On 03 September. 2026. the Sri Lanka Police marked 160 years with the full ceremonial apparatus of the State. At the Field Force Headquarters, in Thimbirigasyaya, President Anura Kumara Dissanayake received a guard of honour, a commemorative stamp was presented, long-service promotions were conferred, and a new mobile application and website were unveiled. He promised a new uniform by mid-2027, a risk allowance, a proper promotion scheme, official housing, vehicles, a modern headquarters, and approval to recruit 10,000 officers. He also warned that officers who can be purchased by the underworld should leave the uniform. It was a day of history, optics and declared intent.
Two days later, the Officer-in-Charge of the Traffic Division, at Dehiwala Police Station, made an entry in the routine information book, left his post and went home. He wrote that he could no longer cope with the workload and the pressure of the job. Mount Lavinia Division SSP Ashoka Gunasekara ordered the Crimes Investigation Bureau to inquire. Statements were recorded from the Inspector and the supervising ASP after advice from the Police Legal Division. The SSP's reported worry was not only the officer's welfare. It was precedent: that other traffic officers might follow.
That reflex is understandable. A disciplined force cannot treat walking off a post as ordinary industrial action. An OIC holds keys, files, exhibits, court dates and daily command of men and women on the road. Desertion of duty, even when dressed as despair, is a breach. But if the inquiry stops at the man and the entry in the book, the service will have treated a symptom as if it were the disease. The episode is not interesting because one Inspector lost his nerve. It is interesting because the nerve was lost in the same week the State spent public money and presidential time announcing that a new police service is being built.
The numbers behind the pageant
The Sri Lanka Police is not a decaying relic. It runs some 609 stations across 47 territorial and 78 functional divisions. In the past two years it has recorded the largest narcotics seizures in recent memory, more than five tonnes of heroin, nearly 10 tonnes of crystal methamphetamine, tens of tonnes of Kerala cannabis, and more than 16 million tablets, and has brought armed fugitives home from abroad. That record is real.
The same institution is running on a deficit no parade can conceal. Police Headquarters has acknowledged more than 30,000 vacancies, on some official reckonings closer to 32,000. Since 2020 more than 4,300 officers have left. Departures peaked in 2025 and remained high through the first half of 2026. Thousands more are due to retire in the next two years.
Applications have thinned as young people look overseas and serving officers leave early for work that pays better and humiliates less. Approval to take in 10,000 recruits is not trivial. It is also not a cure. A force that loses about two thousand people a year and starts 30 thousand short cannot be restored by a single intake, especially if training, housing and supervision cannot absorb newcomers without breaking them.
The President was right to say that officers work 12- to 18-hour stretches. Traffic OICs in the Colombo suburbs live inside a particular version of that grind. Dehiwala sits on one of the island's most congested corridors. It absorbs school runs, funerals, political motorcades, night-time drunk driving and a motoring public that treats lane markings as optional. Accident files multiply. Court lists lengthen. Every fatal crash must be walked through the Magistrate's Court, the JMO, insurers and grieving families. The same officer is then pulled into VIP movements, festivals, flood deployments, elections and the expanding list of "other duties" that have little to do with traffic law and everything to do with the State's habit of using the police as a general-purpose labour pool. Firearm offences and narcotics have not stood still while traffic thickened. A single video of an officer losing his temper on Galle Road travels farther in an hour than a year's worth of quiet competence. The public sees the outburst. It rarely sees the 16th hour.
The household the uniform does not protect
Work pressure is only the official half of the story. The unofficial half is the household. A constable's or inspector's pay still does not absorb the cost of living without anxiety. Quarters are scarce, often poor, and frequently far from the station. A sudden transfer turns schooling into a private crisis. Medical bills, tuition and the small humiliations of falling behind civilian neighbours accumulate. Job security, once the great consolation of the service, feels thinner when overseas markets offer an exit and a disciplinary file, sometimes necessary, sometimes political, can end a career in a week.
Teachers, nurses and soldiers carry their own weights; the police have never had a monopoly on hardship. What is distinctive is the bargain the State still recites and no longer quite honours. In harder years the compact was simple and was taught as S.S.S.: loyalty to the State, the Service and the Superior. That instruction was never a one-way street. It assumed a Superior who would not spend subordinates as disposable hours; a Service that would shield its own from avoidable misery; and a State that would not treat the policeman as both first responder and last resort for every failure of other institutions. When the roster is left to rot, when quarters and schooling are treated as private inconveniences, and when an officer's first public mention after distress is "precedent," the compact is already broken. Pageantry cannot put it back together.
