The police commissioner needs to connect with citizens

Police chief Antony Anderson has often spoken about using partnerships to tackle Jamaica's crime problem. He, therefore, needs to find a means of finding out why people feel the way they do about his office so he can attack the problems.

Maj Gen Anderson’s tricky task

Jamaica Gleaner

9 Sep 2022

WHILE HIS initiatives cannot be dictated primarily by focus groups or opinion surveys, the police chief, Antony Anderson, must not be unmindful of what Jamaicans think about his performance, or of the state of the organisation he leads. Which, in either case, at this time, is not highly.

For if he writes off public sentiment merely as the gripings of the picky, opponents, malcontents and ignorant groups, Major General Anderson risks undermining precisely what he has posited as a major, and potentially winnable, strategy in his arsenal for confronting Jamaica’s big problem of criminal violence: partnerships.

Our suggestion, therefore, is that the police chief acknowledge why people feel the way they do, even as he articulates – in a less stentorian or commandand-control fashion – his plan for turning around the crisis, and what he expects of the citizenry in the execution of the project. Maj Gen Anderson outlined one of his wishes at his press conference this week – his call for parents and communities to teach Jamaica’s children how to resolve conflicts.

The police chief, however, did not go far enough. The erosion, and therefore the rebuilding, of conflict resolution skills transcends individual homes and households. The situation amounts to a national emergency. It requires a response befitting the scale of the problem. Which is not the suspension of rights, or throwing people in jail indefinitely, using the declaration of states of public emergency.

It is, of course, almost cliché to say that Jamaica, with a homicide of around 50 murders per 100,000 population, has among the world’s highest levels of criminal violence. Indeed, Maj Gen Anderson disclosed this week that for the first eight months of this year, 1,018 murders were committed in Jamaica, 56, or six per cent, more than in the corresponding period in 2021. The police chief reported that 15 per cent (152) of these murders were the result of interpersonal disputes. People were unable to resolve their conflicts without resorting to violence.

MAY NOT HAVE ANSWER

It is against this backdrop, and a sense that Maj Gen Anderson may not have an answer to the crime problem, that nine of 10 Jamaicans, in a recent Don ANDERSON/RJRGLEANER poll, said they had no confidence in the police chief and the national security minister, Horace Chang, to turn around the situation. At the same time, people’s attitude towards the constabulary, an institution long perceived as deeply corrupt, remained decidedly sour. Ninetyfour per cent of Jamaicans had little or no trust in it.

As this newspaper said previously, there is no easy or quick fix to Jamaica’s crime problem. But an effective and sustainable crime-fighting effort requires, among other things, a highly professional police force in which Jamaicans have confidence. In this regard, the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF), which has long proved itself impervious to incremental reform, requires a deep and radical cultural overhaul.

In other words, the force demands an excision that a police commissioner cannot perform without deep political support, which, in turn, calls for a government’s expenditure of hefty amounts of political capital. Jamaica’s history in attempting to tackle such difficult matters suggests that it is not something that a governing political party will undertake unilaterally. And with respect to the police, we have been unable to achieve the necessary bipartisan consensus. Which explains why successive police commissioners have largely confined their reform efforts primarily to technical issues and the periphery, rather than the cultural core of the constabulary. They, in the end, make only limited headway in reform and against crime and criminality.

It is unlikely that Major General Anderson, in his partnership-building efforts in communities, and within the JCF, is unaware of these forces that are arrayed against him, or that they feed into the public’s view of how well he has done his job.

BUILDING CONSENSUS

Therefore, in his forays into communities, Major General Anderson should not only seek people’s feedback on the immediate crime problem that affects them. Those exercises should also be about building consensus for the difficult reform that has to be done. Indeed, Major General Anderson might find value in frank discussions with political leaders across the divide, as well as with civil society, so that difficult police reform is not a zero-sum game for either the Government or the Opposition. Rather, given the deep crisis, it should be an equally shared expenditure of political capital.

In the meantime, there are other things to be attended to, such as Police Commissioner Anderson’s call for a campaign in homes and communities to build dispute resolution skills. It should be a mass mobilisation effort. JAMAL, the literacy campaign of the 1970s, might serve as a template.

Beyond homes and communities, it should also be a major and aggressive part of schools’ curricula, from the early-childhood through to the tertiary levels. Addressing the issue in schools would not be new. Initiatives such as PALS (Peace and Love in Schools) have long existed, and there are other programmes in place. Mostly, though, they are reactive. And we sense their intensity has been sapped. These efforts should be revived and the energy about them rebuilt.

For feedback: contact the Editorial Department at onlinefeedback@gleanerjm.com.