned from mission to mission. You've worked in a number of UN missions. If you could create a wish list of two or three changes in UN internal management or policy that would help you or your colleagues serving in the UN do their job more effectively what would these be? BRADLEY: I think we've touched on a couple of them there. The resourcing, early resourcing is an important thing. As I said, that's one of the reasons why deploying with a strategy, make sure you take sufficient for all your operations, to set up and get established. The second thing, the recruitment of people for senior positions. One of the difficulties the UN faces is that they need to show a broad range of nationalities or countries serving in the top echelon of UN CIVPOL for example and that's challenging when you don't know the people. Looking at Andy Hughes' position now, it would be nice to think that he could have a core of people that previously had been identified, even backers, so he's got a group of people that are on standby for deployment in certain key positions, particularly for operations, that's a key one. Communications is key, administration. Probably the final one is the support mechanisms of the UN finances. There has been so much trauma, delays in people being deployed in the field because the finance systems haven't worked. So you have people sitting around in country being paid 95, 110 dollars US a day, living allowance, but they spend in the capital city, not where they're supposed to be because the process is so slow. So getting through that bureaucracy. On the operations side which I assume is being addressed now is one consistent UN training manual that cuts across all countries and then in the pre-departure on any mission is that there is a good package presented on the operating environment, the history of conflicts and things like that which normally you have to chase up and find yourself most of the time before deployment. It's a lot of home-grown research before you can get anything done. BOUTELLIS: Bob Bradley, thank you very much. BRADLEY: Thank you so much Arthur. Innovations for Successful Societies Series: Policing Oral History Program Interview number: I-2 ______________________________________________________________________ 2 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