Trust from top to bottom is what is fraying. Juniors already hear the message when welfare is announced at an anniversary and felt only as a circular months later, and when promotions stall for years before arriving in a ceremonial bundle. Loyalty cannot be drilled into people who no longer believe the institution will stand behind them when the file, the politician, the video or the debt collector arrives.
Discipline is not denial
An inquiry into the Dehiwala OIC is in order. The information book is an official record; walking off a post has consequences; other officers will watch what happens next. If the Inspector was in genuine distress, the professional response is medical and administrative support, not a theatrical charge designed to frighten the traffic branch. If misconduct is mixed with the distress, deal with the misconduct without using it to bury the distress. The worst outcome would be a finding that treats the episode as a one-man failure of character. Character is not irrelevant. It is not a staffing plan.
Sri Lankan policing already knows what happens when exhaustion is ignored: suicides after double shifts, public confrontations that began as fatigue, quiet desertions that never made the papers. Burnout studies here are not new. They describe too much demand, too little recovery and too little support from above. Research and Development does not need a five-year consultancy to discover this. It needs permission to say it in language headquarters cannot file away.
Immediate, short and long
Immediate measures are unglamorous. Audit actual hours at traffic divisions in the Western Province and cap them. Stop treating leave as a favour. Put a working counselling line in every division that an Inspector can use without becoming a case for the Legal Division. Temporary reinforcement of Dehiwala and similar corridors would cost less than another viral incident. Publish, internally, a simple rule: an officer who records distress in the information book is first a welfare case, then, if needed, a disciplinary one.
Short-term measures are already half-promised and must be made real on a calendar, not a podium. Stagger the 10,000 recruits so trainers and barracks are not overwhelmed. Let the risk allowance reach the constable on the road. Weigh schooling years in transfers. Treat quarters as operational infrastructure.
Reorganise court duty so the same handful of officers are not living in Magistrate's Courts while the road goes unsupervised. Use the new app and cameras to cut paperwork, not to add another layer on top of the old books.
Long-term measures are political, which is why they are postponed. The police cannot remain the residual employer of every State anxiety — drugs, school gates, temple crowds, politician security, disaster relief and traffic. Some of those tasks belong to other agencies, or to a properly staffed traffic police with its own career path and rest rules. The President's warning about purchasable uniforms was necessary, but integrity campaigns fail when the honest officer is the poorest man in the room.
None of this requires sentimentality. The public has reasons for anger: corruption cases, rough handling, political servility, the officer mysteriously unavailable until a call from above. Those failures are part of the same story. An understaffed, poorly housed force is easier to buy, easier to bully and quicker to snap. Reform that only lectures the ranks on ethics while leaving the roster untouched is not reform. It is a speech.
What the week actually said
The 160th anniversary was entitled to its dignity. A service that has buried officers in war, tsunami, pandemic and ordinary crime has a right to stand in formation and be thanked. Promises of uniforms, allowances and buildings are not empty if they arrive. But a uniform does not shorten a shift, an app does not find a school for a transferred child, and a commemorative stamp does not sit with an OIC at midnight while the next accident file is opened.
The Dehiwala Inspector may be right or wrong in the particular. That is what the inquiry is for. The conditions he pointed to are not in dispute: cadre shortfall, thinning applications, thin welfare, long hours, growing crime, traffic and court work, and daily media humiliation. Trust between the top and the bottom is weaker than the anniversary photographs suggest.
If Research and Development is good for anything this month, it should take the entry in that information book as a research question, not a disciplinary exhibit: actual weekly hours of traffic OICs in the Western Province, vacancy rates on those rosters, applications for early release or overseas no-pay, and access to counselling that is not a rumour. The answers will be uncomfortable. They will be more useful than another circular on loyalty.
S.S.S. still has a meaning. Loyalty to the State requires a State that does not consume its own guardians. Loyalty to the Service requires a Service that tells itself the truth between parades. Loyalty to the Superior requires superiors who are alarmed by exhaustion, not only by precedent. The Inspector who went home from Dehiwala did not invent the pressure. He only wrote it down. The test of the next year is whether the men who stood on the saluting dais on 03 September are prepared to read that sentence as an order of the day.
This article was originally published in The Island on September 7, 2026.