Despite knowing Luís Neves, the new Minister of Internal Administration, with whom I shared leadership roles at the Ministry of Justice for a few years, nothing personal leads me to defend or attack him at this moment. But there are very objective elements to praise it.
Firstly, because it publicly affirmed aspects of truth, when many were silently pastured in front of it. Which? For example, the difficulty in attracting and keeping decent people to join the security forces, given the salaries paid and the demands of the functions. With consequences that have been visible, whether on the Beja plain or in selection apparent from Esquadra do Rato, in Lisbon, despite normalizing it as just another fact, just another event, just another piece of news, just another small anomaly, just another – doubly so – a police case… Or the unacceptable identity between the increase in immigration and the increase in crime, factually wrong at all levels, as has been presented by the Chega party, with the convenient and active bonhomie of the parties that support the current Government.
For better or worse, the Prime Minister has tried, perhaps with some naivety or, from another perspective, even with a true intention of decency, to accentuate elements of good in his choices for the Internal Administration. In three years, three ministers, it’s true. With different profiles: a prosecutor who, as is the group’s prerogative, always tried to escape justice and seek other roles, progressing in her original career, supposedly with a bad mood; a Law professor, full-fledged, working at the time as Ombudsman, who knew everything about the substance of the matter on which the men’s interim tenure was based, but was apparently out of touch with due communication time, and would not treat mayors and firefighters, her clientele after all, with due deference; and the director of the Judiciary Police until now. That there will be nothing extraordinary: other than having been an excellent director of the Judiciary Police since 2018, the best police service we have here, in fact continuing a legacy started by Minister Alberto Costa, when in office in Justice, with the then unprecedented appointment of Almeida Rodrigues, placing for the first time a PJ inspector as its director instead of the usual judge or prosecutor, proof of trust, now accentuated, in the value of those who effectively combat crime and do not speak or decide about him.
The previous holders – in a bad mood or because they were not fond of drinking at humanitarian associations – quickly collapsed. Now it will be the turn of the new owner, who already knows the news circuit, and who knows well how to distinguish the essential from the accessory and the appropriate from the necessary.
And what is asked of a minister and a government in the area of Internal Administration, this detail? Always having to make choices, priority would have to be given to the structural rather than the episodic.
The response to extreme weather phenomena is, fortunately, still the domain of the occasional. Its prevention and preparation is not.
The training of security forces for a new era, including their capacity to recruit personnel and internal training and selection, is equally decisive.
And the profitable and effective operational organization of devices that can respond to a rapidly changing social context, with adequate information management and technology, is fundamental, frustrating, if necessary, institutional chapels and legacies from other times. And this goes for firefighters, police officers and intelligence criminal.
Three simple aims in their text formulation… It is hoped that the Government will be able to respond to them.
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