Editorial | Is the PCOA-PSC merger still on?

The competition by the Police Civilian Oversight Authority (PCOA) to identify the best performer of the four commands of the constabulary’s Area Five Division may, in fact, as the authority hopes, help to lift morale and boost transformation in the police force.

Some cynics, however, might suggest that the PCOA’s public stir is both a timely reminder of its existence and an opportunity for the agency to explain its relevance, and for the national security minister, Horace Chang, to report on the authority’s planned merger with the Police Service Commission (PSC). That merger, on the basis of last August’s consensus between the Government, the Opposition and civil society groups on institutional changes to help address Jamaica’s crime problem, should be completed by the third quarter of next year. The deadline, though, now seems constitutionally unfeasible. But beyond the likely constraints of time, there has not yet been a serious conversation to remind Jamaicans of the perceived logic of the merger.

Launched 13 years ago, the PCOA was, in part, a response to public clamour for civilian oversight of a police force largely deemed to be corrupt, unaccountable and resistant to change. The 2005 law, on which the authority rests, empowers the PCOA to monitor the implementation of policy relating to the constabulary and its auxiliaries and ensure that “internationally accepted standards of policing are maintained, and to report thereon”. The authority, in exercising its functions, can demand documents for the constabulary and “require the attendance” of the police chief or any other office of the force or its auxiliaries”.

The PCOA may have done its job well. It has perhaps written many potentially far-reaching reports and commanded many attendances upon it by the police brass. It may have wrought change that improved efficiency and accountability of the police force. These may have benefited citizens.

Notwithstanding, it would not be unfair to conclude that Jamaicans have not felt the PCOA. It has neither the profile nor the impact of, say, the Independent Commission of Investigations (INDECOM), the agency that investigates complaints against the security forces in the conduct of their job. Mostly, complaints have to do with excessive use of force. INDECOM, under its former boss, Terrence Williams, who left the job in July, is widely credited for a significant decline in police homicides in the decade of the commission’s existence.

NO INDEPENDENT POWER

Some of INDECOM’s success were predicated on Mr Williams’ aggressive posturing of his agency against misbehaviour and his presumption that the law gave INDECOM the power – since overruled by the courts – not only to investigate transgressions by the police, but to itself institute prosecutions. The PCOA, other than bringing its observations, reports and recommendations to the attention of the authorities, has no independent power with which to enforce them.

It was partially to address this perceived deficiency, as well as the overlaps between the two bodies, that the proposal has been floated for several years for the PCOA’s merger with the PSC, the constitutionally entrenched commission that deals with disciplinary issues, as well as the promotion of senior officers of the constabulary. Any such merger would very likely require amending sections 129, 130 and 131 of the Constitution. These are the sections that establish the PSC and set out its structure and functions. Amending them would require the bill for the change to sit on the table of the House for three months before its full debate. After that debate, there would have to be a further three months until the bill is voted on and passed.

In other words, it requires at least six months for this kind of constitutional amendment to traverse the Parliament, assuming there is no delaying public consultation of the amendment, or a review of the bill by a parliamentary committee. That, given that nothing has happened as yet, would, on the face of it, make a PSC-PCOA merger by the third quarter of 2021 improbable. The administration should get on with the public consultations now, if it still has the merger plan and the deadline in mind.

In the meantime, the PCOA should expand and accelerate its efforts to have Jamaicans know that it exists and, perhaps, does things. Maybe the competition between the St Catherine North, St Catherine South, St Andrew North and St Thomas commands to determine who has performed the best in Area Five is not a bad place to start.