With few exceptions, the intellectual, political, economic, trade union and religious elites have never paid attention to the police: its organization, customs and needs, note Luis Eduardo Solares and Miriam Guindani. [La tragedia brasileña: la violencia estatal y social y las políticas de seguridad necesarias, Ed. Prometeo, Buenos Aires, 2010].
This indifference changes when the issue of public safety is brought up in debates in which these elites get involved, because there, yes, the police are talked about as a fundamental problem.
When a crime leads to serious consequences, the focus is on people in uniform, especially those in charge of day-to-day relations with the citizens, such as the municipal police, and upwards, all the way to joining the armed forces.
Consequently, the perception of the effectiveness of power structures, paradoxically, the greater, the less contact they have with the ruled.
For Hegel [Principios de la filosofía del derecho] the presence of the police indicates the effective development of the law in the state; The police assume the existence of justice. “It is born from law and arises from that first form of law applied to civil society, which is justice.”
It is necessary that there not only be laws, courts, judges, so that the police begin to exist, but it is also necessary, and above all, that the administration of justice “become customary.”
If the existence of the police presupposes the existence of a security and law enforcement system, then the fate of all subsystems depends on its effectiveness.
If a police officer presents a criminal before a court that cannot properly charge him, this breeds impunity and exhausts a complex and risky function; if the prosecutor rightly accuses, and the judge out of negligence, fear, or corruption releases the offender, the effect is doubly harmful; If a judge issues a sentence and leaves the convicted (or accused) in the hands of the penitentiary system, and there are no mechanisms for disqualification in places of deprivation of liberty, the problem is transferred from the streets to prisons. To interpret Hegel, the police will be effective when the society they serve and the system to which they belong are dominated by the idea of justice as a habit.
The police are not the cause of insecurity and violence. It is a sacrifice to the health of the system itself. The debate on the transfer of the National Guard to the Minister of National Defense (Sedene) shows how far we are from what is relevant and shows a different reality: when politics is useless for the purposes of the state, the idea of the police as the source and solution of evils, as argued by Hélène L’Eille [Baja política, alta policía, Ed. Prometeo, Buenos Aires, 2009].
To think that the organic dependence of the public safety organ is fundamental is to ignore the Hegelian approach to the need for a “custom of justice” throughout the system.
The police are not the source of evil, and it is better to save them from indifference. It is the health of the system and the absence of a “custom of fairness” in society and institutions that should be the focus of debate and attention.
MANELICH CASTILLA CRAVIOTO
EMPLOYEE
@MANELICCHCC
BUDDY
Source: Heraldo De Mexico
Ray Bly is an accomplished journalist in the field of Automobile. He currently works as a writer at 24 news breaker. With a deep understanding of the Automotive industry and a talent for uncovering the latest developments, Ray’s writing provides readers with insightful and informative coverage of the latest news and trends in the field.