EDITORIAL - What the Jamaican police can learn from the UK riots

Prime Minister David Cameron and the police chiefs in England have sparred over police tactics during last week's riots across Britain and ownership of the strategy that caused the unrest to subside. But it is the remarkable outcome of the events that has significance for Jamaica.

Six persons died, and there have been more than 1,500 arrests as a direct result of the unrest that left many buildings destroyed or damaged and hundreds of millions of pounds of economic loss. Yet, apart from the trigger for the violence, the fatal shooting of Mark Duggan in Tottenham, none of the deaths, and relatively few of the injuries, were the result of police action.

In one case, three young men were deliberately mowed down by a hit-and-run driver in Birmingham while guarding businesses in an Asian neighbourhood. Another person died in London from injuries caused by rioters. These statistics suggest two things: significant restraint, often in the face of dire provocation, on the part of the British police; and well-developed and effective strategies for crowd control and for dealing with unrest.

It is moot, but not irrelevant, to raise the issue of likely casualties among Jamaican looters from police action, if unrest of the scale seen in London happened in Kingston. Many of those looters, similarly brazen and provocative, might have lost their lives - shot dead by the police.

Indeed, it is not long ago that five protes-ting young women at a government place of safety died in a fire started, as a commission of enquiry concluded, by a policeman throwing a tear-gas canister into a room in which the girls were locked. (Two others died later from fire-related injuries.) Jamaica's policing history is replete with similarly callous behaviour by constables and their generally excessive use of force.

Indeed, last year, the Jamaican police shot dead 309 persons, compared with 263 in 2009, and 224 the year before that.

Taxing job

Of course, constables in Jamaica have a difficult and dangerous job. They often confront criminals with a penchant for violence that a policeman would not normally face in London. On average, nearly a dozen Jamaican cops are murdered annually.

These issues, notwithstanding, the likely contrast of police-inflicted casualties in the circumstances we raise rests on a fundamental difference in the philosophy of policing between the Jamaican constabulary and their counterparts in the United Kingdom. Broadly, there is consensus in Britain that policing is by consent, enshrined in an unwritten, but clearly understood, compact between the constabulary and the community. Even when that relationship is strained, as was the case last week, the constabulary remains part of, and not separate from, the community.

In Jamaica, our police force was established, and has perpetuated itself, as a paramilitary organisation. Its members leverage power and have been resistant to change. Nor has the force had a leader who is heavily invested in the cause of reform, willing to take the risks inherent in driving change, and has survived long enough to carry through the transformation. Rear Admiral Hardley Lewin falls into that category.

The current police chief, Mr Owen Ellington, has declared himself up to the job, which we have no cause to doubt. That is why we wish him well and look forward to an update on the implementation of the reforms proposed in the 2008 report by the committee headed by Dr Herbert Thompson.

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