Aiming for hi-tech JCF
This is the final part of an interview done with Police Commissioner Francis Forbes by Lloyd Williams, Senior Associate Editor. Part 1 was published in yesterday's edition of The Sunday Gleaner.
DESPITE CHALLENGES, Commissioner of Police Francis Forbes is not throwing up his hands in frustration just yet, although he must sometimes feel hamstrung by some archaic rules that still govern the 137-year-old Police Force.
Forbes: I am a little encouraged, though, that the new Police Services Commission and the Solicitor-General are determined to support me in trying to move out some bad cops, regardless of rank. They have been searching for a format that will assist me and right now there are some cases that are being reviewed. Hopefully, very soon we'll hear that they have found a way for some of these people to depart.
According to Commissioner Forbes, "A bad policeman" is someone who is involved in corrupt activities and is to be differentiated from the incompetent cop who can't do his or her job properly. "The bad cops are the ones who take bribes, the ones who are engaged in the drugs underworld, the ones who will use the camouflage of the badge in order to commit murders and robberies."
Commissioner Forbes does not agree that there is a drug mafia in the Jamaica Constabulary. To his mind, the police who are involved in the drug trade are for the most part 'commoners' in the system, who are being used. There are one or two, however, who have crossed the line from just giving protection, to active participation and sharing of profits. I can't call names, but some of some these people are known, but it's just a handful and we are on to them. But most of the others are just collecting 'smalls' from the drug lords to escort the drugs, even keeping it overnight at times if they are the ones who are trusted.
Q: How would you assess the JCF's human rights record under your stewardship?
Forbes: I think a lot of im-provements have been made in the area of human rights. Even as I speak, fatal shootings by the police are continuing to decline. Last year, it was the lowest in a decade and it continues to decline. (It was 114 in 2003 and 355 in 1984.) Our records show that even at the basic training all of the recruits coming out now are trained in human rights and human dignity, something that never existed when I was trained in 1970 at Port Royal. It's an integrated part of the course now. So I think that this new crop of police will help us to turn the corner. And I say that because 50 per cent of the policemen and women now have under 10 years' service and it means that the Suppression of Crime Act influence and all that, have no effect on their persona and their attitudes. So that is one thing that is helping us to turn that corner.
Why was the Crime Manage-ment Unit allowed to run unfettered for so long?
Forbes: I don't agree with the term 'unfettered'. After the first year I had a review done and there were some observations and some recommendations. We followed to the best that we could, some of those recommendations. You noticed that very early, for example, we sent a member of the Constabulary Communication Network to be stationed with the CMU. But I have to remind people over and over again that the CMU was not a squad. That 22 persons were sent there and I set up a computer system there, a local area network with a server and everything. The 20-odd persons were to have been in teams - one team looking at deportees, another team looking at extortion, and other teams looking at car-jacking and so on. And the whole idea was that when you visited their headquarters you would be able to go to those teams and go on the computer and see where they were, how they were tracking, the databases that they were establishing. That was the notion of CMU. Not a squad running around on the road. But at the same time, the entire human resources of the Force would be available to them when they wanted to go operational. They should have been the brains behind the thing and they should have been leading the charges in operations and not waiting on intelligence to be fed to them but themselves creating the intelligence by analysis from their own observations.
Do you feel particularly physically threatened sometimes?
Forbes: It comes with the territory and you learn to live with the thing but there are times when the some threats are more real than others and on those occasions you have to resort to a type of security that is more heightened than at other times. And when you are in that mode you become much more restricted and sometimes you feel imprisoned. But, fortunately for me, it has not been a continuous state but something that goes and comes.
What particular aspect of the job has kept you awake at nights?
