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As these words were written, there is a firestorm of criticism directed at the Martinelli administration over a crisis in law enforcement. A day before these words were written the president announced that in the wake of Security Minister José Raúl Mulino's resignation he would not be getting rid of a police chief whose act of insubordination was a specific violation of Panama's constitution, but just shifting people around. With all of the criticism the foreign minister now suggests that Martinelli may back down on these moves.

With respect to Ricardo Martinelli's swap of jobs between Gustavo Pérez and Julio Moltó --- whom he said would be the new National Security Council director and National Police chief respectively --- I again find myself joining a lot of friends in criticizing what is being done with the police force, but with slightly different reasons.

At the end of the dictatorship it was thought that having a civilian National Police director was needed because the police and military ranks inherited from Noriega were so thoroughly corrupted that it wasn't a good idea to promote new leaders from within the force. There followed a succession of lawyers as police chiefs.

One of the checks on police misconduct was the Judicial Technical Police (PTJ), part of the Public Ministry rather than the Ministry of Government and Justice that included the National Police, who could conduct independent investigations of allegations against cops. However, at the end of the Torrijos administration and the beginning of the Martienlli administration the PTJ was merged into the National Police and turned into the DIJ, and thus lost its independent character.

For a number of reasons the post-dictatorship arrangement didn't work so well, but three of the worst problems were bribery and infiltration of all law enforcement, judicial and prosecutorial institutions by organized crime; subversion of all of these institutions' independence by politicians seeking to assert control on the one hand and people within the institutions seeking impunity for wrongdoing on the other; and demoralized cops. Making all of this impossibly worse was the fools' mission "War on Drugs" that successive governments have accepted from the United States and all of the silly sleeping with the enemy situations in which the DEA and other American forces have consequently found themselves in their delusional crusade.

There came a time in the Torrijos administration when someone got the idea that a police officer should become the police chief, and a law was passed providing that if that were to be the case, someone would have to be elevated to that post from among a small group of commissioners. However, the president could still appoint a civilian, including a former cop. The former police or military figures appointed by Torrijos and Martinelli have all come from sordid pasts in the dictatorship. So I joined with my friends in protesting the appointments of those folks, but I actually like the idea of the chief coming from the ranks of experienced police officers.

Panama's cops have under bad leadership been given such bad habits as "social prophilaxis" roundups, but even if they were deficient in modern technological capacities and prevented by politics from dealing with most white collar crime they actually are and have been pretty good at catching the right guys for stickups, family and neighborhood assaults and the other violent crimes that ordinary people who are not gangsters worry about. Police work is a dangerous profession that burns people out, and to which too many unethical people and sycophants have been attracted. Despite that there is a vast pool of honorable and clever police officers from which a good command structure can be recruited.

Police work can never pay enough to compete with the blandishments of organized crime and the solution to that is to end the War on Drugs and treat addiction as primarily a social and medical problem rather than a law enforcement matter. Getting that losing effort out of the way, police should be paid reasonably well but with a benefits package that takes into account the damaging nature of that job. Right now there are education benefits, and part of the deal should be that work on the police force can be also compensated by an education at any institution anywhere in the world in any subject, with the expectation that many of those who do acquire new skills will leave the force and take their educations into other lines of work. And these people would also form a pool from which police specialists and administrators could be promoted. The officer who got a Harvard MBA as a National Police benefit and then went to work at a bank or in the Colon Free Zone might come back to the force to head a sophisticated financial crimes unit. The cop who became a teacher might come back to command the juvenile unit. The police lieutenant who became administrator of a large public institution might jump ahead of the commissioners to become the new police chief. And prosecutors would have to improve their skills to do battle with all the smart cops who became defense attorneys.

Anyway, that's the way I think that it ought to be. But the way it is, from the outside looking in, there appear to be disciplinary problems and discontent within the National Police. And Martinelli wants to put his computer nerd, a voyeur who wiretaps the president's political foes so that edited recordings can be used for corny political attack videos, in charge of the police? For the first time, we get a National Police director who both has never patrolled a beat and is not a lawyer? That's insane.

