Lloyd Williams, Senior Associate EditorThe police are outraged at the killing of 10 of their numbers in 136 days. And understandably so. Shocked too is every person in this country who respects the law, inured as he/she is by the daily diet of senseless murders.
The slaying of 10 policemen between February 17 and July 2, is totally unacceptable. The question is just how are we as citizens of this tiny country, which seems to be at war with itself, going to reverse this trend and reduce over time, the high murder rate that we have.
The one thing we should not do - certainly not the police - is to get hysterical about the problem.
Talk of the police preparing "to take severe, extreme, resolute and unprecedented action in order to stop the slaughter of policemen" is just that - talk.
What the police need at this time to help them solve the problem are cool heads which are able to engage the co-operation of the public - every decent citizen in this land. What they really need is brain power and new ideas - not M82A2 Barrett .50 calibre sniper rifles. And least of all, we don't need the threatening attitude that says "if we can't catch Quaco we catch him shut".
On Friday, December 9, 1993, three policemen in plain clothes died at Blauwearie district in Westmoreland. Two were stoned to death by villagers who accused them of stealing their ganja and the third broke his neck when he jumped from a window in an effort to escape the mob.
The following Monday, Joseph Williams, the then Commissioner of Police, boasted to The Star newspaper which I was running then, that Blauwearie was like a ghost town. I went to Blauwearie (a place I had hitherto never even heard of) on the Tuesday and discovered that he was right. But as I wrote on the Wednesday, "That is not a credit to the Police Force that he heads." What he did was to send his goons from the Operations Squad to Blauwearie to terrorise the district. For days the police beat up decent, innocent citizens who were going about their lawful everyday business and who had had nothing to do with the dastardly murders at Blauwearie. The police even damaged their property out of malice.
I wrote then: "What the police need now are their brightest and their best investigators to get at the truth of what really happened at Blauwearie on Friday..."
The Francis Forbes whom I have known for several years, long before he became Commissioner of Police, would never entertain the thought of unleashing the police on innocent citizens and I am persuaded that he will do, within the law, everything that is needed to bring to book, the killers of these 10 policemen - and indeed, of all other citizens.
There are, however, too many members of the Jamaica Constabulary with a Blauwearie mentality.
But there is more that the police on the ground can do to avenge, within the law, the deaths of their colleagues.
The threat of "severe, extreme, resolute and unprecedented action" makes a good sound bite but it does not scare one single, solitary murderous gunman. He already knew that the penalty for the murder he committed is hanging.
What deters people with murders on their minds is not the threat of the punishment of hanging, the resumption of which the Jamaica Police Federation is calling for. It is the unrelenting certainty of detection. We have to catch the suspects before we can hang them.
The Jamaica Constabulary over the years, and in my lifetime, has benefited from the skills of some excellent world-class detectives who would have been assets to Scotland Yard, the FBI or the RCMP. With respect, I get the impression that the Jamaica Constabulary is not replicating enough of these detectives.
What we need to stem the murder of policemen and of other citizens is serious, dedicated professional investigators who are committed to building seamless cases against their quarries, ensure conviction and ultimate punishment. That's the only way it is going to stop.
Have the colleagues of the 10 policemen, for instance, volunteered of their time to undertake tedious, even boring foot-slogging work that could help to put the killers on the gallows? And bear in mind that with so many murders being committed each year the caseload of the average homicide detective, can hardly leave him time to scratch his head.
Without intelligent, professional, painstaking investigation and detection work, inflammatory phrases and mindless scapegoating criticism of "human rights activists" are only going to lead us down the path of suicide bombers vs 50-ton tanks, and similarly, it will be a war of attrition from which no winner will emerge.
Nothing attracts the co-operation of citizens like the professionalism of its police force.
