'No magic bullets': Can the Papua New Guinea public and the police learn to get along?

In recent weeks, RNZ Pacific has been looking at the issues confronting policing in Papua New Guinea.

There have long been issues of police brutality being meted out to members of the PNG public, while the Royal Papua New Guinea Constabulary faces an increasingly tough environment, underpowered, under-resourced, and underappreciated.

Recently, a PNG police commander lamented that the public no longer respects the police as they did when he was a young recruit.

RNZ Pacific asked security expert Professor Sinclair Dinnen from the Australian National University's Coral Bell School of Asia-Pacific Affairs, what is going on and how to turn it around.

(This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity).

SINCLAIR DINNEN: The first thing I would say is that none of this, unfortunately, is that terribly new.

And really, what we're seeing is a sort of continuation of a pattern of police community relations that goes back many, many years in Papua New Guinea.

It's kind of difficult to measure with any degree of accuracy. But I think popular discontent with the police in Papua New Guinea is something that has remained relatively constant, certainly over the years that, I've been looking at it.

Possibly more in the news of late with a lot more social media and other ways of capturing behaviour on the part of the police that contributes to that discontent.

DON WISEMAN: We did last week have a senior policeman in the National Capital District speaking out about the very large number, as he saw it, of people appearing, this was just in the Boroko District Court on charges of attacks on police or refusing arrest or whatever. Nine, I think it was, in one week, and he said that this would not have happened when he began as a policeman many years ago.

SD: Or perhaps they wouldn't have been arrested. I mean, who knows what lies behind that particular increase in one court in Port Moresby.

But the larger picture is one of a kind of police force that has never really, in recent times, had the kind of support that it needs from the community in order to do its job.

Policing in Papua New Guinea and in a kind of democratic setting, to a large extent, depends on consent. And I think what we've seen over many years, is a fraying of that consent. Some of which can be attributed to behaviour on the part of the police itself. Others probably relate to the fairly violent context in which many people find themselves living in in PNG.

There are a lot of sort of social stresses, or a lot of pressures that have manifested in violent behaviour. If anything, those sorts of issues, which are usually talked about as law and order problems, have increased, and that's placed great pressure on the police, but also great pressure on the people in the broader community and their expectations of the police to be able to assist them to do something about it.

Police are simply not in a position to help out in many respects. The police are very thin on the ground. Their numbers have not really increased significantly since independence, despite the fact that the overall population has more than trebled.

There are a lot more issues, such as the availability of firearms and the use of those firearms for defensive purposes, for criminal purposes, in the context of sort of tribal conflicts, in the context of election related activities, the environment, the context of policing, has changed quite dramatically over the years.

And if anything, that's placed more challenges on the police as well as the wider public, but the police have not been particularly well equipped in order to deal with those. There's a lot of disappointment and frustration in the broader public with the limitations of policing.

Against that background, we've seen a massive growth of private security. Private security guards probably outnumber the combined numbers in the police and the Defence Force and the Correctional Services - PNG's three disciplined forces.

Whenever you go to Papua New Guinea, the first thing you see are security, private security everywhere. That is one indication of kind of discontent with the police and looking for other options in terms of security.

But of course, private security is only available to those who can afford it.

DW: You've touched on a few of the things that need to happen. But this is not a situation that can be allowed to continue, if the country's going to advance and prosper. So what can be done to turn it round?

SD: Well, if there were any magic bullets or quick fixes, I'm sure they would have been tried by now.

As you're well aware, donors, traditional partners, including New Zealand and significantly Australia, have been working with the RPNGC over many years.

In the case of Australia, really going back to the 1980s, with significant sort of inputs in terms of attempts to improve the efficacy of the RPNGC, often talked about in terms of capacity.

DW: Has that actually achieved anything?

SD: It's a very good question. In some areas, it may have done. But overall, the results are really quite difficult to discern, perhaps. I should say that that is not unique to PNG.

What's often referred to as police building where external police forces try to help develop the capacity of a domestic police actor, have not been that successful, really, anywhere, although in many places have been more successful than PNG.

But it's not a it's not a simple sort of process. So that's one thing. I think what it's possibly done is provide technical assistance in certain areas where that sort of technical assistance was not available. But in terms of applying it on the ground, it's a very difficult situation for PNG police to operate in, and potentially a very dangerous environment as well.

Police don't feel that they're particularly well looked after by government and so on. We, in fact, saw at the beginning of 2024 what was in effect a police strike, which led to widespread looting, especially in Port Moresby, but also in some other places.

There's a lot of discontent and grievance within the police. If you want to put that another way: if you don't have high morale amongst your police, or a certain level of morale, that in itself, is a kind of recipe for police misbehaviour or underperformance, or whatever you want to call it.

I think there are issues about, putting it fairly blandly, that often you end up with a police force you deserve, and if the police force are not looked after in terms of their conditions and other things that can contribute to the kind of problems that we're talking about today.

But of course, that's not the only factor at play. I did mention there the pretty extraordinary law and order environment in which the police are expected to operate.

If you just take the Highlands, for example, where in effect, you have these small wars being conducted with high powered military firearms, even nowadays the use of drones, but really high powered guns, mercenaries being employed by different groups to fight in these things.

