EVERY SO often the police mount what they call 'spot checks', usually on highways and major rural and urban roads. The purpose, one surmises, is to nab wanted people, recover stolen motor vehicles, seize contraband and illegal weapons, and bring to book, the drivers of unlicensed, uninsured and defective vehicles.
Over the years I have run into police spot checks every so often. Indeed, during that violent nine-month-long election campaign in 1980, there must have been very few people who encountered more police-military spot checks than I did. Given the violence of the times I found them reassuring. Help if I wanted it-was just a spot check away.
One dark, power-cut night, around 2 o'clock, I noticed, as I was approaching a four-way intersection, a strange flurry of activities ahead of me. The shadowy, undefined movements made me apprehensive, frightened even. Just as I was figuring how I might turn off, make a dash for it and avoid what seemed to me like explosive, impending danger of threatening proportions, a policeman stepped from out of the dark and advised me that I was to expect a spot check ahead. Whew! I was never so relieved. He probably saved my life.
SPOT CHECKS RAISE SOME QUESTIONS
So I have not the slightest problem with police personnel anywhere doing their duty but some spot checks raise some questions.
I have no problem with the police, if, in stopping me, they explain that I am the spitting image of 'Nunny Puss', who is on their 'most-wanted' list, so they want me to verify my identity; that the vehicle I am driving has a defective headlamp or some such obvious fault, in violation of the Road Traffic Act; that they believe it to be stolen, so I should provide documentary evidence that it was not; or that they have reasons to believe that it had been involved in a crime or an accident. And they may search the vehicle as minutely as they want to. I have absolutely no objection to complying with any of the above demands from the police.
But to be stopped so randomly, out of the blue, and so arrogantly American TV fashion ordered to 'switch off the car engine and get out of the car', and produce documents, without being told what crime I am suspected of committing, leaves me feeling harassed at least, if not violated.
If the Jamaican police are going to adopt the habits of some U.S. police, they should also be guided by Jamaican and U.S. laws which stipulate that citizens should be stopped by the police for probable cause only. For while the Firearms Act, section 42(1), gives the police the power to stop and search vehicles without warrant, even then the police must have reason to suspect that a gun or ammunition is being conveyed in the vehicle.
Indeed, in some jurisdictions if the police were to stop a motorist without good reason, and they find 100 kilos of cocaine in the car trunk, in court, the cocaine cannot be evidence against the motorist.
Of course the police have a hard row to hoe, tackling the high level of criminality in Jamaica, but it cannot be done successfully by alienating, through arrogance at spot checks, the support of the law-abiding citizenry.
People the police among them tend to look for fire where there is no fire. The careful observer will spot at some of these spot checks motorists making U-turns to avoid having their cars or person searched, the moment they realise there is a spot check ahead.
But there are other aspects of spot check operations that often cause friction between police and motorists. Some police personnel simply do not know what to look for on the documents they ask to see, or how to interpret what they read.
Some while back, while a friend was giving me a ride, the police stopped him to make a spot check. On demand, he presented his firearm user's licence to a female constable who examined it for an excessively long time, then sought help. "Hey corporal, you better come look at this because this no legal", she shouted, convinced that she had nabbed a felon. The corporal, even before examining the document, asked, "Is St. Andrew South it issue, no?"
As it turned out the document was perfectly up-to-date and in order and had in fact been issued several parishes away. The constable just didn't know what to look for, and the corporal's gratuitous comment was as unnecessary as it was unfounded and malicious.
And there are complaints about the manner in which the police ask to see firearm users' licences. True, I had the confidence of the friend who was asked by the female constable to produce his. But how did the requesting policewoman know that I wasn't a passenger whom the motorist had just picked up down the road, or an artisan he was taking to his residence or his businessplace to have some job done? It could be that it was the last disclosure the motorist would want to share with his passenger(s). The police must find a more private way of getting this type of information from motorists.
THE OTHER ASPECT
The other aspect of spot checks that is of grave concern, is how unprofessionally some are conducted with respect to the safety of the police personnel themselves. Some of the officers conducting them are sitting ducks for terrorists, home-grown and deported, with murder on their mind. Indeed, I recall at least three cases in recent memory when suspects who were stopped for spot checks killed police personnel at the scene and took away their weapons two assault rifles among them.
And even when body-searches are conducted, you sometimes get the impression that the searchers are not half as professional as they should be.
At these spot-check scenes, rarely are there any barriers in place to effectively deter desperadoes who might have no qualms about crashing their way through, much more spikes or puncture pads.
The Jamaica Constabulary has been moving with the times but it needs to change the way in which it conducts these spot checks.