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Not all mistakes are born of insanity, nor do all mistakes turn out badly. Erika Ender has a song about making a good mistake:

Also on the cultural front, it's time for another little season of theatrical improvisation, with the Improv8 group that Danielle Miles organizes and leads. Because it's improvisation every night's show is different. It's not everybody's cup of tea, as some people desperately need an organized plot and others believe that a theater audience should watch and never participate. But if you get into zany humor, pratfalls and other sight gags, clever rejoinders and weirdness from the audience, this series of shows is for you.

What is especially interesting about this, however, is the combination of a busy year at the Ancon Theater and a demographic shift  that has been ongoing in the English-speaking community for some years now leading to the show going on the road to other venues. One is in the Casco Viejo, and the other in Coronado.

As something of an urban policy wonk, I have mixed feelings about Panama's suburbanization, but in La Chorrera and in Coronado, you can see it unfolding. People commuting in and out of a crazy city from more sedate suburbs is a bad plan just for reasons of energy policy. However, professionals who have long maintained cottages and condos at the beach for weekends and holidays moving their families and their jobs out to the beach is a slightly different matter. They're building an international school in Coronado now, and Gorgona also has a bilingual school. San Fernando Hospital has a clinic in Coronado, and there are ever more private doctors, dentists and pharmacists practicing in the area. People who can "commute" by Internet are finding it possible to do at the beach. The commercial development of Coronado is sufficiently vast that few people in that part of Panama Oeste need to go into the city to shop anymore. A tipping point has been reached. The upscale parts of the beach communities are no longer just for retirees.

Given this now rapid suburbanization of Panama, it makes perfect sense for Improv8 to play in Coronado.

The rule of law, were it to work far more perfectly here, would still work differently from how things are supposed to work in the jurisdictions that use the Anglo-American Common Law system. The Common Law started when William the Conqueror merged Norman law --- itself an amalgam of Viking, Medieval French and Catholic Church law --- with the Germanic tribal Anglo-Saxon law. It it "casuistic," in that history and precedent mean an awful lot, with the precedents of earlier court decisions in many instances counting for more than the black letters of laws and constitutions because those decisions interpret what the laws and constitutions mean and those interpretations tend to become binding legal principles.

Panama has the Civil Code system, which is descended from Roman Law through the Napoleonic Code. When it works properly, the letter of the laws and constitution is the most important thing, whereas the precedents of previous cases don't mean very much. There are maxims about how laws are interpreted and modified, and these tend to be written down in codes.

In a sense, what happens in Panamanian cases is of less durable consequence, because mistakes don't become binding precedents for later cases. And of course, in any legal system what a prosecutor decides is considered far less authoritative than what a judge does. Still, what prosecutors decide to do or not to do can have far-reaching consequences, both for how Panama runs its affairs and for how other countries look at and deal with Panama.

In the past few days there have been two decisions by prosecutors that are likely to have far-reaching consequences, notwithstanding the weak role of precedent in Panama's legal system.

In one ongoing case, the Electoral Prosecutor declared that even if government funds were used to buy the election of a representante in Tonosi, that would not change the result. Over the years election results have been overturned for just that reason. What we have is a brazenly partisan decision in favor of a style of vote-buying politics that was old when Roman politicians campaigned with bread and circuses. It's an open declaration that the Martinelistas, who are running very low in the polls, intend to buy or steal the next election notwithstanding any laws, and that the Electoral Prosecutor will invent things to further that purpose as needed.

In the other case, the anti-drug prosecutor's office said that it would not investigate the Panama end of a notorious case of public corruption in Spain, wherein a member of the royal family stole and then laundered his looted funds through Panamanian corporations, ultimately putting the money in his Swiss bank account. The prosecutor held that because Spain did not ask for assistance, because the money laundering did not adversely affect Panama's economy, and because in Spain they call the crime that the duke committed something different from what it is called here, there will be no investigation of the breaking of Panamanian money laundering laws. It's flunk out of first year law school reasoning, and to the extent that his expresses Panama's attitude toward the laundering of the proceeds of public corruption here, it will ultimately lead to financial sanctions being imposed against Panama.