TONGA’S criminal threat landscape has changed fast, and Acting Chief Superintendent Selosia Fatukala-Satini says the shift is forcing police to rethink how they work.
Speaking with the steady, unsentimental authority of a frontline investigator, during the Pacific Peace and Security Dialogue in Fiji, the Commander for National Crime and Investigation said the old model of crime as a local problem no longer fits.
“There is no longer pure domestic,” he said.
“It’s now coordinated across the countries.”
In Tonga, that means transnational networks moving drugs, moving money, moving forged documents and moving through the gaps created by geography, limited capacity and digital speed.
His warning was blunt, as the biggest change over his career has been the rise of crime that is organised, adaptive and hard to trace.
Criminal groups are using “digital crime because it’s faster, global, and hard to trace,” he said, while also exploiting maritime routes and using legitimate business as cover.
“The result is a broader and more dangerous mix: cyber-enabled offending, cybercrime, financial investment scams, unauthorised foreign exchange dealing, money laundering, counterfeit passports and drug trafficking by sea.”
For Tonga, the maritime dimension is especially acute.
Fatukala-Satini described “the vast ocean territory and dispersed island geography” as a structural vulnerability that criminal networks can exploit.
Drugs, he said, moved through the Pacific Islands, including Tonga, and when they did, the damage does not stop at trafficking.
“Where a country becomes a potential consumption market, the drug use increases in the local population, bringing more addiction, violence, theft and related crimes.”
“That change in crime type has exposed a change in policing needs. The challenge is no longer only about arrests and seizures; it is about specialist capability.
“Tonga Police must contend with digital forensics, forensic accounting, device analysis, and financial tracing, all while trying to keep pace with offenders already operating across borders.”
“The complexity of modern crime has outpaced the capacity of individual countries,” he said.
His answer is regional and practical, and he has called for the integration of regional intelligence, stronger maritime security, harmonised legal frameworks, and faster mutual legal assistance.
Fatukala-Satini also made the case for targeting the profits, not just the perpetrators.
“If we can move the profits, we weaken the networks,” he said.
That logic runs through his wider view of policing in the Pacific: no country can do this alone.
The way forward, he argued, is a coordinated regional model built on intelligence, capability sharing and sustained partnerships with customs, immigration, central banks, Australia, New Zealand, Interpol and Pacific policing networks.
“The fight against modern crime is no longer a matter of isolated national response. It is a contest of systems, and the region must learn to move as one.”
