Cardona
MPSA 2004
15
In countries more advanced than our own, aspirants [to the police force] submit themselves to a
competitive process and spots are given to those who have better service records from the Navy or
the Army. The selected then go on to special schools to complete their professional instruction and
later be initiated in the delicate duties of their charge. This gives them the right, according to their
conduct, to retirement funds or pensions that are more or less comfortable. I have said before that
police employees must be well paid, an indispensable condition for them to be able to dedicate
themselves completely to public service without the concerns generated by the daily necessities of
life. [As a result,] I judge that there should be organized a body of national police, to depend
directly from the Governor of Cundinamarca province, but paid by the national Government and
with Chiefs and Officers named by the national government. (Memoria de Gobierno 1888: 66,
author’s translation).
Here we have a fundamental question with respect to the institutional design of the public
forces laid out in a clear fashion. The questions of who should pay the salaries of police
and to whom they should report would recur in the evolution of municipal and
departmental police in future decades.
In addition, the fact that this appeal for professional police comes from the
Minister of Government and not the Minister of War (Defense) reflects the model of
policing that the Regeneration sought to emulate: the French one, in which police take on
an eminently “civilist” role and bear a close relationship with the central government.
This model contrasts with a more Anglo-Saxon alternative, in which each local town or
municipality has its independent police force and there is little, if any, national
coordination. (Rico 1983). In adopting the French model to Colombian reality,
Regeneration policy-makers contracted directly with the French government to hire the
first director of the National Police, Jean Marie Gilibert, who wrote the first Police Code
in 1891.
Convention