Editorial | Police must secure gun finds

There is at least one front on which 2022 has started well for the constabulary, which this newspaper celebrates and hopes it continues. Up to the middle of last week the police, they reported, had seized 226 illegal firearms, an increase of 23 per cent, compared to the corresponding month-and-a-half – January to mid-February – in 2021.

The busts included the 20 guns, some of them high-powered weapons, and 40 magazines found in January at the Sangster International Airport in Montego Bay. There was, too, the dramatic unearthing, with heavy-duty digging machines, of eight weapons, and many rounds of ammunition, at the Stadium East sports field, which is part of the National Stadium complex. The latter find and the certitude with which the police approached the dig suggested that they acted on excellent intelligence.

That is a good and encouraging development.

This newspaper, however, has two matters which we hope will be addressed by the police chief, Antony Anderson, and/or the national security minister, Horace Chang. The first is our concern that when the police make these weapons haul, it is hardly ever the case that anyone of substance, ‘Mr Big’, is arrested and tried for the crime. It is a shortcoming Dr Chang highlighted three years ago, in 2019, and urged the police to fix.

Second, General Anderson must assure Jamaicans that the recovered weapons are being securely stored, with no likelihood of being recycled. In that respect, he might indicate whether seized guns are stored separately, or in the general police armoury, from which several weapons were embarrassingly stolen a dozen years ago. He should say, too, what is the current state of the armoury.

SUCCESSES IMPORTANT

The police’s recent successes are important in several respects, not least being the pervasiveness of guns in Jamaica and that they are the weapon of choice in the island’s horrendously high incidence of murder and shootings. Of the 1,463 killings reported last year – for a homicide rate of over 53 per 100,000 – guns were used in nearly 80 per cent. Indeed, between January and mid-February there were 145 reported shooting incidents, which, astoundingly, represented a 20 per cent decline compared to the same period last year. One hundred and thirty-seven people were injured in latter shootings, which, apparently, don’t include the 189 people murdered up to February 15.

Almost all of Jamaica’s murders and shootings are with illegal guns. Obviously, the more guns that are taken from the streets and the fewer there are in the hands of criminals, the better it is for Jamaicans. But the police have a hard time keeping up with the inflows of illegal weapons, despite the vast numbers they seize each year – 640 in 2021, up 14 per cent on the previous year.

Indeed, in 2019 Minister Chang told Parliament that 200 illegal guns reached Jamaica undetected each month. That equates to around 2,400 annually. So the amount confiscated by the police in 2021 would be equivalent to 26 per cent of those that reached their intended destinations, based on the 2019 estimates. Even if the captures have improved, it is safe to assume that great amounts are still reaching the Jamaican underworld.

We believe that Dr Chang was right when he implied in his 2019 remarks that apart from choking off the smuggling routes, the greater deterrent to gunrunning would be to arrest and convict the masterminds, and not merely low-level handlers and shooters. “Who we need to catch is not the man who they use to shoot people, (it’s) … the man who is organising this,” he said.

GREATER DETERRENT

Harsher penalties for possessing illegal guns won’t themselves solve this weakness. The greater deterrent for the big guys will be when they see fellow big guys being caught and jailed and they believe that the odds in favour of being caught and convicted are at a level that the risks outweigh the rewards. Otherwise, as Prime Minister Andrew Holness observed at the opening of the new Olympic Gardens Police Station last year, the little guys continue to be expendable fodder.

This, though, doesn’t undermine the worth of cops taking guns off the streets. What we don’t want is that having done the hard work, the effort comes to naught – undermined by corrupt colleagues and accomplices.

In 2010, four persons, including a police sergeant, were found guilty and jailed for stealing 18 guns and thousands of bullets from the police armoury – a fact that was only discovered, it was reported, when two young, alert constables on patrol foiled a transaction for the sale of some of the weapons. That same year, a pistol seized in 2002, and sent to the armoury in 2008 to be destroyed, was again found on the streets in the hands of criminals.

It isn’t asking too much that General Anderson assure Jamaicans that the guns now being apprehended by his officers are being safely locked away and appropriately destroyed – that the police armoury isn’t a sieve. He should perhaps explain the procedures for auditing of guns in the constabulary and the frequency with which such audits take place.