Police and Colombia’s judicial branch disagree on who to blame for the increased insecurity in Colombian cities like Medellin and Cali.
National Police chief Oscar Naranjo told W Radio that criminal law should be revised to avoid the impunity in some crimes.
“The procedure must be adjusted on an experience we had that makes carrying weapons not enough to go to jail. In January the Police seized 8,900 weapons, but at this moment there is no such number of people under arrest,” Naranjo said.
Within the judicial branch there is disagreement with the police. Judicial workers say there is nothing wrong with the system, but there are deficiencies in the investigations of judicial police, because of the 20-day period they have to come to an indictment.
“We legislate in a superficial way here. The accusation system was imposed without a deep analysis and so they believed that it was sufficient and that with the criminal codes it is possible to have a process done in twenty days without creating the conditions to make this possible,” former Prosecutor General Alfonso Gomez Mendez said.
Judicial workers say the workload is what is causing the inability to lock up criminals.
“There are prosecutors in Bogota these days that have five of six thousand cases to handle. They are doing the best they can and are taken cases home to study in the weekend. The misconception is that the prosecutors and the judges are responsible for the insecurity,” chairman of the judicial workers union, Fabio Hernandez told the radio station.
Both Medellin and Cali have seen murder rates soaring this year and also in Bogota lawmakers complain about the increased insecurity.