Reflecting on the occasion of PNG’s 10th independence anniversary, the country’s first prime minister, Michael Somare, remarked:

“I will now turn to what I consider to be the greatest threat to our country, crime, and here I’m referring to both street crime and official corruption.

“Unless we can control it, it can destroy all the advances we have made in the last ten years. It must be controlled before it destroys us.”

Concerns with violent crime and personal security feature prominently in external representations of PNG.

Foreign governments regularly issue travel warnings, highlighting the risks posed to visitors by PNG’s high levels of violent crime.

Port Moresby, the national capital, has been depicted as one of the world’s least liveable cities, largely owing to security problems.

While such portrayals are contestable given their generality and the lack of reliable data on which they are based, security remains an everyday preoccupation for people throughout the country. Such concerns have a major impact on business confidence.

Surveys of companies have repeatedly identified law and order as among the top constraints to doing business in PNG.

Indeed, World Bank research indicates that security concerns among the PNG business community are more than four times the regional average for East Asia and the Pacific, and comparable with countries like El Salvador, Venezuela and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Concerns with ‘law and order’ first came to prominence in the late 1960s as the pace of decolonisation accelerated in preparation for PNG’s independence in 1975.

Decolonisation involved a long, drawn-out process of social, political and institutional change, with a strong accent on state building.

In terms of conflict stresses, this historical transition meant that the fundamental opposition between Indigenous people and colonial powers was displaced by a far messier array of local divisions.

These related variously to precolonial antagonisms between different Indigenous populations, uneven development, corruption and the suppression of warfare during the colonial period.

Some of these divisions manifested in the outbreak of localised conflicts, most dramatically on the island of Bougainville, initially around the construction of the Panguna mine and much later with the decade-long Bougainville conflict of 1988–97.

The lead up to independence also witnessed the revival of tribal fighting in parts of the Highlands, while a moral panic grew around rising crime rates in Port Moresby as independence loomed.

Two aspects of the decolonisation process in particular had an important bearing on the emergence of law and order concerns.

The first related to the repeal of discriminatory colonial regulations that previously applied to the Indigenous population.

Removal of restrictions on movement opened up the towns, formerly expatriate enclaves, to migration from rural areas.

Young male migrants flocked to Port Moresby in search of adventure and a better life, with the capital experiencing a 12.2% annual growth rate between 1966 and 1977 and doubling again in size during the first decade after independence.

While available data were thin, increasing crime rates were accompanied by a growing chorus of voices warning of a serious emergent crime problem in Port Moresby.

The lifting of colonial restrictions on alcohol was viewed as another contributing factor.

According to Harris, who investigated Port Moresby gangs in the 1980s, the legalisation of alcohol provided ‘the spark which ignited the flame’ of urban gang growth from the mid-1960s.

The second aspect related to changes in government and administration, including the modernisation of the police and national justice system.

The suppression of tribal fighting had been viewed as one of the Australian administration’s most significant accomplishments.

Its reappearance in the late 1960s was seen by some as evidence of a withdrawal of government from rural areas resulting from the replacement of the old devolved system of district administration with a bureaucratic system of centralised government.

The relative success of the old system in suppressing tribal conflict was attributed to its mobility and physical presence in rural areas, primarily in the form of kiaps and their field police, and its ability to engage pragmatically with local forms of authority and dispute resolution.

By contrast, the modern justice system was found wanting on many fronts.

In the first place, its concentration in urban locations posed difficulties of access for those living in rural areas. For others, the new system was also seen as overly formalistic and cumbersome compared to the more flexible approach it replaced.

It also inadvertently weakened the standing of the formerly powerful (colonial) police, now subject to regular and humiliating ‘defeats’ in court, often on obscure technical grounds.

From this perspective, renewed fighting in the Highlands represented a return to forms of violent self-help in the absence of effective government alternatives for managing disputes.

Concerns with violent crime and personal safety became progressively more pronounced during the 25 years after independence, particularly in the main urban centres.

Signs of pervasive insecurity continue to manifest in the heavy fortifications and razor wire adorning homes and other buildings, and the ubiquitous presence of private security across PNG’s urban landscapes.

Streets empty as dusk approaches, and visitors are still routinely warned not to visit certain areas or walk after dark. During the 1970s, 1980s and for much of the 1990s, raskol gangs provided the folk devils in a prolonged moral panic around urban street crime.

Port Moresby experienced cyclical patterns of outbreaks of criminal violence followed by special policing operations, entailing heavy-handed raids directed at the settlements viewed as incubators of ‘raskolism’.

