Crooks

We have been losing the 'war on crime' ever since our independence. This failure is aided by policies of short-sighted expediency which have weakened the effectiveness of our national security organisations.

Earlier the colonial authorities employed a well-designed four-tiered response to different levels of violence consisting of police riot squads. The infamous parish militias (as a second response) which was later disbanded and replaced by a volunteer Special Constabulary Reserve. If necessary this was followed by their preserved and garrisoned military.

Their final but rarely used option was overseas forces with a warship hovering off the the coast for impact. Our government's current independent and graded responses are the Mobile Reserve and the Jamaica Defence Force, and since both are employed in everyday crime control with the advent of sustained armed violence, we are deprived of graded organisational responses, except by way of military reserves or a state of emergency.

This has led to the introduction of military fieldcraft in police recruit training while other elements of military combat were embedded in police operations and culture. So the operational modes of both forces have been gradually integrated into a 'one stop shop' for the management of the 'war on crime', the quest for peace and of everyday policing. One is trained to fight a war in the arena of the Geneva Convention, the other to ensure public safety within the arena of the criminal laws.

influencing each other

But with converging core mandates, both are influencing each other, as is evident when our police began to employ military techniques in 'fields of fire', sometimes in disregard of the restraints of the criminal law. On the other hand, such restraints must eventually degrade the capacity of our military techniques in 'fields of fire', sometimes in disregard of the restraints of the criminal law.

To overcome these and other challenges to public safety and the public purse, it is suggested that our Government redirects about one-third of the military personnel and other resources with the Mobile Reserve to create a separately managed, specially trained and deployed paramilitary 'Third Force' with agreed rules of engagement and suitable technology for the better management of armed violence. This would save about 20 per cent of the police budget next year.

Our well-managed military could then be removed from everyday policing support and background for greater impact whenever it is foregrounded. Both a full military/police merger or training our military in policing have already been proposed and found to be unsuitable solutions.

The need to remove our military from everyday policing was recommended in most reviews of our police ranging from the 1977 UN Report on Crime in Jamaica to the JLP's 'Road Map to a Safe and Secure Jamaica'. This would present an opportunity to build, brick by brick, an ethics-based, less hierarchical, civil police service with its core mission to build community partnerships, investigate crime, improve service delivery and public confidence through community-based policing.

The combat ideology and the organisational pathologies, noted worldwide to be associated with police forces which try to operationalise both modes of suppressing sustained armed violence and community-based policing would be thereby weakened. It would also release about $3 billion worth of barrack space to the Government for secure post offices, health clinics, etc.

different role

One of the many advantages of a civil police service compared to a national paramilitary police is a different role, which allows for a lowered ceiling of its coercive arsenal and a vastly different complex of interrelated management, internal compliance, and training systems designed to create more acceptable modes of law enforcement.

Well managed, it would forge a culture for ethic-based self-discipline, inner directness and police service delivery to thrive. This is in contrast with the emphasis on supervised over-the-shoulder discipline, rank-based respect, quick and instinctive obedience inculcated by military drills and a socially isolated and partially barracked paramilitary constabulary. These martial values are necessary in military organisations but are at variance with the everyday values of the average Jamaican.

Another opportunity for better policing and greater savings is to abolish the five police areas. These are regionalised, mid-level layers of police management, headed by assistant commissioners and inserted between headquarters and parish commanders.

They were instituted by former commissioner, W.A. Calver, during 1947-9 to overcome the limitations of bad roads and poor communications. We now have computers, fax, cellphones and Highway 2000 but more vacancies for promotion and more layers of control prevail over efforts to align the organisation with current strategies.

Some years ago, a police research project discovered that these well-staffed area offices were operating as post office boxes transmitting decisions which they avoid making, from police headquarters to the parishes and micro-managing parish commoners. Recognising this problem, the Strategic Reviewers of our police in 2007 remarked at page 54 of their report that "further effort is required on part of the JCF leadership to clarify the roles between area and divisional commanders".

Similar layers of police management in the Royal Ulster Constabulary in Northern Ireland were abolished in 2001 when this prototype of all Caribbean Police Forces was transformed by the Patten Reforms, into The Police Services of Northern Ireland.

illogical separation

For the purposes of administration, investigation and crime control, the geographic layout of these areas illogically separate Half-Way Tree from Constant Spring and Hunts Bay from Portmore, while integrating Havendale, Whitehall and Constant Spring with districts such as Bath in St Thomas and Guys Hill in St Catherine. Consequently, no single officer is held accountable for the management of the Kingston Metropolitan Region or Kingston and St Andrew.

Any necessary inter-parish coordination and unexpected demands affected by the abolition of these areas could be managed by the assistant commissioner responsible for national operations at police headquarters, giving effect to current policies supporting the primacy of parish policing. This will, however, mean less promotion opportunities at the senior level so no one will bell the cats.

This measure would reduce the 18 assistant commissioners by about one-third. The Jamaica Constabulary is already top heavy at this rank by any regional or international standards. More important, this move would reduce future police budgets by about 18 per cent.

Nat'l Intelligence Agency

Another critical organisation is a National Intelligence Agency recommended in the National Security Strategy and by both political parties. The savings which would accrue from the previously suggested reforms to penetrate the criminal underworld, provide better intelligence to control our murder rates and protect other national interest here and aboard. The salaries and other police policies cannot attract and retain most of the staff required to perform modern intelligence functions.

Our Rural Police has become the most discounted form of policing. Its members, known as district constables, were organised as part-time intermediary agents of social control to help communities police themselves through collective action and to act as countrywide intelligence sources.

They performed well with much public acceptance. With rising murder rates, this form of social capital was destroyed as they were removed and placed on reception and custodial duties at stations under the pretext of police manpower shortage. Yet, the UK Government, recognising this missing link between their police and communities, introduced thousands of community security officers and neighbourhood wardens via Section 38 of their Police Reform Act of 2002.

part-time police reserve

Jamaica is among the few countries in the world without a volunteer part-time police reserve. The Island Special Constabulary Force was originally mobilised as such, but has evolved into a full-time paid and separately managed police force with a tall hierarchy of ranks and its own chief executive officer.

These shortcomings and the full-time employment of our military in aid of policing have created some dangerous directions for public safety, while depleting the national security budget. First, the absence of a Volunteer Police Reserve has led to a tendency to justify the upper levels of police manpower needs, based on periodic operational surges, since the additional available manpower is the military and their reserves, which are not trained in policing.

The demand for order sometimes conflict with law. Our governments have retained our police, primarily as an order maintenance machine, designed by others for other purposes. Despite post-independence rhetoric and an independent judiciary, procedural due process is still operationally subordinated to order maintenance. This has led to widespread 'noble cause corruption', where our police sometimes manufacture legal evidence in place of factual evidence, so as to convict dangerous criminals, and continue to use excessive force, all for our protection.

schizophrenic role

Police officers must engage armed gunmen for years in south St Andrew and then play marbles with children in Catadupa. The good 'human clay' they carefully recruit is cast and moulded in the schizophrenic role of combat soldiers in this 'war against crime' and in community policing endeavours while they remain subjected to the echoes of the Morant Bay Rebellion under a retained section of an 1867 law which made them partially military and partially civil.

Today, being neither 'fish nor fowl' and trying to be all things to all people they continue to fail, as they must.

It should now be obvious that we are operating a unitary but duplicative, expensive, full-time and three-tiered policing system, with the Rural and Special constabularies and/or military employed on duties for which they are not organised; for reasons which undermined their proper relations and which create wasteful overlapping of their different and original core missions.