Based on outgoing Commissioner of Police Jonathan Smith’s speech to Rotary this week, he is is leaving a number of time bombs for his successor — whoever it is — to defuse.

In the speech, he said a number of officers, some of them senior, “neither accept nor respect the authority of the Police Complaints Authority — still believing that they are in some time warp where the Police could do anything it wanted and did not have to answer to anyone”.

Mr. Smith also said recruiting was becoming harder for the Service, with fewer Bermudians willing to join, and with those who did join refusing to make it a long-term career. Instead, many Bermudians who might be expected to become the next generation of Police leaders leave for the private sector.

At the same time, the Police are facing more accountability with the introduction of PACE legislation, which Mr. Smith says will present new challenges for serving officers.

It would be easy to criticise Mr. Smith for raising these issues just as he is going out the door. The obvious question is: “If he knew about these problems, why didn’t he do something about them?”

The answer is not that simple. Mr. Smith did outline a number of ideas for improving recruitment and retention, including extending the retirement age from 55 to 60, phasing in performance-related pay, introducing an accelerated promotion system to keep talented recruits and offering officers short-term contracts, recognising that few people remain in the same career for decades any more.

All are valid, and the Police have made some moves in that direction under his direction.

Similarly, no one could criticise Mr. Smith for not pushing higher ethical standards for officers and introducing more transparency to the Service.

The long-awaited PACE legislation, inevitably, can only be implemented when it is set in stone, and that has not happened yet.

The better question to ask is may be what it is about the Police Service that makes change so difficult, and prevents senior officers from introducing reforms with the speed that one might expect in the private sector.

In theory, given that the Police is a disciplined force, it should be easy to bring about change. Once the Commissioner says something should be so, then that should be it.

In reality, life is not like that. The Police are governed by regulations and conditions of service that make changing something relatively simple like the retirement age quite cumbersome and slow. Similarly, performance-based pay — which in principle, sounds like sensible — would change decades of thinking about pay based on seniority and the like, and would be the subject of lengthy negotiations with the Police Association.

It is more worrying that Mr. Smith was seemingly unable to do anything about officers who treated the PCA with contempt, when it would appear he knew who they were — and are. Why didn’t he just fire them?

The problem is that in the Police, like the Civil Service, it is almost impossible to fire someone. So the cycle continues.

It would be nice to think that Government House — to whom the Commissioner reports — and the Government — who pays the Commissioner’s salary — will take Mr. Smith’s comments on board and will ensure that his successor has sufficient power and flexibility to ensure that Bermuda has the Police Service it needs to handle the challenges the next few years are sure to present.

That does not require a Commissioner who is accountable to no one. Clearly that would be dangerous. But it should be possible for the chief executive of the Police to take executive action.