Latest news with #RoyalPapuaNewGuineaConstabulary
RNZ News
22-05-2025
- RNZ News
PNG kidnapping: Five schoolgirls and health worker still held hostage after armed abduction
Police says the area where the kidnappers are hiding is dense jungle with no road or water access. Photo: AFP / Chris McCALL Five schoolgirls and a male community health worker remain in captivity nearly two weeks after an armed kidnapping in Western Province, Papua New Guinea. A man, woman and a teacher managed to escape, and the health worker's wife was released the day of the abduction on 12 May. The kidnappers, a group of armed men from Hela Province, abducted the victims from Adjumari Village in the Middle Fly District. The victims are believed to be held near the border of Western Province and the Southern and Hela Provinces. The kidnappers are demanding a ransom of 550,000 kina (around US$132,000), and community members have been raising funds. Police say that the motive involves a police shooting and the alleged killing of one of the group's members by local residents. The Royal Papua New Guinea Constabulary has mobilised in response, but there is major concern within the community at what they see as the slow police response. However, police have pointed out that the area where the kidnappers are hiding is dense jungle with no road or water access. Three suspects have been apprehended - one shot dead while trying to escape, and the other two have been transferred to Kiunga - located near the Indonesian border in the Western Province - for investigation. Additional police officers have been deployed for search and rescue operations, with assistance from Ok Tedi Mining and Santos. Border Command assistant commissioner Steven Francis Photo: Supplied "Our strategic partners acted swiftly and decisively to support our police requirements at a time when internal constraints limited our operational capacity," Border Command assistant commissioner Steven Francis said. "Their contribution has been instrumental in our ongoing efforts to rescue the remaining hostages and bring the perpetrators to justice," he said. According to police, the community has so far raised 12,000 kina to try and meet the ransom demand. PNG Police Commissioner David Manning said in a statement that they will use the country's newly enacted counter-terrorism laws to apprehend the kidnappers. "This is an act of domestic terrorism, and security personnel are authorised to use full force against the kidnappers if the hostages are not released safely," he was quoted as saying by the newspaper. He added that "third parties" should "stay out of the situation" and allow the police to do its job.
RNZ News
15-05-2025
- Politics
- RNZ News
'No magic bullets': Can the Papua New Guinea public and the police learn to get along?
The public no longer respects the police as they did, according to a PNG police commander. Photo: AFP/RNZ Pacific 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. A police landcruiser patrols the streets of the Papua New Guinea capital Port Moresby. Photo: RNZ Pacific/ Koroi Hawkins 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.
RNZ News
13-05-2025
- RNZ News
Can PNG police win back the public's respect?
In PNG, assaulting a police officer is a serious offence under the Summary Offences Act 1977 and carries a hefty fine. Photo: Twitter: @Mangiwantok A police commander in Papua New Guinea's National Capital District is concerned that the public no longer respects the police. Assistant Commissioner Benjamin Turi points to nine cases of resisting and assaulting police officers that appeared before the Boroko District Court this past week alone. The Post-Courier reported him saying that when he joined the police force, such disrespect was unheard of: "Respect was given and it showed in the way the public responded when a police officer issued a command." He said now that the person in a blue uniform is not safe is a sad day for the Royal Papua New Guinea Constabulary and for the country. In PNG, assaulting a police officer is a serious offence under the Summary Offences Act 1977 and carries a hefty fine. Our correspondent in PNG Scott Waide has been looking at police deaths dating back to 2017. (This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.) SCOTT WAIDE: I compiled a few figures about three months ago, just trying to understand how bad it was, and I counted at least 24 police officers who had been killed in the line of duty, and these are people who have either been shot, stabbed or just killed in various different ways, plane crashes and all that, but just attacks on police officers. A lot of those attacks have been in the Highlands. There are others as well, in Alotau, West New Britain, East New Britain, attacked in the line of duty whilst performing an arrest or just driving through locations that are dangerous. So yes, it is a big problem. Families of police officers have come out and stated, off the record of course, that their husbands, their wives, are not adequately protected while they're out in the field. A lot of police officers, policemen that I've spoken to, have expressed that a lot of times, when they go into trouble spots, they are ill equipped, like they don't have the body armour or the helmets that are needed. So there is a big problem. DON WISEMAN: I guess one of the big problems as well, the numbers [of police] not big enough are they? SW: One of the big concerns is that the officers who are being deployed are just overworked, and they're stressed. For example, Governor Alan Bird was talking about a mobile squad unit from Wewak that has been on permanent deployment in the Highlands for months and months. That means they're away from their families for several months, you know, upwards of half a year, and there's really no rest and recreation for them to regenerate and go back on duty. The numbers are too small to deal with a country like Papua New Guinea. DW: Now an assistant commissioner in the National Capital District, has pointed out that in the past week there have been nine cases of resisting and assaulting police just in the Boroko District Court alone. Benjamin Turi is saying in the past, well, when he began as a policeman, such incidents were very, very rare, and he wonders why people seem to have lost their respect for