By Lloyd Williams, Senior Associate Editor 
Phillips
(left) and Forbes (right)
SPECIAL POLICE squads are often formed when violent crime or the perception of it is at its worst and the populace is fearful.
The prevailing mood among the citizenry, usually brought on by recently-committed barefaced and senseless murders such as those which have occurred in Spanish Town and at the Caymanas Crossing and, before that, at Mountain View Avenue, 100 Lane, and too many other places, is that "something has to be done about crime". That "something", invariably is more aggressive police action to bring crime under control. And it is quite natural for the police, politicians and the public to use the murder rate to judge how safe the country is, since murder is the ultimate crime.
But what this "something" means in the mind of the populace which feels increasingly threatened and vulnerable, is that the members of the police special squad should be given a free hand to do whatever they deem necessary to curtail the current crime wave. And if there are complaints about how they execute their duties, then the critics are deemed to be "hugging up" criminals, "just like the human rights people".
CALLS FOR THE CMU
So it's not surprising that just now there is a call from certain quarters to "bring back the Crime Management Unit". And you can imagine just how thorough and zealous its performance would be to justify its new lease on life. But fortunately Commissioner Francis Forbes dismantled the Crime Management Unit which he said was not fulfilling its mission of "targeting dons and dealing with extortion, car-jackings, guns and deportees who were involved in crime". According to the Commissioner: "... I realised that they were being channelled just to go and help a division that had a general crime problem and therefore enough focus was not being placed on those areas".
Usually, the leaders of these police special squads are experts at playing the media, affording their friends every photo and interview opportunity to highlight their "accomplishments". They dote on each other, with the media dubbing them "crime fighters" in a way which co-opts the description from every other member of the Jamaica Constabulary, as if the police outside their special squads have nothing at all to do with fighting crime. They feed on each others' egos.
But it should never be forgotten that the great majority of the policemen and policewomen in the Jamaica Constabulary and its auxiliaries are decent, hard-working, honest people, most of whom go the extra mile each day to serve the communities which they police. They too fight crime and effectively if not in the glare of television cameras or in the news pages of newspapers. And, similarly, there are notable exceptions to all your typical special-squad leaders.
For the police special squad leaders' appointment, more often than not they are approached first by the political directorate, "in the public interest". This tends to enhance their sense of importance and power and imbue them with the heady feeling of being untouchable which is too often manifested in their ignoring or bypassing their official chains of command.
For this reason the leaders feel beholden to the politicians and too often go out of their way to justify to them, their appointment. There are reports of a certain special squad leader who became so infatuated with his own exalted status that he often boasted that he reported "only to the Prime Minister". This might have been true or false, but the problem was that he had become so close to a "don" who too is rapidly falling out of grace, that he simply had to go.
Eventually, it's the very headiness of the position that brings police special squad leaders tumbling down, as sooner rather than later, they become a law unto themselves and really believe they and the actions they undertake, regardless of how outrageous or patently criminal, are above the law.
Over the years police special squads tend to be selected more for their "courage", which really means their propensity to shoot first and give cover stories later, or to assault civilians unprovoked, than for their ability to outwit their criminal quarries, build seamless evidence-supported cases against them and bring them to book.
The problem which usually destroys a police special squad such as the CMU is the culture of excessive force which is manifested in what are seen as unpunished extra-judicial killings and which dogs the larger JCF of which it is a unit although it tends to behave as if it is independent and autonomous of the JCF. If relentless efforts are not made to stamp out this culture, it will surface from time to time in other sections of the force. So it mustn't be taken for granted that the culture which gave birth to the CMU in the first place, and to the previous squads, has disappeared entirely from the Jamaica Constabulary.
SHORTCOMINGS IN TRAINING
Commissioner Forbes, members of the Police High Command, and criminologists, would know better than most of us that often, at the root of the problem experienced by the special squads, specifically, and the police force in general, are shortcomings in training, poor or non-existent supervision and of course the culture of silence which brands as traitors, the colleagues of law-breaking police who speak out against their actions.
Now you begin to appreciate the job the Office of Professional Responsibility has to do.
Observation of other police forces show that the excessive force indisciplined special squad leaders are usually accused of authorising and using, never just spring up over night. It usually is nurtured over years by the culture of the force or sections of it. This is how the little cancer of indiscipline grows. This is how the rights of defenceless poor people come to be trampled on. This is what gives birth to organisations like the Independent Jamaica Council for Human Rights and Jamaicans for Justice which labour to protect the Michael Gayles of this world, the poor, the weak and the defenceless against what would otherwise be unpunished excesses by the police and other security forces.
But serious crime as is occurring in Jamaica must be tackled seriously and urgently. Crime is never static. Organised crime bosses these days are more educated, they are shrewder, they are richer, more money is at stake for them and they are most ruthless. The police can't counter them with just brawnier personnel, bigger guns and more accurate shooters.
