Not much to celebrate for cops or journalists

Martin Henry, Contributor

Police Week and Journalism Week ran together last week. Both groups chose downtown churches to launch their week - the cops at the East Queen Street Baptist Church and the Press Association of Jamaica at the Pentecostal Tabernacle, Wildman Street.

'Downtown', basically the parish of Kingston, poses some of the toughest policing challenges in the country, is highly degraded from decades of concentrated criminal activity, and is showing a declining population driven by crime and its results. As both the home of the nation's Parliament and a centre of intense criminal activity, downtown keeps journalists busy, as it does the police.

Interestingly, the first Police Week in the life of the 146-year-old Jamaica Constabulary Force came at a time when human-rights activist Dr Carolyn Gomes and her Jamaicans for Justice lobby were calling for the resignation of Police Commissioner Owen Ellington. In extensive media coverage, Jamaicans, including several fellow civil-society groups, widely and sensibly rejected the senseless call, and Gomes herself in the course of the week announced a pending resignation from leading the JFJ which she had founded.

Just ahead of Journalism Week, a young TV reporter got into a tangle with the prime minister's security detail while in dogged pursuit of an on-the-spot interview to have his questions answered on the reinstatement of Richard Azan as a minister of state in her government. Vashan Brown's exploits and their rebuff raised again issues of the pursuit of 'truth' and of the relationship between politicians and public officers on the one hand, and media on the other.

"We stand for truth," PAJ President Jenni Campbell declared as she rallied the troops at the church service last Sunday. Journalists pursuing "truth", ostensibly on behalf of the public, may have been more than a little taken aback by the significant segment of the public which is of the view that pursuing a prime minister with a television camera when she declines an ambush interview may not be good journalism. As a prime minister should know that public perception of avoiding the media, the people's watchdog, will be politically damaging. Striking a fair and sensible balance is the thing, a very slippery thing.

During Journalism Week itself, the owner and chief journalist of one of the most aggressive news-gathering and news commentary media, Cliff Hughes of Nationwide News Network (NNN), admitted, under cross-examination in court in a defamation suit brought by former Prime Minister P.J. Patterson, to not getting it right in several instances and that the story carried by NNN may not have served any larger public interest.

A key lieutenant of Hughes', Emily Crooks, had earlier this year in a PAJ forum to mark the 20th anniversary of World Press Freedom Day in May chastised fellow journalists for failing to dig deep to provide the public with the information it needs.

Noting that Jamaica ranked first in the Western Hemisphere on the World Press Freedom Index published annually by Reporters Without Borders, Crooks went on to conclude that "there is little or no threat to our freedom and safety because we're not pushing the envelope".

She wants members of the Jamaican media to stop being "pushers of press releases" and to break down doors to try and get the information required. Patiently piecing together the story of the political calculation behind the prime minister so quickly, even hastily, reinstating Richard Azan, for instance, would serve the public interest far better as far as interest in reducing corruption is concerned than capturing a tailored political sound bite for the evening news from the PM exiting a ceremonial function.

Emily Crooks, addressing the World Press Freedom Day forum, celebrated the fact that there has not been an instance where any member of the local journalism fraternity has been harmed in any major way. The police are not so lucky. A major part of their week was the commemoration of the 36 officers who had died between November 2012 and this November, several of them at the hands of criminals.

66 attacks on cops monthly

For the first time, as far as I can recall, the police released in early July information on the number of times members of the force had been shot at: 331 times between January 1 and June 1 - an average of 66 attacks per month.

For more of the fairness and accuracy which Chief Justice Zaila McCalla urged at the Journalism Week church service, the media owe both the police and the public, which both the police and the press serve in different ways, more coverage on crimes against the police and the impossible conditions under which the police operate to maintain law and order and to fight crime.

