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“What has been announced and has been worked on with the Ministry of the Interior will not go through absorption, but through the merger between PSP and SEF,” said Magina da Silva, after a meeting with the President of the Republic, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, at the Belém Palace, after days of controversy over the death of a Ukrainian citizen at the SEF facilities at Lisbon airport in March.
The director of the PSP said that he “proposed, very directly,” and that he discussed the matter “with the President,” that the PSP be extinguished and the SEF be extinguished.
“And a national police appears, as, indeed, occurs in Spain, France and Italy,” he described.
The statements provoked a reaction from Eduardo Cabrita. The internal administration minister told the Lusa news agency that the reform projected under the SEF will be announced “appropriately” by the government “and not by a police director.”
Hours later, in a statement, the national director of the PSP responded to the “apparently generated controversy”, saying that “he has just presented his personal vision” for the ongoing restructuring.
Magina da Silva also says that “the ongoing restructuring process seems to be an opportunity for the ‘update’ of the PSP designation, since it pursues a plurality of functions, constituting itself not only as a criminal prevention police, but also integrating other skills and performs other missions, namely criminal investigation, special administrative police (licensing and inspection of weapons, ammunition and explosives and licensing and inspection of private security activity), airport security, and possibly airport security, border control, if applicable. the Government decides ”.
The hypothesis of the extinction of the SEF, the transfer of powers to the PSP and GNR was denounced in recent days by the weekly Expresso and the online newspaper Observer and had no comment from the Government.
Today, the Prime Minister, António Costa, avoided talking about the matter and referred this issue later.
Asked if he sees this change in the police with a positive perspective, Magina da Silva said that the PSP is “a security force that complies with the legal framework that policy makers and the legislator understand.”
“We will be here to face this challenge” for PSP and SEF agents, he added, and promised to welcome border services agents into the new police force.
[Notícia atualizada às 23h54]
