Portugal Police Forces

Portugal has 3 police forces:

• GNR: The Republican National Guard (Guarda Nacional Republicana) is a para-military gendarmerie, not strictly a police force. Similar to the Guardia Civil in Spain, the gendarmes in France and the carabinieri in Italy. More details on Wikipedia. In Portugal they mainly have control of rural (countryside) areas. There were major changes in 2009. The GNR is now, for police and operating in peacetime, responsible to the Ministry of Internal Administration and, for military affairs, to the Ministry of National Defence.
• PSP: The Public Security Police (Polícia de Segurança Pública) are more of a true police force with civil rather than military origins. More details on Wikipedia. In Portugal the PSP mainly has control of urban (cities, towns) areas. Report ultimately to the Ministry of Internal Administration.
• PJ: Judicial police. Concentrate on serious crime. Report ultimately to the Ministry of Justice.

Most northern European countries have distinct lines between military / police / judiciary. That is less the case in southern European countries like Portugal. The country could benefit greatly from a radical simplification and integration of current police forces – including much stricter separation of military and policing. But there are huge cultural and historical issues here.

With the GNR in particular, the military influence is not healthy in normal policing work. Contact with GNR officers on the ground varies wildly. Some are efficient and courteous, others come across as just plain bitter and nasty. Some GNR think they are 'the law' which of course is garbage. The law is the law of the land that the people voted for. Police enforce the law, not make it up. This extends to the questioning that some GNR officers get up to. This definitely crosses the line from routine questioning into security-type interrogation. In the long term this is highly counterproductive. Intrusive and irrelevant mind-game questions just alienate the public into distrust of the GNR. There is also an element of distorted nationalism at play here. The GNR have attitudes to protect the people from law-breakers but also protect the state from the people. This 'social order' influence goes back centuries to when the job of the gendarmes was to protect a weak central state from rebellious and corrupt regions.

Portugal is inherently bureaucratic and has a bloated public sector. This definitely extends to the police. There is substantial overlap between the 3 forces that Portugal can ill afford. Of course all police forces have specialised units (transport police, riot control, serious oganised crime, white-collar financial crime....) but Portugal as a small country simply can not afford to have those functions replicated over and over again. And they are – because 3 different government departments are involved, each building their own bureaucracies and fighting their little turf wars. One consequence is that too many resources get allocated to quantity of policing and not enough to quality. Too much over-staffing and promotion on personal influence. Too little training and promotion on merit. The dual reporting of the GNR to two different government ministries is a classic example of a messy little Portuguese bureaucratic compromise.

Like all aspects of public life in Portugal, significant reorganisation of the GNR/PSP/PJ will be very difficult to achieve. Resistance from within those organisations to reorganisation would be intense. And there is absolutely no doubt that people at the very top there form cliques with other vested interests in both public and private life. Of course every country has elites – people at the top of their society. But Portugal is more likely to cross red lines when it comes to undue influences by the police and on the police. Without a doubt this is moral corruption that undermines Portuguese democracy.