Forbes: My goal was to reform and modernise the Police Force. From the very day that I became Commissioner I invited an external review of the Force and the whole idea was to identify very early what were the strengths and weaknesses, build upon the strengths and change the weaknesses into strengths, if possible. And out of that came the Five-Year Corporate Strategy which has expired. We are just about completing the draft of a three-year strategy now. So the thing that really kept me up was just trying to convince myself that although it was very challenging because of the lack of resources and the lack of capacity at certain stages, that it was possible, my goals were achievable and that I should stay on track. There have been many pressures, internally and externally, coming from persons who maybe were more comfortable in the old mode of policing but everything tells me that we have not just changed from one millennium to the other, but that we, as an organisation, have to change in every way possible... I have been challenged sometimes by those who don't quite understand the journey that we are taking and it's things like those that keep me up sometimes.
In carrying out the reforms, how has the culture of the 137-year-old JCF assisted or impeded you?
Forbes: At first there was a lot of resistance to modernisation and reform. No man is opposed to modernising the Force. The opposition comes when you speak about reforming, telling people that they have to change some attitudes and all that. So, there is a lot of resistance. For example, with the young people coming on board there is a great appreciation for community-based policing. But even now community-based policing is resisted by some as soft policing. You try to convince people that in communities where the police work closely with the citizens there is a greater level of crime prevention and crime prevention should be our target rather than crime protection.
What would you say is the toughest part of your job?
Forbes: The toughest part of my job is attending the funerals of police persons. Over and over I am amazed at the lack of presence of the public at some of these funerals. I had to be off the island when Senior Supt. Lloyd McDonald was buried, but the reports I got was that the church was full and ran over. But shortly after that I went to the funeral of the policeman from the Caymanas Police Station who was shot in his car and there was hardly anybody in the church. And it occurred to me that here we go again. I remember attending two funerals in one evening many years ago when a district constable from Central Kingston was murdered. His funeral was in St. Catherine and earlier that day, at Stella Maris, I had to attend the funeral of a policeman from Hunts Bay who had been shot and killed on a bus when he tried to foil a robbery. And at that particular funeral, the church was almost empty.
But one of the things that really causes me to grieve a lot when policemen are killed is that there never seem to be any rich policemen dying. You go to the homes of some of these policemen and you stand in wonder at the poverty that is obvious at their homes and you wonder at the amount of work that they put out and yet that is the condition they are forced to live in. But I still believe that members of the JCF can do a little more in trying to protect themselves. Too many are dying in bars and those places and I think they can do a little better and I have been saying it to them. They still need to be a little more alert.
The JCF now manages its own budget; what's the state of your resources?
Forbes: We now manage the recurrent side of our budget, the bulk of which goes to salaries and emoluments. "But it has been a learning curve for us and I think we have done very well the first two years that we have been managing our own budget. For example, we have been able to identify more accurately, areas of waste, and have been able to plug them. Telephone although it still continues to be a problem because technology does not allow us to put limitations on the instrument as we would like to. But, we have been making some inroads there, cutting bills, for example, from $500,000 a month to $60,000 at one police division; so we have done quite well with that. Even in dealing with suppliers of goods and services, we have been able to demand, in most cases, better quality at more reasonable rates.
How equipped is the JCF in terms of technology and personnel to fight modern-day crime?
Forbes: Although we still have a long way to go in terms of technology, we are making some improvements. Certainly we have recruited over recent years, persons who are very well educated and are therefore trainable. And so we have been able to deploy some of those in areas that require a high level of intellect. Computerisation now is an attraction for most members of the Force and so people are taking their own time out to go and study computers. We have probably close to 150 persons in the Force now who have degrees and many of those persons are not persons who came in through the direct-entry programme, but persons who joined and then obtained degrees or persons who joined as constables, with degrees. In fact, almost every batch of graduates in recent years has one or two persons who have degrees and who train as ordinary constables at Twickenham Park, (the Police Academy.)
The JCF is getting a lot of training assistance from overseas law enforcement agencies in terms of transnational organised crime, Commissioner Forbes says. "Our people are getting training in money laundering, etc., and I think that the future looks good for us. We are doing a lot of capacity building and I think it will pay off as we go along."
List your proudest accomplishments as Commissioner?
