Reduce crime, save lives

Martin Henry, Contributor

Jamaica has one of the highest rates of police killings in the Western Hemisphere, according to an Amnesty International statement. What you will not hear from Amnesty International is that Jamaica has one of the highest rates of police being killed in the Western Hemisphere, and in the whole wide world for that matter. Or that policing in Jamaica is in one of the most hostile and dangerous environments for law enforcement on the planet.

Last year, the police killed around 370 persons, many under controversial circumstances suggesting extrajudicial execution. But many others were armed and dangerous criminals who confronted the police.

In 2010, 17 police officers were killed, one of the highest number in recent years.

With a force size of around 8,500 officers, this is a horrendous kill rate of 200 per 100,000. If this were the murder rate in the general population, murders in 2010 would have jumped from 1,428 (one of the lowest numbers in recent years) to 5,400. Indeed, it can be credibly argued that a critical factor in holding down the national murder rate to a level only a quarter of that of the rate of the police getting killed is the removal of killer criminals from action, including the application of legitimate lethal force.

But the analysis runs into problems because data disaggregation is so poor. We need to know pretty accurately - and quickly - which police killings involved the legitimate application of lethal force and which did not. The human-rights activists must not simply be allowed to play upon our emotions and feed us with sentiments with no better data than the rest of us. Or worse, with a less-than-honest use of available data. Nor must the police be allowed to get away with the stale lines of the Constabulary Communication Network about armed confrontation with criminals and resulting fatalities.

Adequate resources needed

But isn't this what the Independent Commission of Investigations (INDECOM) is about? To investigate and report on the legitimacy/illegitimacy of questioned police action? For this, adequate resources will be needed.

We also need better disaggregation of data on police killed. When an officer gets killed in a love triangle, for example, that murder is no different from that of a doctor killed in the said love triangle, as a couple have been in recent years. Too many police officers, on and off the most dangerous job in the country, are compromising their safety and throwing away their lives. Stop it!

Watch March 31! I will soon tell you why.

There must be few other places on the planet where police - and the population - face as many illegal firearms and such a heightened will to use them to commit murder as in Jamaica. Police Commissioner Owen Ellington delivered a suave, comprehensive, hourlong plenary lecture on 'Crime-fighting Strategies in Jamaica' at the International Forensics Conference hosted by the University of Technology (UTech) last week, in which he reiterated the view that up to 80 per cent of murders in Jamaica are carried out by gangs in crime-for-profit violence. More about the conference in a mo.

Mr Ellington is a charming and articulate man who could be a leader in all kinds of areas besides the police force. His dead-panning of the horrendous statistics of hard crime in Jamaica before an international audience was chilling when one got over the usual Jamaican numbness to the matter. We ought not speak of, nor listen to, our crime condition with such tranquility!

Shocking acts

Just to shock you - if we can still be shocked - the commissioner rattles off how one imprisoned don has ordered by phone from prison up to 100 additional murders. The One Order-Clansman battle in Spanish Town has taken around 500 lives over the last decade. The police have collected money to give to a family to pay for a gun that the police themselves have captured and for which the gang is demanding compensation from the family of the 'soldier' from which it was taken, or else ... .

The gangs are embedded in communities, control communities, support communities - and are protected by communities which benefit on the one hand from the criminal enterprise while paying a heavy price on the other for their criminalisation. Many of those communities - too many - are political garrisons with the gangs and the dons first rising to prominence and dominance as political enforcers.

And it is precisely in these hostile, essentially unpoliceable communities under near-battlefield conditions that the majority of police fatal shootings occur. But even war has rules of engagement.

So, 'what the hell the police can do?' Watch March 31. As a leading-edge crime-fighting strategy, divisional commanders, Commissioner Ellington told his forensics conference audience, have been instructed by him to disrupt and degrade the three most violent gangs in their division by March 31 as a murder-reduction measure.

Key issue

The commissioner spoke eloquently - even passionately - about the social, economic and security costs of crime and about crime as a critical development issue. He failed to mention a key issue, vital to the men and women under his command, why the police should go all out to build on the embryonic successes in crime reduction of 2010, about which they are crowing too loudly, too early. Perhaps he was a little shy. Let me do it for him. Crime is extraordinarily costly to the police themselves. The kill rate is 200 per 100,000, nearly four times the national murder rate. We haven't even mentioned yet the maiming, the costs to families, and the extraordinary stress levels of paramilitary policing under the abnormalities of chronic war conditions.

The creators of the garrisons packed with their gangs and guns have set up the police. The police must 'un-set up' themselves by crushing the greatest threats against their own security and well-being, applying, under the law, the iron fist in the velvet glove. They have tasted the sweet of success on a very limited scale. This is not the time to pause to celebrate. The operations, deploying all available lawful strategies and all available resources, must be scaled up and sustained to pacify the threat.

What do the police need?

The commissioner said some elements of the Force Orders are now being published via media because he wants public assistance in police supervision since he alone can't supervise 8,500 officers. There is something else he needs to break the code of silence and tell us. The commissioner needs to let the public know what the force needs to get the job done and is not getting from the Government. We will help!

Budget season soon come. Another reason to watch March 31, the end of the financial year.

I want to repeat a suggestion I made in this space last year. The number one concern of the country year after year, poll after poll, is crime and violence. The number one business of government, everywhere, every time, is the securing of the life and property of citizens. The Government of Jamaica has been a miserable failure here.

For the next few years, Government should slice X per cent, say, a painless two or three per cent, off every budget line and give it to Security and Justice to restore public order and improve the delivery of Justice as a foundational requirement for development with peace and prosperity. One of the off-the-record comments made at the Forensics Conference from very high up in the judiciary is that "Justice has no money" even to get staff into training courses with quite modest fees charged only to offset costs like the forensics short courses offered by UTech. The officers must be paid better, more recruited, better trained, and facilities upgraded and equipped.

Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and medhen@gmail.com.