Our View: Officials persist in believing they can fight crime with words

A public prosecutor’s car was set ablaze on Tuesday evening in Paphos. Four weeks earlier, a bomb was placed under the car of another Paphos-based state counsel outside her home in Anavargos. Earlier this week a police officer’s car was also set on fire.

Violence is not restricted to the Paphos district. On Monday evening, on a busy Nicosia road, shots were fired at a car while the driver’s son went into a shop. His 15-year-old daughter was in the back seat. Nobody was injured. On the same day shots were fired at a house in Geri, presumably as a warning to someone.

The new minister of justice and public order, Marios Hartsiotis, was rather unfortunate with his timing, as earlier on Monday during a visit to police headquarters in Nicosia he declared that his ‘first priority’ was to restore people’s ‘sense of security’. He had been in the job for less than a week so he cannot take any responsibility for the situation, even though his comments were a reminder of how officials seem to think they can fight crime with words.

“This was a brazen, criminal attack against a colleague that rocks the foundations of the state,” said attorney-general George Savvides, who went to Paphos on Wednesday for a meeting with Hartsiotis and the police chief. There was no more room for tolerance, he said, before resorting, like the minister, to big words.

“What is certain is that we continue steadfastly in the execution of our high mission for the rule of law and justice,” he assured. The reality is that the law enforcement authorities have not been very successful in executing this high mission. Last October two men with links to organised crime were shot dead, while there have also been cases of shots fired at the house of a well-known Nicosia lawyer without anyone being arrested.

The general impression is that there is no rule of law in the case of members of organised crime who operate with impunity. Is this because they intimidate and threaten violence against witnesses, police and prosecutors? If this is the case, it would suggest that organised crime may have won the war with the authorities and is now in control, a terrifying prospect.

Facts would indicate the police have failed and so has the state prosecution service to deal with crime. And words about “ensuring the security and sense of security of citizens”, repeated by the government spokesman on Tuesday, have a hollow ring. There needs to be a plan of action and practical measures for fighting organised crime and for ensuring people’s sense of security. Crime cannot be defeated by words, nor can it be by placing more policemen on patrol as Hartsiotis said he would do.

The police need to have a plan and to act. There is no other way of combatting organised crime and ensuring people live with a sense of security.