Forbes: The Staff College, for instance, where I once lectured, and which I was in charge of, is now linked with the University of the West Indies, delivering a certificate programme. That's an accomplishment that I feel very proud of. The uniformed bicycle patrols, I feel proud of that. When I see the number of persons with safety equipment like helmets and bullet-proof vests, I feel proud of that.
Commissioner Forbes served for five years at the Jamaica Constabulary Staff College, helping to reform it and bring up the standards, rising from course director and lecturer to administrative director.
"We have had commissioners in the region who were once my students at the Staff College. So, nowadays when I travel the region as president of the Association of Caribbean Commissioners of Police, I am well-known and well-respected in the region."
He is in his second term as president, not yet deciding whether he will run for a third term.
"The way we do things. Some simple things. For example, the re-done Use-of-Force Policy that says before you go out on an operation you have to do a risk assessment. If the risk is so high that innocent lives will be lost, you don't go. You re-schedule, you re-plan. Those are things that might not be attractive to people outside, but I am proud of them because they are designed to save lives, the lives of the police as well as of citizens. The anti-corruption policy and strategy that we are trying to put on the table now, that is something that I feel good about, also. Of course, when you see a crime scene on television now, people take it for granted. You see crime scene tape and evidence collection going on but those were not thought of before I became commissioner. I bought the first crime-scene tape for the Force and we have numerous persons who are trained to protect crime scenes. In fact, we have 4,000 regular police who have been trained. They are usually the first who arrive on a scene. They have been trained as to what to do as the first persons to arrive on the scene to protect it until the experts arrive. So those are accomplishments that I am proud of.
SCOUT MOVEMENT
The Scout movement is regenerating itself because of the involvement of the police, something that the Governor-General, who is the Chief Scout of Jamaica, had asked us to get involved in and even the Girl Guide movement; people are asking us to help them and we are doing so. These are things that we are proud of.
I have seen a lot of things happening. For example, the determination to work with the youth is paying off now. We have hundreds of students in schools who are now members of Scout troops that are managed by police Scout leaders. This morning the principal of Denham Town Primary School was chairing a function on my compound and we have a Scout troop at that school now. So those are some rewarding moments, as far as I am concerned, that had been resisted earlier but have changed around now.
What are some of your yet-to-be implemented visions for the Jamaica Constabulary?
Forbes: I'd like to see the Force computerised. The Janice Allen case is a typical example of what can happen when you are not computerised. People can destroy records easily; fire can destroy records. When you are computerised and you have databases established, back-ups and all that, even if there is a national disaster, all is not lost. Doing things with paper all the time is becoming more and more onerous. We are just out of synch with some other places in the world. My really big project is to see to computerisation.
The pilot traffic ticketing system is up and running now and is very encouraging. But I would like it to go to the next step where we carry palm-held computers where you write the traffic tickets onto this thing. If a mistake is made and you correct it, a red flag goes up on the system and the auditors will be notified. Policemen in the past got away by putting wrong court dates Sundays and public holidays on traffic tickets. If it is computerised properly that will be impossible.
This new system now has the capacity to accommodate the wanted index; those who are licensed firearms holders will be on the system too. That linkage by computer is critical to our success. And that is where I'd like to see the Force go.
I acknowledge that Jamaica is not a rich country and as Michael Lee-Chin said today, if you are wealthy there a lots of things that you could do. I am still concerned about the living and working conditions of some police. I am still concerned as to the challenge when it comes to the mobility of the organisation and I am still concerned about training that we have not yet received in certain areas but we are working on that. For example, for the last three years we have been trying to get a SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) team trained. We are not successful yet but we have not given up hope on that. I would like to see the health and safety issues of the Force better addressed than they are now, and some welfare matters of the junior ranks that need to be addressed, I'd like to see more attention paid to that. Whatever we can do now, I am doing it but much more needs to be done.
In situations like these, the Commissioner, an accomplished amateur magician, must sometimes wish he could pull some resources out of a hat. But being Francis Forbes, he faces the reality of his job.
