E/CN.4/2001/66/Add.2 page 57 imprisonment. When dealing with ordinary criminality, they should also be reluctant, when alternative charges are available, to proceed with charges that prevent the grant of bail, rule out alternative sentences, require closed-regime custody, and limit progression of sentences; (p) For the same reason, the law on heinous crimes and other relevant legislation should be amended to ensure that often long periods of detention or imprisonment are not imposable for relatively low-level criminality. The crime of “disrespecting authority” (desacatar functionario publico no exercisio de sua function)77 should be abolished; (q) There should be sufficient public defenders to ensure that legal advice and protection are available for every person deprived of liberty from the moment of arrest; (r) Greater use should be made of and the necessary resources provided for such institutions as community councils, state councils on human rights and police and prison ombudsmen. In particular, fully resourced community councils, which include representatives of civil society, notably human rights non-governmental organizations, with unrestricted access to all places of detention and the power to collect evidence of official wrongdoing, should be established in each state. (s) The police should be unified under civilian authority and civilian justice. Pending this, Congress should approve the draft law submitted by the federal Government to transfer to the ordinary courts jurisdiction over manslaughter, causing bodily harm and other crimes including torture committed by the military police; (t) Police stations (delegacias) should be transformed into institutions offering a public service. The “clean police stations” (delegacias legais) being pioneered in the State of Rio de Janeiro is a model to be emulated; (u) A qualified medical professional (a doctor of choice, where possible) should be available to examine every person on being brought to and on leaving a place of detention. He/she should also have the necessary medicines to meet the detainees’ medical needs and the authority to have the detainees transferred to a hospital independent of the detaining authority if those needs cannot be met. Access to the medical profession should not be dependent on the personnel of the detaining authority. Professionals working in institutions of deprivation of liberty should not be under the authority of the institution, nor the political authority responsible for it; (v) The forensic medical services should be under judicial or other independent authority, not under the same governmental authority as the police; nor should they have a monopoly of expert forensic evidence for judicial purposes; (w) The appalling overcrowding in some provisional detention facilities and prisons needs to be brought to an immediate end, if necessary by executive action, for example by exercising clemency in respect of certain categories of prisoners, such as first-time non-violent offenders or suspected offenders. The law requiring separation of categories of prisoner should be implemented;