Julius Isaac, left, and Edwards Seaga
Balford Henry, Senior Staff Reporter
THE West Kingston Enquiry has been limping towards a relatively uninspiring end after some four months of investigations.
The Commission should conclude its hearings this month. About three more witnesses are expected, including ballistics expert, Deputy Superintendent Fred Hibbert.
Any chance of an extension will depend on the reaction of Opposition Leader Edward Seaga to a recent letter from the Commissioners, seeking his comments on a number of points raised during the hearings.
As the Commission winds up, it is obvious that much of the excitement which greeted its announcement last year has faded leaving faint hope that it will actually contribute substantially to removing the problems which led to July 7-10, 2001.
One obvious reason being the withdrawal of the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) lawyers in early October and the subsequent decision of its leaders, including Mr. Seaga, and supporters, including many victims of the security forces operation in West Kingston, not to co-operate.
But there have been some hopeful developments in the last few weeks, as a number of reports commissioned by the enquirers come in, resulting in dialogue which has allowed for some non-political and impartial assessment of the problems which have been plaguing the inner-city for decades and which have contributed to the situation we are now in.
The encouraging signs started to flicker with the recall of Police Commissioner, Francis Forbes, and Senior Superintendent Reneto Adams, the two most influential voices of the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF).
They were followed by civilian experts Canadian Professor Jennifer J. Lewellyn, visiting Professor Bernard Headley of the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona, Dr. Anthony Harriott, UWI lecturer in Government, Horace Levy, lecturer and social activist and economist Dennis Morrison.
Varying approaches
For example, we found that, while SSP Adams spoke of supporting community policing, he didn't feel it could work in inner-city areas where houses are in close proximity and surrounded by zinc fences.
Both he and Commissioner Forbes agree that getting rid of the "area dons" is essential to a reduction in crime and violence.
But, they vary in their approaches, Mr. Adams being more convinced that a "final solution" policy is necessary and Mr. Forbes preferring harsh sentences like 25 years to life.
Mr. Adams didn't seemed perturbed about criminal gangs growing more heads, after the main ones are decimated. Mr. Forbes was worried that getting out a "don" would only lead to succession by another, usually more "wicked" than his predecessor.
Mr. Adams did not seem worried about an image of the Police Force as being permanently terrifying as it made "don" after "don" extinct. But, Mr. Forbes did.
It is obvious, therefore, that the Police Commissioner supports, at least to some extent, an approach similar to that of the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) in the United States, which allowed Jamaican posses to operate freely while enough intelligence was gathered to ship off all the leaders to prison at once, leaving this huge gap between "dons" and soldiers.
How else could he explain his views that removing the "dons" would hardly help in a situation where there is a structure of succession, while at the same time expressing concern about the vacuum which would be created in the inner city by their disappearance, which would require the combined efforts of civil society and non-governmental organizations to fill.
A very interesting contribution came from Professor Lewellyn, introducing the Commissioners to restorative justice which, as Professor Headley informed them, was actually created by one of late U.S. President Richard Nixon's Watergate co-defendants, Charles Colson.
The Commission had requested her input with respect to the concept of restorative justice, its associated processes and its application in the Jamaican context.
She explained that it defined processes, particularly in the criminal justice realm, which differed from the mainstream justice system.
These included: diversion - whereby individuals are kept out of the criminal justice system through the use of community service, etcetera; or family group conferences, pioneered in New Zealand to deal with juvenile crime.
It was obvious though that the concept, as explained by her, was much too advanced for a Jamaican culture in which the majority still believe that gunmen should either be exterminated by the police or be hanged.
Urgent and relevant
The contributions of Professor Headley, Dr. Harriott, Mr. Levy and Mr. Morrison, people who have been closely associated with the social and political processes for years, were much more urgent and relevant.
Professor Headley, for example, sought to put the July 7-10 operation into an historical perspective, weighing the influences of "political spoils" and poverty.
He suggested that the Government develop partnerships with business and philanthropic organizations to strengthen the resource base of the Ministry of National Security's "Peace Manage-ment/Social Conflict Interven-tion Initiative" and also seek international assistance in launching Peace Centres, similar to one launched in January in Grant's Pen, St. Andrew.
Mr. Levy suggested that the principal agents of violence and crime were the community gangs, while the two most important sources were the poverty of the family and, especially in the western end of the city, depressed economic conditions.
He suggested that, "first and most crucially, all work distribution be removed from the control of Members of Parliament and/or Parish Councillors".
He said that it must be located, instead, with agencies of the state, collaborating with genuinely representative citizens associations".
Dr. Morrison, who holds a number of top Government positions, including with the Jamaica Bauxite Institute (JBI) and the Airports Authority of Jamaica and is best known in the media for defending current Government policies, offered what he called a "programmatic approach to the resolution of inner-city decay, crime and violence".
He suggested that this programme involve tourism and entertainment, free-zone shopping and related industrial parks, a downtown shopping district, market reorganization, sport and culture, information technology and micro businesses.
He said that in its current, disorganised form, the downtown shopping district still catered to the shopping needs of hundreds of thousands of consumers from the metropolitan region.
He suggested that a lack of co-operation from commercial interests and the absence of effective security arrangements were preventing the Kingston and St. Andrew Corporation (KSAC) from effecting a reorganization.
I deliberately left Dr. Harriott's submissions for last, because I felt that he struck a very crucial note that most other contributors either failed to grasp or refused to wrestle with. This is the question of the control of the Police Force and the chance that it could become uncontrollable at some stage.
Dr. Harriott's report to the Commission primarily addressed the issue of recommendations to assist the security forces in "effectively and professionally" discharging their responsibilities.
According to the consultant to the JCF, "The system of accountability should be improved with a view to plugging the existing gaps in the system of accountability and breathing new life into it. New mechanisms are needed at both the national and local levels. At the national level, the proposed National Crime Commission would serve as part of this renewed system of accountability. But important gaps would still remain.
"Specifically, a structure is needed that would hold the JCF and its Commissioner accountable on operations matters. This could be a bi-partisan committee of Parliament. How this mechanism should be configured is an open issue, but while there should be accountability to the political administration, it should be configured to avoid partisan interference in the operations of the force," he proposed.
Dr. Harriott pointed out that currently there is no authority charged with overseeing the Police Force's operations.
First step
Up to the mid-1990s, police operations were subject to the approval of the Minister of National Security, but the JCF Act was amended to give the Commissioner of Police a free hand to carry out any operation where, when and how he felt like.
And while one can understand the reason for the thinking which led to that decision - the fear of political interference in detailed operational matters - I am in total agreement with Dr. Harriott, that the solution was not in moving from one extreme to the other.
Certainly, there needs to be some civil balance, especially in light of the fact that the force is now so well armed and trained for activities beyond normal policing.
Dr. Harriott said in his recommendations: "I am obviously not an expert in the field of law, but it appears to me that presently oversight and accountability on these matters is proceeding on an ad hoc basis via Commissions such as this one. This is an unsatisfactory state of affairs."
This is one area in which the Commission of Enquiry can certainly be of considerable help to us in terms of rebuilding co-operation between inner-city communities and the police, by providing substantive proposals as to how we can limit the freehandedness of the police force and control some of the operational excesses and eventually return to a more civil form of policing.
This could be a first step to destroying this monster of crime and violence which has been menacing us for so long.
