INDECOM laments poor accountability of security forces

TERRENCE WILLIAMS, commissioner of the Independent Commission of Investigations (INDECOM), has submitted key recommendations to the Jamaica Constabulary Force to properly identify lawmen carrying out their duties.

Williams argued that the implementation of these recommendations was critical to reducing the too-frequent incidents of "anonymous police officers" involved in misconduct.

He was speaking yesterday at a Rotary Club of New Kingston breakfast at The Jamaica Pegasus hotel in New Kingston.

Williams wants the regulation numbers worn by officers be printed at prominent places on their uniform. He has proposed that proper records be maintained by the police force, which must be audited on a regular basis and officers must be required to state if they fired their weapons and the circumstances under which they did.

Noting that some 200 persons were killed by the police each year, the INDECOM boss said accountability of the security forces was an area of Jamaica's constitutional democracy that had failed.

He also lamented the lengthy time it took to get forensic evidence from the lab.

"Investigations of shootings by the police are not timely, mainly because it takes us many months to get results from the forensic laboratory, sometimes over a year. There are cases almost three years old that INDECOM inherited from the PPCA (Police Public Complaints Authority)," he stated.

"We were told recently that the laboratories were preferring cases that were in court. Which meant the case against the citizen is handled in a different way than the case against the police officer. There is, therefore, an institutionalised unequal treatment."