Editorial | Crucial to transform the JCF

The planned recruitment and training of 1,000 police officers this year was among a slew of policies for arresting Jamaica’s crisis of criminal violence which were announced by the national security minister, Horace Chang, in his upbeat assessment of his portfolio during his recent contribution to Parliament’s ongoing Sectoral Debate. Dr Chang also spoke of several technological innovations that will enhance the efficiency of the constabulary.

Increasing the size of Jamaica’s police force is a matter on which this newspaper is a long-standing proponent. We, therefore, welcome the fact that it is getting attention. But the importance we ascribe to the size of the constabulary is matched by our expectations of its quality. That does not mean only the equipment and the technologies available to the police, but the philosophy that underpins the job of policing. It is against that backdrop that we hope to hear from Dr Chang, the police commissioner, Antony Anderson, and others with oversight for the constabulary, a broader vision for the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF) beyond the hard facilitation of operational strategy.

The size of Jamaica’s constabulary force – relative to the country’s crime problem – matters. Annually, Jamaica records over 1,300 murders, for a homicide rate of approximately 48 per 100,000, which is among the highest in the world. Indeed, on average, Jamaica’s murder rate is approximately two-thirds higher than its Caribbean peers. Yet, on a per capita basis it has a smaller police force than most of them.

The establishment (the number of members it, by regulation, is allowed to have) of the JCF is around 12,000. That is fewer than 440 police per 100,000 citizens. But the JCF, at least in recent years, is never at its full establishment. It is usually between 15 per cent and 20 per cent below full strength.

By contrast to the JCF’s per capita strength, Jamaica’s Caribbean Community partner of Antigua and Barbuda has a ratio of 750 police per 100,000 citizens. In St Vincent of the Grenadines it is 630 per 100,000; in Dominica it is 700; The Bahamas, 800; and Grenada, nearly 870.

GIVE JCF MANPOWER

Against that backdrop, and the need to give the JCF the manpower to do all its tasks, Dr Chang’s 2019 announcement of his intention to lift the constabulary’s membership by 4,000, to 16,000, by 2022 was welcomed. He also spoke of plans for another 2,000 members for special squads later on.

The first 1,000 of the additional JCF members should have been recruited last year, according to the consensus document on crime the Government signed with the political Opposition and civil society groups. But the coronavirus pandemic severely hampered the effort, according to the minister. However, Dr Chang says that the plan is to recruit 1,000 officers this year “and the full capacity of 1,500 next year”.

“In addition to fixing the facilities, we have ensured that all the instructors are trained in the modern way of policing before they are placed in the training facilities,” the minister said.

The training, plus the investment in technologies, should, on the face of it, deliver a modern and competent police force. Except the public pronouncements by Dr Chang and Commissioner Anderson do not, we believe, sufficiently stress another element that is critical to the transformation of the JCF to a constabulary with public trust and the moral legitimacy to police with the community’s full and unswerving consent: aggressively rooting out corruption and an unshakable insistence on accountability.

NOTORIOUS

There are three traits for which, unfortunately, the JCF is notorious: that it is corrupt; that it is institutionally resistant to change; and it has a knack for co-opting new members into the culture of the squad – the so-called ‘squaddie mentality’. Some experts have argued that in a process of transformation the JCF does not only need new, well-trained members. It needed, too, to be shocked into a transformative culture via the excision of between 20 per cent and 30 per cent of its existing members. Or, preferably, a complete reconstitution of the force.

Clearly, neither of these proposals is the preferred option of this administration or previous administrations. In this circumstance, care has to be taken to ensure that a critical mass of new members of the JCF are not subsumed into the old culture of the JCF so that nothing changes.

Institutional vigilance, therefore, is important. But so, too, must be a clear and consistent articulation of the new transformative ideals of a constabulary, including a commitment to holding itself to a high order of accountability.

Dr Chang would, therefore, appreciate the deep unease of many people at his invocation of the late prime minister Hugh Shearer’s 1967 declaration for the police to “proceed without reservation and without restriction to tackle the problem of violence and bring wrongdoers to justice in whatever way can be done”, and that: “When it comes to handling crime in this country, I do not expect any policeman, when he tackles a criminal, to recite any beatitude to him … the police cannot tackle a wrongdoer and talk about ‘Blessed are the meek’.”