Colin Steer, Associate Editor
Goffe
ON SATURDAY, October 31, 1981, two students of Kingston Technical High School Garfield Hardie and Herbert Gallant were shot and killed by a policeman along North Street. The official police story was that they were chasing some would-be robbers who had fled into a yard along North Street near to Wildman Street. The police said they went in to the yard 16 North Street where they believed the suspects were hiding. As they entered, they were attacked and opened fire in response. When the shooting had died down, two school boys lay dead.
Two tenants who said they were eyewitnesses, had another version. Hardie, accompanied by Gallant, had just left Kingston Technical where a school fair was in progress about five minutes away on Hanover Street. They had gone to retrieve something from Hardie's home to help construct a booth. The policemen from the Flying Squad barged into the yard and seeing the two boys, apparently believing them to be the robbers and without attempting to ascertain who they were, opened fire, cutting them down in a hail of bullets.
CHURCH-GOING YOUNG MEN
In the days that followed, teachers, friends, church colleagues described the boys as decent, church-going young men. Hardie was a bright, quiet, unassuming young man who was determined to make something of his life. Having failed a few years earlier to gain a place in one of the traditional high schools through the Common Entrance Examination, he continued to apply himself and was successful in the Technical Entrance Examination. His dreams and that of his mother who was raising him practically on her own, died with him on that fateful Saturday.
Gallant was also very active in the church he attended at the top of Orange Street.
The following Monday,
KTHS students took the streets to demonstrate against the killing. A newspaper editorial subsequently thundered that it was unseemly for children to be on the streets demonstrating against the police. They should allow the proper investigations to take place, the argument ran. In other words, 'Get yourselves back in the classroom and allow big people to do their work'.
After much public agitation however, two policemen were charged with the murder of the
students. One was freed after a
preliminary hearing, the judge accepting the defence attorney's submission that a prima facie case had not been made out against him. The other, who was ordered to stand trial, was later found not guilty of murder which was the charged preferred by the director of public prosecutions. The jury in the Clarendon Circuit court where the case was sent did not believe the policeman murdered the boys. End of the story.
There have been many other Garfield Hardies and Herbert Gallants since October 1981. They are the victims of policemen's bullets some slain in cases of mistaken identity; some caught in crossfire; some crammed in jails until they suffocated; others battered and beaten for no reason than that they lived in the "wrong part of town", and still others harassed as part of the political machinations of the day from which the police are not immune.
It is also more the exception than the rule for police or soldiers to be found guilty when charges of abuse are levelled at them.
ANAEMIC COMPANIES
Sometimes, after they are freed in scandalously questionable
circumstances, the state offers some anaemic financial compensation to the victims' families.
However sympathetic many
people are in cases like that of the Kingston Technical boys, there is a general discomfort when civic action groups voice criticisms or raise questions about how the police do their work. People
seemingly want to suspend belief that the security forces are often callously brutal in how they deal with 'ghetto youth'. The 'victims' must be some 'old criminal', they rationalise.
And in recent times, with the society increasingly on edge over the high crime rates and in particular murder, voices which have long been critical of human rights groups who they see as defending criminals over the interests of the rest of the society's, are getting louder.
Increasingly, the civic action group, Jamaicans for Justice (JFJ), more so than Families Against State Terrorism (FAST) or the Independent Jamaica Council for Human Rights (IJCHR), is being lambasted for not speaking up in defence of the police. The JFJ in turn, now seems to feel obliged to issue statements condemning attacks against the police as a matter of course. This presumably is to demonstrate their even handedness that the organisation is really not against the police.
But JF chairperson Susan Goffe disagrees that this is a new stance. She says the practice of expressing sympathy about policemen killed in the line of duty has been a policy decision for several years.
CONFUSED
At the same time, many people in the society are seemingly
confused about the aims and
objectives of groups like hers. The groups seem to pop up primarily as critics of state agencies. These same people are angry and impatient with the media and especially the television stations for giving too much exposure to apparently bra-less buxom women bobbing in front of the television cameras shouting: "We want justice ... "
Attorney-at-law, Nancy Anderson, who has done some work for the IJCHR, says the anger is understandable but misplaced.
"They do not understand that we (human rights groups) are not
supporting any particular group. We would be just as concerned to take up the case of a policeman were he unfairly dismissed from his job, for example. Our purpose is to see that everybody gets a fair trial. We expect the police to be treated as fairly as anyone else in a court of law," she told The Sunday Gleaner last week.
One of the arguments frequently thrown at JFJ is that the group comprises uptown 'brown people' and as such, does not speak for the majority of Jamaicans. But long before Carolyn Gomes and Susan Goffe, there was the decidedly Afro-centric Flo O'Connor and attorney-at-law Dennis Daley who for years, through the then Jamaica Council for Human Rights, led the struggle to investigate allegations of police abuses among other things. They were similarly dismissed
as troublemakers who were wasting time and energy 'defending
criminals'.
Susan Goffe concedes that JFJ drew its initial membership from among the middle class but says as the group has sought to deal with the systemic problems affecting many areas of national life, they have managed to build a broad coalition of interests, including from within corporate Jamaica.
She also points to the range of issues about which the organisation is concerned including:
The need for effective, professional policing;
Credible independent investigations into killings involving the police; and independent observers at post-mortem examinations;
Accountability for the spending of public funds;
The Access to Information Act;
Charter of Rights; Anti-Terrorism and Anti-corruption legislation.
While their focus and activism often pit the group against the Government, Mrs. Goffe stresses that JFJ is more concerned about holding whoever is in public office accountable, rather than being opposed to any particular administration.
"Government is there to protect the rights of all citizens. They have a duty to ensure that there is accountability and when they fail to do this, we try to hold them up to the standards from which they are falling," she said.
It must be admitted that by any stretch of the imagination, three policemen and two security guards assassinated in the course of 18 hours is deep cause for concern and one which requires strong and appropriate action based on proper investigation. But shorn of their uniforms or apart from their jobs, the persons killed a few weeks ago might be any other Jamaican citizen just another day in paradise.
FLURRY OF PRESS RELEASES
Unfortunately, there has developed a tendency in Jamaica, that whenever a policeman is killed, there is a flurry of press statements expressing shock and horror. The assumption is that he was killed because he was a policeman. Few people will bother to question whether he might have been eliminated because of a drug deal gone awry or might have been the victim of a domestic dispute in an extra-marital affair. These circumstances would not make their murders any less heinous but in general, there is a rush to judgement.
Of course we must support the forces of law and order; of course we must stand by the decent police in the execution of their duties. And yes we should not hug up or provide shelter in whatever form to criminals. But this principle must be applicable whether they are civilians or dressed in the uniform of the state security agencies.
But, organisations like JFJ and the IJCHR must continue the struggle to hold the state to higher levels of accountability.
Fighting criminals, supporting the police and respecting the human rights of citizens are not mutually exclusive. Being united in the fight against crime must also encompass facing the criminality within the ranks of the security forces.
