THE INVESTIGATIONS into the reported beating by policemen of Corporal Grantly Waite are continuing but there seems to be enough credible independent accounts that he was savagely battered by officers of the law during a fracas at a police station in St. James last week.So brutal was his beating that for several days he was unable to speak and may have been rendered something of a paralytic.
The recent history of police behaviour being what it is, it does seem more than a little hypocritical that senior police officers are expressing shock and horror over the beating of one of their own. This kind of behaviour has been far too commonplace when meted out to civilians and often with insufficient condemnation from the Jamaica Police Federation. The expressions of shock should not reside in the fact that the victim is a policeman.
Often when civic action groups raise an alarm over reports of police abuse, they are accused of being on the side of criminals, of displaying a snooty class bias against the police, or even of having a political agenda. Until every policeman within the ranks of the Jamaica Constabulary Force considers it his duty to uphold the rights of, and to respect, all citizens irrespective of status or profession, we, and they, are all vulnerable.
Even if Corporal Waite were impersonating a policeman or had wandered off the road into the police station to get a drink of water, as has been reported, there can be no excuse for the kind of savagery meted out to him to subdue him. The incident has again thrown into sharp focus an all too common tendency within the JCF: that is, to react with excessive force to any perceived act of defiance or resistance. Surely professional training must include methods of disarming or immobilising a potential threat without the use of firepower or brute force.
For too long the Police Federation and other groups of persons sympathetic to the police fall into an ultra-defensive mode when charges are raised about how they conduct themselves.
Good, decent and honest policemen have nothing to fear from upholding the rights of the Jamaican citizen.
For the sake of his own health and that of his family, we pray that Corporal Waite will be able to recover fully but we also think this episode should be a salutary warning to all members of the force - the same knife that sticks sheep will stick goats.
