Left: Laura Tanna Right: Commissioner of Police Lucius Thomas and Deputy Commissioner Jevene Bent speak to the media during a press conference at the Police Officers Club in Kingston on Tuesday, January 31. -
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I write this after having spoken with a number of persons in authority in the security forces and foreign embassies and after having visited Majesty Gardens, August Town and the AmCham Place facilities in Grants Pen.
Informed sources locally and internationally are loathe to give more technology or better pay to security forces here until the corruption existing within the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF) is seriously addressed. They note that the 12 most important suggestions in the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) report have still not been implemented, including combating corruption in the ranks of the JCF. They allege that computers have ended up in the homes of police whose children use them for school work, or high tech lab sets disappear.
Police Commissioner Lucius Thomas has thanked the Jamaica Defence Force (JDF) for its assistance in providing intelligence and carrying out joint police/military operations which lowered major crimes, including homicides over the past year, but informed sources say the JDF is loath to integrate with the JCF for fear the contagion of corruption within the JCF could spread to the JDF. Indeed, some have suggested that the best move would be to dismantle the JCF and rehire only those who are not corrupt, but that would take the Government and Opposition acting jointly.
Of the 39 cases considered by the Police Services Commission between January 2005 and March 2006, only one is above the rank of sergeant. Both Commissioner of Police Thomas and the JDF Chief of Staff, Rear Admiral Hardley Lewin, are widely held to be men of honour, as is Minister of National Security Peter Phillips. Surely they deserve whatever assistance necessary to rid their respective organisations of any and all corruption, and that can come only with political will from the highest level of Government considering the vast financial resources available to drug dealers.
Help needed
Deputy Commissioner of Police Jevene Bent, the first female deputy commissioner of police in the Caribbean, was just honoured by the Kiwanis Club for her work with many charity organisations. There are 80 police stations in Jamaica in need of repair, 40 of which are in desperate need. Even if we can't yet pay DCP Bent the salary she might earn overseas, at least let us provide her with the means to make working conditions for the police tolerable.
Two other women honoured by the Kiwanis were both born abroad, one in the United States and the other in the United Kingdom. With the financial help of a Jamaican who made his fortune in Canada, and the input of community residents, coupled with other advice, they spent three years creating a model of what community policing can be like in Jamaica. In the past six months since AmCham Place has opened on Grants Pen Road, there have been no major crimes committed in the area as opposed to eight homicides the year before. That is remarkable. The police now have a clean, comfortable station in which to work within a centre that houses a post office, 24-hour NCB ATM, cyber café, health centre and community centre, all open to the public.
The difficult accomplished
Fifty police are assigned to the area and foot patrols are the norm. Funds for eight more models have been identified, which means
people in garrison communities might hope for better, instead of being subjected to the violence they now periodically face. The difficult can be accomplished.
Aubyn Hill outlined an enterprising plan for camps to educate and socialise youth in his Gleaner article of March 29, 2006, DCP Mark Shields outlined basic police needs in a Gleaner interview of May 17, 2006, advocating better pay for police, outlining the need for an amendment to the law making DNA swabbing upon arrest mandatory to create a database, together with a good forensics lab, digital closed-circuit television network and computer links, all of which would combat crime effectively, and reduce the reliance on witnesses, which is currently too great. Byron Buckley coherently discussed the MacMillan Task Force recommendations and noted all other relevant security plans in his article 'The time to act is now!' in The Sunday Gleaner, May 14, 2006.
Hit corruption
Portia Simpson Miller has it within her power to do just that: to act now to hit corruption and crime head-on using her goodwill to implement the legal amendments police need, to ask for foreign assistance in continuing to combat corruption created by international drug cartels, and to realise that the police are not just any other civil servant. They not only save lives, they also put their own at risk and as such deserve at this time to be given preferential salary treatment. She was wise to keep Peter Phillips as Minister of National Security. He is respected in that capacity by the JCF, JDF, and foreign governments.
Economic development and the creation of more jobs will come only when the crime and corruption situation is addressed as the MAJOR budgetary concern. The World Bank estimates crime costs Jamaica $32 billion per annum (The Sunday Herald, June 25-July 1, 2006). Building for the upcoming Cricket World Cup further burdens the security forces, who must ensure that no explosives are imbedded in the stadiums to be set off later and who must prepare to cope with crowds which might contain terrorists attacking foreign teams, etc.
