Experienced in most kinds of police work, Terry Tulang says his heart is happiest when he is sitting down with people in the settlements and schools around the Solomon Islands capital of Honiara.

“Every week, we go out with members of the Royal Solomon Islands Police community relations team and support them talking to school kids, church congregations or village meetings about social problems affecting their community; problems like domestic abuse, marijuana and kwaso, the local Solomon Islands home-brew.”

Currently on deployment to the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands, the Vanuatu police man recognises that community policing is not just something that Tulang enjoys doing and is good at, it’s fundamental to RAMSI’s job of helping the police maintain law and order in Solomon Islands well into an uncertain future.

“What we want is the Royal Solomon Islands Police to go out more on the streets and into communities and establish good relationships. We can support them to find ways of encouraging communities to do things like set up local crime prevention units. This is one step towards making things better.”

The burgeoning young and unemployed population in Honiara, one of the fastest growing in the Pacific, demonstrated its potency and volatility during the ethnic tensions and more recently in 2006 with the burning down of the capital’s Chinatown district.

As in many Pacific countries, building bridges between young people, community leaders and the police will help in the larger job of building and maintaining an effective response to law and order problems, and assist in resolving them at community level.

To build the skills and confidence of the Royal Solomon Islands Police Community Relations Team, Tulang and his RAMSI colleagues face historical barriers. The five years of ethnic conflict (1998-2003) in which many police officers took part broke the bond of trust between Solomon Islanders and their police force.

By helping Solomon Islands police officers learn the process and benefits of community policing, RAMSI advisers like Tulang are also helping to restore community confidence in their police.

Despite these considerable hurdles, Tulang says the response from the community so far has been excellent. “People are very keen to do something within their community deal with the problems they see. We sit down and talk about how they can set up things like crime prevention units and as a result some have already been established.”

This is not the first time Tulang has been deployed from his home in Port Vila to help a neighbouring Pacific country. With 27 years experience working in almost every area of policing from close personnel protection, mobile force, intelligence, to community policing and human resources, he is a valuable addition to any police force.

“In 1998 and again in 2000, I was a member of the Bougainville Peace Monitoring team. That was my first time to work as part of a regional mission, working with people from Fiji, Australia, New Zealand and Vanuatu.”

Now working together with people from all 15 countries of the Pacific Islands Forum, Tulang is making a valuable contribution leading the seventh contingent of police officers from Vanuatu, learning more about the region he is a part of and passing on his skills and expertise to people coming from a very similar background.

“Being Melanesian I thought most things would be the same: food, culture and the way we communicate with each other. But the population here is much bigger and the ratio of police to citizens is different. In Vanuatu, we have one officer for every 500 people. Here in Solomon Islands, it is much lower.”

Like all members of the mission preparing to be a part of RAMSI, Tulang underwent training in Australia.

“The pre-deployment training in Canberra, Australia, helps us prepare for our unique role in Solomon Islands within the police component of RAMSI, capacity building the local police force.”

“Solomon Islands police officers who take part in the training told us about the history, the kastom and the culture of their country. These are important things to understand before going into a community to talk about law and order issues, to understand more about the context we are working in and how to adapt our skills to this context. Things like respect, compensation, geography, down to what people eat and what can be found in the market.”

Now close to completing his 12 months with RAMSI, Tulang is circumspect about the role of advisers working with their local counterparts to help build a safe, well-governed and prosperous nation.

“Solomon Islands belongs to Solomon Islanders, not us. We will all leave one day. Solomon Islands needs to deal with law and order issues in their own way and we must respect that. But the problem that I can help them with is that not many people in Solomon Islands know the law. People want to know in black and white about laws related to sexual assault, traffic, kwaso drinking and marijuana. That is something that community policing can help solve, and that is something we can help the police here do better.”