Both men, according to the Observer, were applauded for their acts of contrition.

But the same community which applauded them told the Observer that they were afraid of the police. “We are very concerned about personal safety because we have seen what has happened … We have the gunmen on the one hand and now we have the police on the other hand.”

As a young reporter I grew up with the police. I played billiards at the Waterpolice Station, drank rum at police canteens and  knew dozens, if not hundreds of policemen by name.

I still have friends in the police force but most of those I knew so long ago are dead or retired. They weren’t dead or retired in 1963 when I was assaulted, beaten up and arrested at a roadblock early one morning in Constant Spring. Many were still around when I had an M-16 jammed into my throat one night in 1980 as I was going home from the JBC with my wife and two small children. This was another roadblock and I was suspected of nothing. But I had to bear that gun in my throat for nearly ten minutes, wondering when the sweating, trembling policeman holding it would lose his nerve and blow my brains all over my family.

Mr. Phillips and Mr. Forbes are sorry. Very, very sorry.

I am sorry too.

And Jamaica is a sorry mess.

…For whom the bell tolls

Two old men, both younger than I, were shot dead. One of them was reportedly shot more than 60 times. An old woman was shot and injured. They had done nothing wrong; they were suspected of nothing. They were going about their lawful business.

No guns were found on them. No young men were in their car. There was no excuse, no reason. But they are dead and their relatives and friends and neighbours mourn.

So, we are told, do Dr Phillips and Mr Forbes.

Well might they mourn.

And well might we.

Because we are all complicit. We are all part of this obscene problem.

We have known for years that the police force – the Jamaica Constabulary – is out of control.  We foster and promote  crime by our lack of compassion, by our refusal to act, by our total disrespect for the human rights of poor people, We have sneered and jeered at Jamaicans for Justice and anyone else who attempts to defend the rule of law and to seek respect for the  rights of poor people.

What we have known

We have known for years that the police force is undisciplined. There are official reports to prove it. Policemen do not wear uniforms unless it suits them so we don’t know gunmen from law officers.

We do not insist on inquests into violent deaths caused by the police; our governments in fact have explicitly given the police the right to decide whether there should be inquests  so licensing them to kill. We have known for years that a great many young men killed in “shootouts” with the police were unarmed and guilty of nothing except their poverty and friendlessness.

We have known for years that many of the so-called “crimefighters” are  murderous psychopaths who literally notch up their kills and compete with each other in compiling the biggest “bag.”  

In the 1970s when the rate of police killings was far lower than today, I suggested that we needed to control the use of deadly force, not least because the police were killing more people than the official hangman. One policeman, in the Police Mirror newspaper, suggested that it was I who deserved hanging.

We have known that many policemen live way above their police earnings. My cousin, Karl Cork, who was a barrister, told me of policemen paying for the defence of people charged with drug trafficking.

The police force has resisted every effort to raise the general level of policing whether by graduate entry schemes or by other means.  The police force has obstructed justice, perverted justice and denied justice to aggrieved people by all sorts of devices. They do not turn up in court and are excused by compliant judges; they lie transparently and their evidence is accepted because it “won’t do” to diminish confidence in the police.

I have news for all of you. Nobody to whom I have spoken recently, of high status or low, has any confidence in the police force. Two decades back, in 1984 Carl Stone found that 66% – two thirds of Jamaicans  – did not believe that the police respected citizens’  rights.

Deadliest in the world

When policemen walked the beat and knew their constituents, the rate of crimes “cleared up” was much higher than today. And today’s ‘cleared up’ rates have included at least one case where a murder, committed by one man, was cleared up by shooting three different ‘wanted’ men on three different occasions.

The Detroit Free Press in May 2000, deplored the fact that the Detroit Police force was the “deadliest in the United States,” with a kill rate more than twice as high as New York’s and 50% greater than Los Angeles, where the police were under severe pressure to stop killing so many people. The Jamaican police make these guys look like amateurs.

Four years ago I wrote: “Press releases from the Police Information Centre make it clear that those who provide the information to the PIC don’t really care whether their stories are believed. The report on the police murder in Kitson Town is a classic.  The police saw men scrapping a car. The men ran when challenged. Some time later, the police shot up a taxi killing the driver and wounding his passengers.

“Those are the bare outlines of a story which even the story-tellers must have considered ridiculous. It is not only that they don’t care if they are believed; clearly, there are elements of the police force who know that they can do whatever they want and get away with it.” (Common Sense, June 18,1999)

We know that the police force is unreliable. It is unreliable not because the majority are bad people, but because the toxic minority are able to depend on an institutional loyalty which coerces good people into protecting the bad. The result is a kind of Gresham’s Law of policing. Bad police drive out the good.

Which, I suspect, is exact what happened in 1997 when in their ineffable wisdom, the Prime Minister and the then Minister of National Security, K.D. Knight, decided to get rid of Commissioner Trevor Macmillan. MacMillan  had been trying to clean up the force His enemies  are still where they want to be, in possession of unlimited power to murder whoever they want and to get away with it. When  MacMillan was Commissioner of Police it was a known fact that there were several contracts out on his life, paid for by policemen.

The other problem

Our delinquent police force is not the major security problem. The most important problem we have is the almost total incompetence and cowardice of our political leadership. Because they are afraid to discipline the constabulary, they cannot bring themselves to bring aid and comfort to those the constabulary considers its enemies.

Who are these enemies”?

At the World Bank 1999 conference on Development Economics, a World Bank staffer, Mr. François Bourguignon examined all the relevant evidence and came to the conclusion that: 

Mr. Bourguignon quoted a Latin American survey which strongly suggested that:

The Jamaican Cabinet has many lawyers with experience in the criminal courts, among them the Prime Minister himself. The Minister of National Security has a doctoral degree in sociology and once edited a UWI Department of Government publication entitled “Crime & Violence, causes and solutions.” He chaired a 1984 conference on these issues. One contributor was Dr Carl Stone, whose researches had persuaded him that crime and violence were basically linked to certain social parameters : increased urbanisation; increased inequality; increased migration and family disorganisation; increased unemployment, declining living standards; the ideology of the ‘sufferer’ and an increased inflow of guns from the US.

Six years ago  sociologists at the UWI published the results of surveys in urban slums. The study – Urban Poverty and Violence in Jamaica –  was carried out by the Centre for Population, Community and Social Change in the UWI's Department of Sociology. It was written by Horace Levy. I spent a great deal of time in recommending that we should all try to read the little monograph. It is still on sale for about $200. The report is in effect, a self-analysis of the ‘ghetto’ by the ghetto:

The analysis

My point is simple.

We and our rulers have known for years what is wrong. We know that if the police could catch one quarter of the murderers there would be five murder trials going on in every week of the year. We know that the fear of being caught is the greatest deterrent.

We know that poverty promotes criminal behaviour. We know that police indiscipline promotes violent responses from the endangered youth. We know that we are siphoning our lifeblood away in debt repayment while our children grow up wild, our families disintegrate.

Flankers speaks: “We are very concerned about personal safety because we have seen what has happened … We have the gunmen on the one hand and now we have the police on the other hand.”

We know all that. And yet, we are satisfied when the Minister of National Security and the Commissioner of Police declare that they are sorry that a gang of policemen murdered two innocent old men last week Saturday.