‘We swap black puss fi monkey,’ say St Catherine North cops - Officers’ spirits broken as leaky pipes, broken toilets flush hopes of better working conditions

Crime fighters assigned to three separate units in one of Jamaica’s toughest police divisions say they are working in squalor and are desperate for a change in fortunes.

Members of the Proactive Investigation Unit (PIU), the Centre for the Investigation of Sexual Offences and Child Abuse (CISOCA), and Scene of Crimes for St Catherine North are lamenting the condition of their office spaces.

“We may have swapped black puss fi monkey,” one officer assigned to the PIU told The Gleaner, in snarky colloquial reference to the “odd decision” to relocate the unit from a building on Martin Street, which once housed the Spanish Town branch of the National Housing Trust, to a section of the Burke Road Police Station, which he described as being “unfit for human occupancy”.

The Martin Street building sits smack between turf dominated by two of the Old Capital’s most notorious gangs – Clansman and One Order – and is said to have been earmarked for renovation by the St Catherine Municipal Corporation.

Attempts to have the mayor, Norman Scott, speak on the issue proved futile as calls to him went unanswered, but a source told The Gleaner that several reports about the run-down state of the offices have been made in the hope they would make their way up the chain of command to have the situation arrested.

“The building is in a very deplorable state and so we had to move for multiple reasons. On top of that, it offered little by way of security because it was never constructed with the sensitive nature of a unit like CISOCA in mind,” said an officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

In the meantime, all three units formally housed at the Martin Street property have since been relocated.

LOW MORALE

The new locations afforded them – the Burke Road and Central Village police stations – are equally inadequate.

“Where we are now located is really a dump. We are worse off than where we were before we made the move,” said one officer assigned to the Scene of Crimes unit.

“We are stressed out because of this, because we feel that our work is not appreciated and, in fact, it could negatively impact our cases,” a detective said.

The St Catherine North PIU is said to be one of the most successful units of its kind in the island based on its work to dismantle gangs, but they, too, are practically homeless.

Members of the unit have to resort to a “virtual office space” to get their jobs done, as the area assigned to them at the Spanish Town Police Station is not suitable.

“Suffice it to say that when we were told we are to be relocated, we were up for it because the state of the building on Martin Street was really poor,” one officer said.

It is even worse in their new home.

“The building is in a deplorable state. It is dilapidated and there is water of some kind leaking from upstairs into the bathroom below and the team can barely operate out of the space. It is very bad; it has broken our spirits and left us feeling unappreciated, neglected and depressed,” one team member said.

A Gleaner news team saw first-hand the dire state of affairs on Monday. A messy, broken toilet, along with an office area without windows to allow for proper ventilation were among the conditions observed. In addition, there was no air conditioning and not even a fan was in sight.

“We are at a distinct disadvantage here. It’s like a storage area. The fixtures in the toilets don’t even work. It’s inhumane, to say the least,” one officer lamented.

paul.clarke@gleanerjm.com