Adams
Bernard Headley, Contributor
LIFE FOR SSP Reneto Adams has been one dizzying journey. I should know, since I've been trying to independently 'cover' him for some time now.
That life has in recent times taken an unexpected, huge descent - certainly from where Mr. Adams stood not quite three years ago, in October 2001. Then, testifying before Justice Julius Isaac and the West Kingston Commission of Enquiry, purportedly looking into the official killing of more than 20 citizens from Western Kingston (in which Mr. Adams played the lead role) he was the glittering star, the dapper anti-crime colossus, the quintessential lawman. No one then would have dared question his bona fides, or his bravura, than would some slimy varmint try to mess with Wyatt Earp, the legendary frontier marshal of Wild American West fame.
At that (in)famous set of hearings, Mr. Adams had eating out of both his hands eminent jurists and front-row, expensive Queen's Councils (QCs) and others who saw things mostly through the prism of the military and the police. Collectively they sought out Mr. Adams' wisdom, and they clung to his every response. They cheered him on, and they lauded him.
The renowned late great, Ian Ramsay, back then wooed the 'Ivy-Leagued' Mr. Adams into a loquacious, leisurely discourse on the decline of civilisation and Durkheimian treatises on societal change, the disintegration of mechanical solidarity, and the creeping decadence in the Jamaican society.
All of them compelling forces, Mr. Adams had theorised, to wit a bemused Mr. Ramsay obligingly concurred, that inexorably weighed heavily on Jamaica's desperate crime situation.
GOOD OL' DAYS
In the Jamaica he grew up in, Mr. Adams expanded, for benefit of those who hadn't read Durkheim, communities worked harmoniously and peacefully together. And they did so without regard to whatever racial, class or political boundaries that may have artificially separated them.
Proper and accessible role models were local schoolteachers and village elders, like the parson and the village barber, not criminal dons or citified youths with wads of cash, lots of pretty women, fancy automobiles and their nine-millimetres.
The barefoot boy from down the road, in his rural St. Elizabeth, Mr. Adams offered, "could feel free to walk onto the verandah" of the house of his better-off, big shot neighbour, and sit down and "reason with him", without rancour or prejudice. If only we could get back to those good old days, Mr. Adams had bemoaned.
But then, within a tragic few months following the West Kingston hearings, somewhere along the ill-fated road to a little-known town in Clarendon Kraal Mr. Adams' journey arrived at an abrupt, surreal and dreadful nadir.
VINTAGE ADAMS
Inside Justice Mahadev's crowded courtroom on Wednesday morning, April 21, Mr. Adams gave glimpses of his usual effusive, confident self. He flashed his trademark, winning smile. And he enthusiastically pumped hands, slapped shoulders (including mine) and bear-hugged colleagues he had on air said some pretty mean things about.
That vintage Adams scene would within moments, however, when it was time to "get serious", take a dark, dismaying and dissonant turn. We saw Mr. Adams and five young men with caring mothers and adoring aunts looking on in anguished horror, and whose career and world view Mr. Adams played no small part moulding being led up a set of stairs to take their respective places inside the 'prisoners' dock', a place as chillingly disgraceful as it is archaic.
A place to which Mr. Adams, in his long career as a senior crime-fighter, must have himself sent scowling, angry and frightened-several of the society's most despised and irredeemably wicked.For the once revered senior lawman, a one-time shining beacon in the Jamaica Constabulary, now seen standing inside the prisoners' dock - and on a charge of murder - represented an arrival at an altogether incongruous destination.
Not so unlikely is it, though, when we consider that, as the English author Angela Olive Carter so eloquently put it, "the destination of all journeys is their beginning." We should all fervently hope that, in due course, at the end of what will be the most important criminal trial in Jamaican history, our 'trial of the century', we will learn whether the sorry place at which Mr. Adams has arrived began as a tale of a man possessed: a man driven by voices and his own inner demons, while, incredulously, he was an officer in the Police High Command; and whether, in the case before the court, on an afternoon in May 2003, he did with malice, premeditation and planning, murder innocent, defenceless citizens?
Or, did Mr. Adams' journey begin, we'd equally like to know, in the institutional setting that nurtured him for 37 of his relatively young 50-some years, and in his hugely admired assimilation of a kind of crime-fighting strategy that has been promoted and given official support and broad public approval?
We shall all watch with interest for empanelling of an impartial jury, one capable of rendering in light of queries like these a just, fair and fearless decision.
Bernard Headley is Professor of Sociology & Criminology at the University of the West Indies, Mona.
