A callous and insensitive response
published: Sunday | May 18, 2003
THE EDITOR, Sir:
IT IS with much dismay that I note the apparently callous and insensitive response by Senior Superintendent Reneto Adams to the decision by the Police High Command for members of the Crime Management Unit team that participated in last week's killing of four persons in Kraal, Clarendon, to be taken off front-line duty, pending investigations into the matter.
In the face of intense public scrutiny of a police killing which included the deaths of two women under extremely questionable circumstances, SSP Adams' response was to inform the country that the net result of being taken off front-line duty would be that he would now have time to go and hot up the roadways in his high-powered racing car, something which is illegal for the average Jamaican except on a prescribed racing track.
In further trivialising a really serious matter, for which Police Commission Francis Forbes felt compelled to apologise to the country from the Halse Hall Great House in Clarendon, where he held a community meeting and press conference, Mr. Adams indicated that the time-off would also allow him to have a few more facials, manicures, pedicures and time to enjoy his gardening and to spend with his birds.
There are many who would say Mr. Adams has, to a great extent, served a useful purpose as some sort of a colourful bastion of public defiance of the criminals within our midst, and that notion I would support to some degree; but in all of that, we have to factor in the perimeters of the law, the constitutional provisions to protect the rights of us all. Allegations especially surrounding the deaths of the two women at Kraal, have once again conveyed profound implications for justice and personal security from the state's own primary enforcement unit.
It is intriguingly coincidental that the Kraal killings followed right behind the recent transfer of Superintendent Warren Clarke, former head of the Clarendon Police Division, whose strong community policing approach was welcomed by both the citizenry and business interests in the parish, for which they collectively demonstrated against the transfer. Against that background and Commissioner Forbes' statement at Tuesday's press conference that the parish police heads should be notified when the various national crime-fighting squads intend to go into the different divisions and, where possible, the local police should be present on such operations, last week's CMU action in Kraal begs the questions of whether or not that policy was followed and if not, why not?