What would the New Zealand police do in a situation like that? That is not a kind of traditional policing environment, and yet, the PNG police force are expected to operate across all these different environments with pretty minimal resources.

I think we need to spend a little bit more time trying to understand this context in which this lack of improvement and in many respects, backward movement, of deterioration, is taking place.

There are lots of very complex factors at play here, some of them within the institution of the police themselves, but many of them also to do with the larger environment in which they're operating.

DW: We know the force is ridiculously small. How big should it be? Do you think now if the population is 10 or 11 million?

SD: The UN has a recommended police to population ratio of, you know, one police officer to every 450 people. Well, the sort of figure, insofar as we can estimate, and the figures are always very wobbly in PNG, is one police officer to over 1145 people.

Now that's a an aggregate figure. It doesn't tell us about the dispersal of the police, their distribution. There are many parts of Papua New Guinea where that figure is likely to be much, much higher. It may be very difficult to find any police in certain parts. They tend to be concentrated in urban areas, whereas a large majority of Papua New Guineans live in rural areas.

A lot of the sort of conflict and the violence that we see in parts of rural areas like the Highlands essentially resort to self help policing in the absence of state policing.

The actual distribution of the police in a place like Papua New Guinea is also a big issue. Not just the numbers of police available, it's how they are allocated.

So again, these are not new issues, Don, they've been around forever, and there's been endless sort of commitments to, you know, increasing the size of the police.

I think under the current government, they're hoping to add another 10,000 police officers onto what is probably about 6,500 sworn officers at the moment. We're not absolutely certain, but that's probably the figure.

DW: They've [the Marape Government has] added almost none.

SD: Yeah, yeah. We've been hearing politicians talking about this forever. Each administration says, Oh no, we're going to double the number of police. We're going to do this. We're going to do that. But nothing really eventuates.

DW: It's two years out from the next election. The last two election cycles have been the two most violent to date. It doesn't augur well for the next one, does it? Can anything be done between now and the election in two years time to improve the prospects of a more secure election?

SD: I think it's not a new issue and it is the sort of situation that has been getting progressively worse, certainly in some parts of the country. But problems that initially were sort of viewed as being largely confined to certain areas. Notably, election related violence in the Highlands seems to have spread to some other parts.

In the last election we saw election related violence in the National Capital District, essentially Port Moresby, so it tends to sort of travel. There's really two ways of looking at that. One is how to improve the kind of security operation that goes on around elections.

And there is a big, always a big emphasis on a sort of major security operation, which includes the police. But also includes the Defence Force, and includes the Correctional Services, those arms of the three discipline services that I mentioned earlier on.

So they work together, and they sort of travel around, in accordance with the kind of voting which takes place in different places at different times. A massive exercise, a very expensive exercise where a lot of the kind of movement has to take place by air because of the lack of roads in some rural areas. So that massive operation, can it be more effective?

A lot of the kind of conflict occurs, when the security operation has moved on to the next place. This conflict will erupt after they have gone. They can't be everywhere at one time. Can a security operation like that be improved? Of course, it can be improved.

I'm sure there are people sitting down already beginning to plan the next operation, and you know what lessons were learned from the last one? But the second, probably even more critical issue to consider, Don, is what is leading to the kind of violent conflict that we see increasing in the electoral context, guns is one issue, the widespread availability of these high powered weapons.

Where are they coming from? Who's distributing them, who's buying them, where's the ammunition coming from? All those sort of things have to be looked at. In addition, many people would suspect that political players are involved in stirring up these sorts of conflicts for their electoral advantage.

Politics is really the main game, the primacy of politics in Papua New Guinea speaks to the fact that getting into political office is the way to access resources. There are few alternatives to that. There isn't a massive private sector as such. The private sector that does exist, obviously, in the resource development side of things, is largely owned by multinationals and operated by multinationals.

It is not necessarily open to Papua New Guineans, and we're talking about really high levels of poverty and increasing levels of poverty in many parts of the country, growing inequalities and grievances. So the expectations by people of their elected members is going up and up and up and up.

People really expect, their sole expectations, of being able to access services and development, rely on them getting their person up in the election. And so the disappointment about not succeeding in that class that also contributes to the sort of conflict.

The stakes in electoral competition are increasing, and that's a kind of reflection of the political economy in PNG, where so much depends on, you know, having your member in office looking after your community, or being able to access resources and bring them back home.

So that kind of politics is a massive issue, and again, a very complex one for which there are no magic bullets.

But I mean electoral reform and other areas are really required, other kind of measures are really required in trying to address that broader issue, to try and reduce the stakes, if you like, what's happened over many years is that service delivery has been increasingly taken over by individual Members of Parliament who now have access to large amounts of what used to be called discretionary funds.

These funds are taken away from bureaucratic service delivery. The sort of public service providers service delivery is going down as the money is taken away. It is increasingly individual members of parliament who provide those services by using their discretionary funds to that effect.

So, that increases their importance in the eyes of their constituents, which increases the extraordinary competitiveness of elections and the very high stakes that are involved, and that's the kind of context of electoral violence.