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Commissioner of Police, Rear Admiral Hardley Lewin.

Don Robotham, Contributor

The swearing-in of Rear Admiral Hardley Lewin as the nation's new commissioner of police has been greeted with satisfaction by nearly all Jamaicans. We all hope that this new leadership will mark the turning point in our fight against crime.

So far, the new commissioner has hit the ground running with his trademark style of forceful leadership and outspokenness. This is a breath of fresh air especially in the frankness with which he acknowledges the problems of corruption and even does not hesitate to chastise an impatient public. We are in for interesting times.

Intellectual qualities

This may sound strange to some, but the first impression made on me had to do with Commissioner Lewin's intellectual qualities. Here was a person who had thought long and hard about the problem of crime and security in Jamaica and who had arrived at developed views. He placed the problems of the force in the broad histo-rical context of its colonial origins and hence, its adversarial relationship with the public. He commented on corruption as not just some sinful disease, but as arising from the identifiable social and economic inequalities in Jamaican society and the epidemic of greed which has overcome us in recent years. He made it clear that this deeper perspective informs his approach to leadership and crime fighting, especially his emphasis on the broad social context out of which crime arises. All of this had a distinctly 1970s ring to it - and it will come as no surprise that it was in that heady, idealistic era that Rear Admiral Lewin rose in the officer corps of the Jamaica Defence Force.

At the same time, there was an unmistakable toughness on display - this is not a man to trifle with! Commissioner Lewin has seen politicians up close and personal for many decades and knows first-hand the games they play and the doublespeak which they engage in as a matter of course. He knows full well how much the wholesome public image cultivated by some contrasts with the deeds done in the dead of night. One even gets the impression that part of the reason for his emphasis on frankness and full disclosure is a personal contempt for the language of hypocrisy which dominates political life in Jamaica as in many other countries.

Commissioner Lewin is trying to set a national example. He is offering his leadership style as one in sharp contrast with the prevailing demagogy on the political front. It is inconceivable, for example, that Commissioner Lewin would meekly accept the kind of abuse heaped on the police by a junior minister of government recently. With the example of Commissioner Lewin before us, both sides of our political divide will have to drop the destructive approach which Jamaican society is tired of, or face some serious consequences.

Significance of his leadership

To that extent, the significance of his leadership goes way beyond the police force. He is offering to the public an example of what he thinks leadership in Jamaican society should be like in general - for all sectors of the society, public as well as private. This has the potential to have the broadest impact on our national life - in civil society as much as in the State. It will be interesting to see where this man on horseback leads us in the coming months and years.

Partly because of some of his initial pronouncements, each commentator is reading into the new commissioner's words whatever pleases him most. To the advocates of community policing, he is their man. To those who favour hard policing, he is also the man of the moment. For the human rights advocates, he is a civil libertarian. And so it goes on. All these groups may be in for a rude surprise. Commissioner Lewin may turn out to be all of these things combined, but none of them taken singly. The reason for this has to do with the nature of the challenges which he and the country faces.

On the one hand, we have the medium- and long-term roots of crime and corruption, and we have the immediate short term. Both have to be addressed. On the one hand, we have the vast body of law-abiding citizens, including our youth; on the other, we have a significant minority of our population who are drawn to criminality and corruption. Again, both have to be dealt with.

Hence, in his first statements, Commissioner Lewin emphasised the importance of winning the public's confidence. To him, this was not only a useful technique to obtain intelligence for crime- fighting purposes. It went much further. It was an effort to build the kind of police-civilian relationship which ought to exist in any democratic society in the 21st century, irrespective of the crime rate. This is why his initial statements stressed community policing and the importance of good police community relationships so much.

Special weapon and tactic team

At the same time, Commissioner Lewin was quoted in the press last Friday as saying: "The Mobile Reserve will be the police's special weapon and tactic team which needs to be retrained, reconstituted and brought up to a higher level of skill to deal with those hard-core criminals who are not amenable to community policing and who would want to destroy communities." Commissioner Lewin is from the hills of St. Ann and has suffered directly from the depredations of this ruthless criminality in the most hurtful possible manner. He is under no illusions.

The one area in which I have concern is that of legality. This pertains in particular to how the new and improved Mobile Reserve would operate. Jamaica has a long and unhappy history with such special squads. This has led some to conclude that the special-squad strategy should be abandoned completely as it invariably leads to police abuse of citizens. Others take the view that there is a fundamental contradiction between the special squad and the community-policing strategy. Such persons argue that one must choose one or the other, but cannot have both. This view may be correct in the abstract, but is mistaken from a practical point of view. Who can doubt that Commissioner Lewin is right when he says that there are hardened criminals out there who laugh at the community policing strategy? Such persons need special squads to target them.

Nevertheless, there are troubling issues of legality and rights at stake here, which the new and improved Mobile Reserve will have to find ways of addressing. Part of the answer to this problem is the better selection and training to which the Commissioner refers. But there is also the issue of the legal-rights framework in which the Mobile Reserve squad will be operating.

This is not just a bleeding-hearts issue, but a practical one. The Mobile Reserve approach is a hard, policing one and can be a blunt instrument, alienating the very communities and constituencies which need to be won over. This applies in particular to our youth. If the Mobile Reserve strategy succeeds in inspiring hatred and loathing in the youth population as a whole, an important battle would have been lost in the fight against crime. Moreover, as past events have proved, it is quite possible that robust Mobile Reserve activities could expose members to criminal prosecution on the grounds of severe human rights violation.

This is not an insuperable problem, but it requires really careful thought to establish and implement a viable rights-governed framework for the necessary hard-policing strategy which we must employ. It is probably wise to address this issue upfront and at the very beginning of the retraining of the new Mobile Reserve. Particular attention will have to be paid to their operational governance, rules of engagement and the entire legal framework of the Mobile Reserve.

Respecting legality is not a formality but has broad implications for the way the governance of the whole society is conducted and the citizen's general attitude to the state and society. This has already been severely damaged in Jamaican society. We cannot afford more damage in this area, difficult as the challenges are that we face.