[Hands Off Venezuela] Venezuela Passes National Police Law

[Hands Off Venezuela]

Venezuela Passes National Police Law
April 11th 2008, by James Suggett - Venezuelanalysis.com

President Hugo Chávez passed by presidential law-decree Wednesday the law
(ABN)

Mérida, April 10, 2008 (venezuelanalysis.com)-- Venezuelan President Hugo
Chávez promulgated the Organic Law of Police Service and National Police
by presidential decree Wednesday, creating the legal framework for a
single, integrated, national "revolutionary police of the People," after
nearly 6 years of legislative debate and public consultation. Chavez
passed the law under the 18-month law-decree authority that the National
Assembly had given him last year for this purpose.

Chávez acknowledged Wednesday evening that citizen security "has been
deteriorating." He advocated "profound changes" in order to "finish
demolishing the old, repressive police model with education, conscience,
social organization, and prevention."

The president said the "capitalist" police forces of the past, which have
been "generators of police abuses, not in the rich zones, but in the poor
barrios," will be gradually transformed into "communal police" that are
"close to the citizens, dialogue-oriented, preventative, which shall be
loved by the People and not feared by the People, and shall be part of the
People."

Local community councils, which have proliferated since a 2006 law was
created to facilitate their formation, will manage "security modules in
each barrio," where they will "work with the new police," Chávez
envisioned, emphasizing the preponderant role of governors, mayors, police
academies, and local populations in this process.

Chávez called for "the best young men and women" to comprise the new brand
of humanist police who will be the model for this "transformation from
within the current police." They will go through a "very rigorous" and
"meticulous" selection process headed up by the Minister of Justice and
the Interior Ramón Rodríguez Chacín.

The minister commented that the new law will fill in the "empty spaces" in
the present system. "We must mobilize the battalions," Chacín remarked,
referring to the newly formed United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV),
and "go house to house to exhibit the law, explaining the benefits and the
co-responsibility that we have in this initiative."

Zuleima Flores, the spokesperson of a Caracas community council, said the
"soul of this new police will rest in the amount of solidarity that exists
between the security forces, the communities, and the People
that is why
we should collaborate and understand that these new police will be new
citizens in our communities."

Similarly, the Venezuelan Attorney General, Luisa Ortega Díaz, said in a
radio interview, "to the extent that the police remain close to people, to
the extent that the police participate in community issues... we will
attenuate the violence and crime will diminish," adding that "we are going
to improve the conditions of the prisons, too."

This constitutes the "integral format" of the new system, which improves
citizen access to the levers of justice, in the opinion of Luisa Estela
Morales, the president of the Supreme Court of Venezuela.

A prominent sceptic of the law is Eliseo Guzmán, the former director of
Venezuela`s investigative police, who admitted he had not yet read the
law. Designating a single national police body is unnecessary and brings
with it "a lot of inconveniences," Guzmán commented Wednesday to the
Venezuelan daily El Nacional. He suggested that the government should have
opted to improve the legal framework already in place, asserting, "we have
police, but what we do not have is a functional coordination among all the
actors."

Guzmán also expressed that too many different proposals of the law had
been circulated through a confusing array of constituencies during the
formation process, rather than being sufficiently analyzed by what he
called "specialists" in criminal justice.

The National Assembly initiated discussions of police reform in 2002 and
created the National Police Reform Commission (CONAREPOL), which organized
a nation-wide, community-based deliberation process during which
approximately 700,000 Venezuelans participated in local police reform
conferences, culminating in 2006. The council produced a report based on
public recommendations that became the basis of the law which was passed
by presidential decree Wednesday.

All recent polls show that Venezuelans identify insecurity as the number
one problem in their country.

Even so, Chávez boasted of the "positive impact" of his administration`s
policies, citing a national poll conducted in March by the Venezuelan Data
Analysis Institute (IVAD) that showed the percentage of Venezuelans who
said that insecurity was the worst problem they faced dropped from 81.4%
to 69.5% since 2007.

In contrast, El Nacional highlighted the findings of the Datos polling
firm in late March, showing that between 34% and 41% of Venezuelans think
the president is "totally responsible" for the nation`s problems, security
being number one, while between 20% and 25% think he is "not at all
responsible."

The president also cited the 2007 annual poll of 18 Latin American
countries by the highly-respected Chilean polling firm Latinobarometro,
which reported that 38% of Venezuelans believed that "equal access to
justice" existed in their country, while the average for the rest of Latin
America was 22%.

In the same Latinobarometro study, however, Venezuela had the highest
percentage of people who said they or a relative of theirs had fallen
victim to a crime in the past year, with 49%, while the Latin America
average was 38%.