police. SW: There are several contributing factors, and one of them has been police attitudes towards the public, and police brutality towards the public. That has also been a contributing factor, and the general loss of trust over time, that's also another major contributing factor. The public has in many places, lost respect for police. There are also good commanders out there who have tried to restore order, restore the respect for police. The situation in Lae, especially where I live, is vastly different from other places, where you have a lot of respect for police, and it took a long time to get there. Took at least a decade to get there. DW: What happened in Lae to get there? SW: Well, firstly, there was a reorganisation of the Police Public Relations, going out and talking to communities, getting community involvement. There's a law and order committee set up for Lae and there's an active Whatsapp group that they use where police officers are available, and the numbers of policemen who have committed offences and [whose actions] have been reported have been acted on by their commanders. It's restored that trust in in the public. So that needs to happen, in my opinion, that needs to happen in every other town and city as well. But it's a slow, slow process. I mean, if Lae took 10 years, then it will take just about the same time in other places as well. DW: Well, a critical issue, of course, for Papua New Guinea is election time, and it's been a pretty bad time for police. Hasn't it going back over the last several elections. So the new election coming up in two years time, one would be hoping that things are going to be a lot better. Are there any signs that the government is putting greater resources toward police to improve things. SW: There are efforts being put in by the government. There's new vehicles being bought, additional manpower being trained, the middle management of the police being up skilled and new people recruited. But the numbers are just too small to deal with the population. Like Papua New Guinea talking about the elections, there's a large number of guns in the Highlands. And generally, if you talk to members of the disciplinary forces - the PNG Defence Force, the police - they will tell you that when they go into the villages, they're largely outnumbered and outgunned by tribesmen who are very heavily armed during elections.
RNZ News
12-05-2025
- Politics
- RNZ News
Pacific news in brief for 12 May
Papua New Guinea police Photo: RNZ / Johnny Blades A police commander in Papua New Guinea's National Capital District is worried that the public no longer respects police. Assistant Commissioner Benjamin Turi points to nine cases of resisting and assaulting a member of the police before the Boroko District Court last week alone. The Post-Courier reported him saying that when he joined the police force, such disrespect was unheard of - that "respect was given and it showed in the way the public responded when a police officer issued a command." He said the person in a blue uniform is not safe and there is no respect, which is a sad day for the Royal Papua New Guinea Constabulary and for the country. In PNG, assaulting a police officer is a serious offence under the Summary Offences Act 1977, carrying a hefty fine and a possible two-year jail term. Airbus has told Vanuatu media about the usual arrangements when there is a failure to complete an aircraft purchase, amid concern over Vanuatu's aircraft deal. In response to questions from the Vanuatu Daily Post , an Airbus spokesperson declined to comment on the specifics of the Vanuatu Government's arrangement, citing company policy. However, the spokesperson said any contractual default or failure to take delivery of an aircraft causes major costs and damages for the aircraft manufacturer. They said in such cases, it is standard industry practice for pre-delivery payments to be forfeited. The Vanuatu government has recently reaffirmed the VUV2 billion (US$16.5 million) deposit remains safe and talks are continuing regarding the aircraft purchase. Fijian Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka says his predecessor Frank Bainimarama cannot contest next years' election because he is facing further charges. Rabuka told FijiLive that even if the former prime minister had his corruption conviction quashed by the Appeal Court, he has other cases pending. Former Attorney-General Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum hit back, asking if Rabuka already knew Bainimarama would be found guilty. The former military head is facing one count of abuse of office and one of unwarranted demand in the Magistrates Court. A new vessel aimed at improving disaster response and development on Fiji's remote islands is being procured under Japan's Economic Social Development Programme. Fiji and Japan have signed an exchange of notes to formalise the funding of approximately $US12 million. Fijian Prime Minister Rabuka said the new vessel will enhance their ability to respond quickly to emergencies and deliver relief supplies, but it also has non-disaster roles. He said said Japan's support comes at a time when the need for climate resilience and disaster preparedness has never been more critical. A second by-election has been ordered in the Lagaip seat of Enga Province in Papua New Guinea, after MP Amos Joseph Akem was found guilty of bribery. Akem had won the by-election in 2023. This was held after the vote in 2022, won by Tomait Kapili, was declared failed because of the violence and intimidation that had surrounded it. Four more people died in the violence surrounding the vote in the 2023 by-election. Kapili had cited bribery allegations following the 2023 poll and these have been upheld in the National Court at Waigani. A Papua New Guinea Government official says they are committed to transferring PNG's 36.4 percent shareholding in Bougainville Copper Limited (BCL) to the Autonomous Bougainville Government. BCL chairman Sir Mel Togolo said once finalised, "the ABG and people of Bougainville will become for the first time BCL's majority shareholder with a 72.9 per cent share in the company". The National reported him saying the ABG has been exploring arrangements whereby a suitable entity receives the shares free from stamp duty charges on transfer.
