If we had asked Mr. Adams to scale 20-foot-high walls and chase on foot "criminal bad men", instead of eliminating them, he could have easily done that.
Bernard Headley, Contributor
IF COMMISSIONER Francis Forbes and other police brass are having things their way, Senior Superintendent Reneto Adams is fast headed the way of the disco, Shabba Ranks, the old and onetime "Trinity", and one Wolfgang Grassl.
My guess is, most people will ask, scratching their foreheads, "Who? Grassl?" And then they'll draw a total blank which is exactly my point.
Mr. Grassl not so long ago was a management studies and economics lecturer here on the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies. He was also a well-known entity in and around the island.
Trouble with Mr. Grassl was, he used to terrorise with his writing and speech-making bold, provoking and perfidious the Patterson administration. He criticised and attacked the Government's economic policies and management style with the kind of temerity of someone off the reservation.
Today, Mr. Grassl is indeed off the reservation. As far as anyone knows, he teaches very small classes, of not-so-gifted students, at a backwoods, no-name college in the United States, where he doesn't get provided housing, and no Kiwanis Club or Chamber of Commerce is interested in his views.
ABSURDITY
Before Mr. Adams is finally banished into similar gruesome oblivion, might we not, one last time, behold in him some of the glaring absurdities (which he displayed so tantalisingly) in the society we asked him to police?
We need hardly look any farther than at the surreal visage he presented earlier this month as he departed his demolished Crime Management house of ill-repute.
Seductively shaded from the glare of the noonday sun, in what appeared to have been dark Perry Ellis eyeshades, Mr. Adams, Mama's boy and model family man, let loose on us his trademark wide-open, winning smile.
The at-minimum $50,000 dark Armani suit he sported, with matching silk tie and equally pricey shirt, fitted perfectly his well-sculpted, rock-solid physique. Mr. Adams is no flabby, potbellied "has been", as The Sunday Gleaner columnist "Valhala" mischievously sought some weeks ago to portray him.
HIS MANDATE
If we had asked Mr. Adams to scale 20-foot-high walls and chase on foot "criminal bad men", instead of eliminating them, he could have easily done that. He could have climbed, swooped down, out-ran and collar, every time, with breath to spare, doped-up, two-bit 20-something punks.
But "bringing them in" is not implicitly what we asked Mr. Adams to do. And the kind of policing policy his Government asked him to help implement has conspicuous precedent going back some 25 years ago in the foothills of Green Bay.
Mr. Adams must have clearly known and understood these things, and had them firmly planted in the back of his mind, when, like Prometheus unbound, a man free of the impediments of second thoughts, he strode defiantly, confidently, into his shiny, silver BMW, state-of-the-art cellular phone in one hand and remote car-alarm device in the other. Punch a hole in that!
Try now telling me that becoming a super-bad Rambo cop is not the way to give "yuself a chance fi step up inna life".
All I could say to myself, as I looked on in awe and wonderment at this truly amazing man, was: "Wonder who is his investment adviser?"
Particularly so as I got to thinking, how on earth am I going to pay a repair bill for the little nondescript, beat-up Ford I still have stuck in the shop at the same dealer where a few weeks ago Mr. Adams picked up his brand new BMW?
He must have, I concluded, an awfully good adviser over at DB&G or Mayberry, one far brighter and more brilliant than mine. A genius who smartly invested what's left of the $20,000 to $50,000 a month salary we've been hearing policemen take home.
I've since learned, though thanks to Gleaner staff reporter Howard Walker (June 16, 2003) that behind Mr. Adams's thrash and brash were his stubborn patriotism and a wise old grandmother.
ON INNOCENCE
There's more but the absurdities continue. Take the matter of Mr. Adams constantly popping off at the mouth every opportunity he used to get opportunities that have begun to dry up with his now diminished public-media currency. Left to interpolators and his favourite bashers talk show host Wilmot Perkins, Jamaicans For Justice (JFJ), and Families Against State Terrorism (FAST) you'd think that Mr. Adams's publicly articulated views on crime and criminal justice were so frighteningly onerous that he is Adolf Hitler, "Papa Doc" Duvalier, and Idi Amin re-incarnated into one terrible, loathsome being. (Though I admit, I too at one time entertained similar thoughts).
Check out what he said, for instance, about the cherished, long-standing, well-established principle in democratic societies relating to the presumption of innocence.
Mr. Adams's claim, which he has not backed away from one bit, not even when challenged by a group of my pesky UWI students, is that all the talk about being "innocent until proven guilty is pure semantics."
On the face of it, such a peculiar construction of what is generally regarded as a fundamental right could normally be taken as coming from a committed Fascist. Next thing you know, keep Mr. Adams around and he could very well be asking, as did Stalin (not Mussolini), "How many troops does the Pope have?"
But hearing Mr. Adams out fully on this perhaps his most infamous uttering, minus its shock effect, tells a different story about what he really means. And what he means fittingly illustrates a notion that is well grounded in Left criminological critique.
More than that, it's a notion that JFJ and FAST adherents would, I suspect, have little difficulty accepting. Mr. Adams is describing what he knows, as a police officer of more than 30 years' experience, of how law enforcement and the criminal justice system actually work in Jamaica.
He likes to recall that, as a young foot patrol officer in 1960s' Jamaica (maybe he could yet do community policing after all), one of the first things he learned from his superiors was, no matter what his apparent or suspected offence, "You never stop a man driving a Humber Hawk" (a big shot motorcar of yesteryear and of vintage, "old" money). That man was ineluctably innocent. He cannot, ever, be proven guilty. So why bother?
On the other hand, Mr. Adams points out, look at what happened to poor Ivan Barrows. He was the 76-year-old mentally challenged, indigent man who for 29 years was unaccounted for while he rotted away in prison, without charge, much less a conviction.
Mr. Barrows was already "guilty", perhaps not quite before he was born, but the circumstances of his birth had a priori condemned him without need to prove anything.
That kind of thing happens everyday. Hello--. It's normal practice on the crime battleground that is Jamaica, Mr Adams will say, to the mortification of his superiors.
HYPOCRITICAL
Resourceful law enforcement is law officers having intuitive understanding of who are the good, the bad, and the ugly; and then enforcing the law against those whom the society has already marked for death. The hell with some arcane semantic about "innocent until proven guilty." Who's got time for that?
One other significant utterance of Mr. Adams dovetails with the foregoing. It's that, according to him, "over 75 per cent of the Jamaican people are criminals."
Him believing this to be so, Mr. Adams's detractors have contended, is what he took as licence to kill indiscriminately. (Fire into a flock of John Crows; and any and everything you hit is bound to be a John Crow).
The only problem with that "75 per cent" statement, however and it's so only because of Mr. Adams's tendency toward linguistic overkill is that technically no one is a "criminal" until convicted in a court of law.
But, do as many as 75 per cent of Jamaicans break the law, a significant amount of the breaking coming from cheating (and trying to cheat) the Finance Minister?
Of course Mr. Adams is right. Political authorities have gone so far as to tell him, he told the West Kingston Commission of Enquiry in October 2001, to lay his confounded, sugarcane-cutting hands off patrons and "area leaders", whom he and other police higher-ups know are "criminals" bigger "fish", that is, among his 75 per cent.
Mr. Adams is, in a most despicable and intelligence-insulting way, being made the latest fall guy for much that is ludicrous and shamelessly hypocritical in the society.
Dr. Bernard Headley is Professor of Criminology in the Faculty of Social Sciences at University of the West Indies.
