In a statement carried last Sunday, Labour spokesman Gavin Gulia complained that superintendents and assistant commissioners have been waiting for their performance bonus since last May.

He is right, but lower rank police officers who spoke to this paper said the performance bonus, which was introduced by the 1996-1998 Labour government, is at the root of all that is going wrong inside the force.

Because the performance bonus is linked, among other things, to the management of expenditure by the high officials and it has increasingly come to mean that those who cut down drastically on overtime and other expenditure receive their performance bonus (although with some delay) but those who allow overtime to mount are sharply drawn up.

This has led, sources said, to high officials cutting down on whatever can be cut down, sometimes postponing operations to the next day so that no overtime is done.

Police of all ranks feel that a thorough review of the principles on which the performance bonus is granted is now overdue, sources said.