Peter Phillips, the National Security Minister, has stressed from time to time that the international drug syndicates are fuelling serious crime here.
GUN-RUNNING
This means not only cocaine and ganja trafficking, but murder, gun-running, kidnapping, extortion, corruption and bribery. He told the House of Representatives on June 18, 2002 that "Narcotics control remains a central part of our immediate mission. Accordingly, we will be intensifying our focus particularly on major drug traffickers."
Here is what the International Narcotics Strategy Report 2003 says, in part, about these highly organised drug gangs:
"Battling the international drug trade is a complex, dynamic process.
"Contrary to expectations it does not get easier with time. Every time we score a major success and over the past decade we have scored many the drug trade learns from it. As successful counter-narcotics operations eliminate the less agile drug syndicates, those that survive get smarter and more sophisticated, adopting ingenious new strategies for concealment and survival. We have seen this already with the emergence of hundreds of small, less targetable syndicates that filled the void left by the destruction of Colombia's Medellin and Cali cartels. This type of forced natural selection eventually leaves us with a very astute adversary.
"The drug trade itself also evolves naturally over time. We are now confronting second-generation multinational drug syndicates that have adopted modern management techniques, use state-of-the-art communications, and have sophisticated technical and financial expertise. As we have noted, they also have nearly unlimited financial resources to draw upon. The international counter-narcotics effort, therefore, will require even greater tactical adaptability and flexibility, closer co-ordination between governments across the whole spectrum of diplomacy and law enforcement, and significant resources."
ORGANISED CRIME
This is the nature of the organised crime and the criminals that the Jamaican Constabulary and the civil society have to face these days. This is what we are up against. The big bosses or organised crime, often well protected and well-connected themselves, have their allies in money launderers, white-collar criminals who commit forgery and fraud, invariably with help from insiders, extortioners, kidnappers, armed robbers and contract killers, and lest we forget, accomplices within the Jamaica Constabulary itself.
Taking on serious crime gangs is serious, tedious, life-threatening, painstaking business. It's not at all like political campaigns that you pour money into and let your spin doctors loose to create the necessary favourable image which is guaranteed to get you votes. It's not a showy, telegenic, photogenic business even though the media savvy among "crime-fighter" cops would want you to believe otherwise.
We cannot "detain" our way out of it, even if we have organised "effective civil oversight of the process of detention to make it impartial" and given it "a solid legal framework and justification" and established "humane facilities for detention instead of some hell-hole."
We have to stop talking about "community policing" and blanket the country with it. Only then will we get from the public the level of co-operation that is vital if we are ever to combat crime successfully.
"Intelligence" is a word used by some sectors of the police force so loosely these days that it has almost been debased to equate with "malicious rumour". But we must begin to use real intelligence to tackle this country's problem of crime. First, we must make an assessment of the threat the society faces from the organised criminal gangs and gangsters this country hears so much about, regardless of how wealthy and politically well-connected they are.
Then we need more and better analyses to provide the details that are needed to link seemingly unrelated cases and enable the development of successful prosecutions which end with the "Mr. Bigs" who now run drug trafficking, extortion, kidnapping and murder syndicates, languishing behind bars, and their assets in the coffers of the state.
While it is impressive to cite the number of arrests and seizures made during operations and raids, it will all come to nought if the intelligence, investigative and enforcement efforts of the security forces are not focused on disrupting, weakening and destroying the organised crime gangs, their finances, transportation, communication and leadership structures and all their other vulnerabilities. (But there are members of the security forces who are highly trained in intelligence gathering and who know these things far better than this writer.)
Some police commanders these days spew statistics like confetti, somewhat similar to how we sometimes bandy about impressive domestic agriculture production figures. So the focus tends to be on the statistical - emphasising the number of arrests and seizures and not the number of iron-clad cases, resulting in convictions and long prison terms.
MAJOR DRUG TRAFFICKERS
Instead, for the war against organised crime to be waged successfully, the focus must be on the major drug traffickers, and extortioners, and white collar crime bosses and other racketeers who are making crime profitable, and engaging in activities that are bleeding the nation. The focus must be on the "Mr. Bigs" who insinuate themselves into legitimate sectors of the economy such as construction, imports and all kinds of other businesses; those who have the money to bribe the persons who have with the influence, the power and the authority to ensure the implementation of their wishes.
But if we really want to restore law and order in the society, we must realise that the police and civil society can't do the job alone. We need not only the political will but the willing politicians People's National Party and Jamaica Labour Party. These are the parties' contacts who offer themselves as mediators and negotiators with the gunmen, the murderers, the rapists and the extortioners who wreak havoc, with impunity, in the various inner-city communities. It's past time to cut them loose and let the police do their job.
Until these politicians JLP and PNP decide to cut loose once and for all, their stewards, the "dons", and their "soldiers" who are their eyes, ears and arms on the ground in these inner-city communities, then there will always be tenuous, intermittent cease-fires and never the hope of lasting peace.