However, concerns with urban raskols appear to have diminished during the first two decades of the new millennium.

Support for this proposition is provided in a review of available crime data by the World Bank in 2014.

While levels of crime and violence in PNG are high compared with other parts of the world, the review concluded that these levels may be stabilising and noted that in 2010 there was an overall reduction in recorded crime compared to 2000.

More attention has been placed in recent years on serious problems of violent tribal conflict in some Highlands areas.

High-powered weapons, local mercenaries (‘hiremen’) and guerrilla tactics have fundamentally altered the ground rules of tribal conflict and fuelled prolonged cycles of violence in several provinces.

These forms of conflict have been aggravated by heightened contestation around elections and large-scale natural resource projects.

Violence against women and girls, including rape and other sexual offences, has been a longstanding concern.

According to the Human Rights Watch World Report 2017, PNG is one the most dangerous countries in the world for women, with the majority experiencing rape or assault in their lifetime and women facing systemic discrimination.

Deeply engrained social attitudes towards gender are slow to change, while the effects of economic globalisation, including growing inequalities, impact disproportionately on women and girls.

The effectiveness of legal protections has long been hindered by weak enforcement.

High-profile cases and persistent campaigning by local non-governmental organisations and activists have contributed to growing awareness of the level of violence and abuse experienced by women and girls have prompted government, donors and civil society organisations to initiate a range of legislative, policy and emergency responses in this area.

One of the most significant law reforms was the enactment of the Family Protection Act 2013, which made domestic violence a discrete offence for the first time. Parliament also endorsed the first National Gender-Based Violence Strategy in late 2016.

An ongoing spate of sorcery-related violence, often directed against women, has also precipitated awareness, engagement and law reform campaigns, including repeal of the colonial-era Sorcery Act 1971.

The combination of weak enforcement agencies, porous borders (including a 750-kilometre land border with Indonesia), location as a regional shipping hub and rapid rate of economic globalisation renders PNG highly vulnerable to transnational crime.

There have also been concerns that criminal syndicates have been using PNG as a transit point for conveying illicit goods, such as drugs and weapons, to its southern neighbour, Australia.

Despite the prevalence of law and order concerns, available data remain patchy and unreliable, making it hard to quantify levels of crime and violence with any precision.

A review of PNG’s criminal justice data in 1994 lamented the lack of systematic evidence that ‘could provide a rational basis for understanding the current context of crime and promoting feasible strategies for crime prevention, development and management of the criminal justice system’.

Not a lot has changed in the almost 30 years since. Levels of unreported crime remain extremely high, especially, but by no means exclusively, in rural areas where access to police and justice services are limited.

Over the years there have been numerous reports and policy reviews directed at improving responses to these problems.

Although undertaken almost 40 years ago, the 1984 Clifford Report remains one of the more insightful reviews.

It documented the shortcomings of individual agencies, noted the poor quality of data, and was critical of planning, budgeting and coordination across the sector.

The report also highlighted distinctive features of PNG’s broader regulatory environment, including high levels of legal pluralism and continuing reliance on informal approaches for everyday security and dispute resolution.

It recognised how significant this informal layer of non-state regulation was in dealing with many kinds of problems at local levels.

The report recommended further engagement with some of these informal approaches as a way of supplementing over-reliance on a fragile and expensive criminal justice system.

Despite the prescience of the Clifford Report’s efforts to broaden the lens on available resources for managing disputes and security, successive governments continued to be preoccupied with crisis management, relying on special policing operations and temporary crime control measures such as curfews to suppress surges in crime and violence.

In the context of rapid population growth, urbanisation and globalisation in recent years, the scale and range of PNG’s law and order problems have progressively overwhelmed the criminal justice system.

Although affecting all parts of the system, these pressures are most apparent in the police force, the Royal Papua New Guinea Constabulary (RPNGC).

Since PNG’s independence in 1975, the size of the RPNGC has increased by only around 30%, while the overall population has more than tripled. At an average of one officer to 1,145 people, the police-to-population ratio is significantly lower than the UN recommended level of 1:450.

Government pledges to increase the size of the force are unlikely to be realised anytime soon given severe fiscal constraints as accentuated by the economic fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic.

A recent study undertaken on behalf of the Papua New Guinea–Australia Policing Partnership demonstrated that the RPNGC is seriously underfunded.

The study found that the RPNGC experiences an average recurrent funding gap of K126 million per annum and would require a one-off capital injection of around K3.9 billion to enable the organisation to deliver its service mandate.