One of the charges, which in the eyes of Carolyn Gomes and the JFJ merit the resignation of the present commissioner of police, is the "unacceptable" number of fatal police shootings. How many are too many? In one of the most dangerous policing environments in the world and daily facing heavily armed gangsters, which police shootings are justifiable, and which are not? The media, bogged down with pushing CCN press releases and scene-of-crime interviews of shouting protesters, is hardly of much help.

You hardly see in media substantive work on the resource deficiencies with which the police must carry out their impossible task. The force, for instance, is short of hundreds of ballistic vests.

The Observer, in its last Monday editorial, 'Law and order must come first', pulled up some data given by imported Assistant Commissioner Les Green from the UK. ACP Green told a forum back in 2009 that 30-40 detectives may investigate a single murder, handling no more than three or four per year.

Commissioner Ellington, in finally responding to the Gomes/JFJ call for his resignation, said he was leading 10,000-12,000 persons, counting every district constable. With some 1,275 murders projected for this year, if every man and woman under the commissioner's command were assigned to the murder cases of this year alone, and nothing else, there would be only around nine officers per case.

What the commissioner will not say publicly is that the majority of murder cases, with convictions requiring long, detailed work by many persons, must simply be quietly ignored if the police are to do anything else, like barring insistent journalists from overrunning the prime minister, or prosecuting ganja cases against majority public opinion for decriminalisation of personal use, as a Don Anderson poll told us last week - or directing traffic, for that matter.

Shortage of resources

With or without Ellington, very unfortunately, the murder rate will continue to be high, driven mostly by gang-on-gang violence, until the security forces and justice system have the resources to decisively dismantle gangs and their systems of support and protection and to deliver swift and sure justice to criminals, firmly demonstrating that crime does pay.

And if law and order must come first, where are those resources to come from? From the national Budget, as first priority. Let me make the point again: If Government top-slices the budgetary allocations of other sectors even very modestly, billions more dollars could be freed up for security and justice, without doing any large-scale damage to the operations of those other sectors. A five per cent slicing of this year's $78-billion Budget, for instance, would yield just under an additional $4 billion for security and justice. Pushed to 10 per cent, some $8 billion more could be freed up.

Commissioner Ellington, refusing to resign and having better luck than Mr Holness' unwanted senators, spoke at the National Police College in the middle of Police Week on 'The Economic Value of Effective Policing'.

And then ACP Les Green was of the view back in 2009 that "the JCF, with all its constraints and problems, does deliver a reasonable standard of policing". Everybody, except the criminals and lawbreakers, wants better. Better has a price tag.

Both the PAJ (journalists) and the Media Association Jamaica Limited (owners and managers) have warmly welcomed the long-delayed passing of the Defamation Act earlier this month as a "milestone achievement". The Defamation Act (2013), replacing the 1851 Libel and Slander Act and the 1961 Defamation Act, and eliminating criminal libel with prison sentences, removes one of the alleged principal impediments to investigative journalism.

I have long held that bigger impediments than those archaic laws include the unwillingness to commit people and resources to investigative work which can be costly and slow, and a general cowardice to push to the limits of law in a small, incestuous, back-scratching society very tolerant of corrupt behaviour.

Policing the Media

Right in Church last Sunday, minister with responsibility for information, Sandrea Falconer, wasted no time getting back to an old and urgent theme of hers: the establishment of a media complaints commission.

She pushed the very reasonable point that with the recent passage of the Defamation Act, the media must now move swiftly to establish the long-awaited complaints commission.

"Just as how the media rightly continued to lobby for a change in the libel law until we did enact new legislation," she said, "so must not just the State, but civil society, demand that you set up your own mechanisms of regulation and self-policing."

A functional complaints commission would provide a formal mechanism for redress when media damage people's reputation. A good defamation law balances the right of freedom of expression of both individual citizens and media on the one hand, and the right to reputation on the other.

Minister Falconer, is, of course, right. The Government is not always the dragon and the media the knight. That's media myth. Ditto the police and human-rights organisations and the people they speak for.

Martin Henry is a university administrator, communication specialist and public affairs analyst. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and medhen@gmail.com.