Police Commissioner Dr Carl Williams will retire in the first week of next year with one major regret — that he was not able to totally burnish the image of the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF).
“Certainly I wanted to ensure that the force was so clean that everyone would respect the members and perhaps even come to love police officers. Right now I’m not convinced that that is the case,” Commissioner Williams admitted to the Jamaica Observer on Thursday after news of his early retirement decision was publicised. “We don’t have the full respect of the public because there are some members of the force who are still inclined to do the wrong things, to be unprofessional, so that is something that I wish we had done more.”
Since taking office in September 2014, Dr Williams has given serious attention to purging the constabulary of corruption. In April this year, for instance, the JCF introduced polygraph screening for recruits as part of its strategy to prevent corrupt or tainted individuals from joining its ranks.
The initiative, implemented with the help of the United States Embassy, proved effective as the commissioner reported that by mid-August US polygraphers had already examined 191 potential recruits, of which 103 were found suitable for enlistment in the JCF.
“There were significant doubts about the other 88 that made them unsuitable to become members of the JCF,” he said on August 25 during the launch of a project, under which cops will be outfitted with body cameras.
The acquisition of that technology has been welcomed by law enforcement agencies in a number of jurisdictions as a means of reducing police abuse, as well as protecting cops from accusations of excessive force.
“These devices will promote greater transparency and build public trust and provide evidence against false accusations,” Dr Williams said at the project launch at the Police Commissioner’s Office in St Andrew.
In April, Dr Williams had told the Observer that there was high concern about corruption within the police force. Statistics given then revealed that, in 2014, a total of 41 cops were arrested and charged with various crimes, while 27 were arrested in 2015, and seven up to April this year.
The commissioner had said that of the 88 recruits who failed the polygraph test, some were found to have criminal links, others had been actively involved in lottery scamming, while some were affiliated to gangs.
“There were persons who had handled illegal guns, and some were habitual thieves,” he said, but made sure to explain that not all 88 had criminal links.
Dr Williams said many of these potential recruits received “glowing recommendations from justices of the peace and ministers of religion and other ‘upstanding residents’ as citizens in their communities”.
He said that they would very likely have made it into the JCF and would have further corrupted the organisation.
“We would be stuck with them for the next 30 or 40 years. But thanks to the polygraph, we won’t have to worry about those types coming into the force anymore,” he said.
Commissioner Williams, in the interview on Thursday, expressed equal dissatisfaction with the murder toll, even as he acknowledged the inability of the police to prevent domestic-related homicides which, he said, were being committed with increasing frequency.
“When you look especially at the number of domestic murders and murders developing from just conflicts between people who know each other and who are former friends and so on, when you look at just that you realise that there is not a lot that the police are able to do about some murders,” Dr Williams argued.
“You can’t put a policeman in a couple’s bedroom to prevent murders, and we’ve had a large number of those this year and especially this month. We’ve had so many; a man who killed his own three-year-old daughter; we’ve had a father who killed his own girlfriend and children; we had a son who killed his father last week, and in one day we had three murders — lovers killing lovers or former lovers,” he said.
“All that the police can do in those situations is go in, investigate, arrest the suspects and take them to court,” he argued.
“What we need in this country is a reawakening to the fact that life is not cheap. Some people know that they are not going to get away with the murders, but they do it anyway. So that means they just don’t care,” the commissioner added.
Earlier this month, though, police personnel from across the island participated in a training course on how to better respond to instances of domestic violence and facilitate conflict resolution in communities.
Domestic conflicts, the police insist, have contributed to the significant increase in murders this year.
For the period January 1 to December 23, 2016, the total number of murders stood at 1,321, compared to 1,192 for the same period last year. By the end of 2015, murders totalled 1,207.
“I wish the murders were not as high, but… with the intelligence that I have, I know that we prevented a whole lot of murders had we not deployed in the way we did,” the police commissioner said.
Dr Williams argued that the increase in murders was not because the police are ineffective. The reason, he said, was that gang conflicts developed in different areas across the island at the same time.
“In Montego Bay, for instance, you had so many different ones there. Before we could put resources down there to deal them, we saw a problem developing in West Kingston, and as we were focusing on West Kingston, there was a flare-up in Spanish Town and then there were Clarendon and Westmoreland. So that, I think, has been a serious challenge,” he explained.
However, he took some comfort in the Get The Guns programme he launched shortly after taking office.
At the end of last month, the police reported that they had removed 590 illegal guns and more than 7,000 rounds of ammunition from the streets so far this year.
The Get The Guns initiative was accompanied by a strategic decision to strengthen the JCF’s resources to find individuals and groups involved in the illegal trade of firearms and ammunition. As a result, the police say they now have more than 10 people before the courts on multiple charges under the Firearm Acts and the Anti-Gang legislation.
In addition, the police have reported that last year they arrested 700 murder suspects, the highest number ever.
“We arrested more alleged murderers than any other time in the history of Jamaica, and that was not by chance, it’s something that I deliberately set out to do, because it is one of the surest ways to impact the number of murders committed in Jamaica. So next year I expect that the murder figures will not be as high because a lot of the alleged murderers, men of violence, are off the streets,” the commissioner said.
“I also felt that we could impact murders if we seized more guns, and we set out with a deliberate strategy to do so. We don’t have a record here, but we have numbers that are significantly higher than in previous years in terms of illegal guns seized,” he added.
