Editorial | Next phase of the JCF’s reform

Horace Chang, the national security minister, in an article in the newspaper on Sunday, highlighted a list of technologies the Holness administration has afforded the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF) to strengthen its ability to respond to the island’s crime problem, especially criminal violence. The timing of his intervention may have been aimed at blunting any criticism by the independent Crime Monitoring Oversight Committee, in a scheduled quarterly review of how well the Government is keeping to its timetable for implementing projects to deal with the crime issue.

Nonetheless, Dr Chang’s inventory is impressive. They range from the employment of geospatial technologies that allow the constabulary “to map and analyse crime data in order to generate actionable insights”, to the improvement of the force’s communication systems; the digitisation of criminal and identification and police records; and a project to enhance the constabulary’s ability “to use data-driven, evidence-based, proactive policing to increase the conviction rate for murders”.

“For the first time in the history of the Jamaica Constabulary Force, a technology branch was established in 2019 with a mandate of institutionalising the technological development of the force and directing it into the global digital era,” Dr Chang wrote.

More critically, though, the investment in technology, Dr Chang noted, demonstrated the Government’s “deep commitment to ensuring that our law-enforcement practitioners are given the necessary tools to operate more efficiently and effectively in this information technology age”.

DIFFICULT CHOICES

This newspaper applauds these developments, which, as Dr Chang and Prime Minister Andrew Holness periodically remind, have come with consistently higher levels of expenditure, in real terms, on the security forces in recent years. Obviously, the Government has had to make difficult choices of priority in these expenditures.

Hopefully, the projects will soon translate in a sharp hike in the clear-up rate for murders, which, officially, is at a bit over 50 per cent – a statistic which critics believe to be infused with heavy doses of analytic steroids – as well as lead to more convictions and generally prove to be deterrents to crime. For Jamaica’s homicide rate, which hovers at around 50 per 100,000 population, is among the world’s highest. The country’s crisis of crime breeds fear in the society and deprives the country, by some analyses, of up to seven per cent in potential gross domestic product annually.

However, even as we welcome the Government’s hefty investment in technology, we again note the absence of any mention by Minister Chang of a critical aspect of the JCF’s culture and of direct efforts to transform it. The organisation has a reputation for corruption and of being resistant to change. Many independent analysts also say it exhibits a strong capacity for co-option, and that those who resist being directly ensnared watch passively from the periphery.

Technologies such as those catalogued by Dr Chang have shown, in many jurisdictions, to contribute to reducing corruption and to the development of constabularies that are more efficient and transparent, and, therefore, more accountable.

NOT SUFFICIENT

But Dr Chang is no doubt aware from his review of the literature that the introduction of technology, especially in police organisations with the historic cultural problems of the JCF, is not usually, by itself, sufficient for their transformation. Indeed, a case in point is the London Metropolitan Police (Scotland Yard), where Sir Mark Rowley has just been appointed as its commissioner to replace Dame Cressida Dick, who resigned in April under a barrage of criticisms.

The Met is a highly technological police force. But a review found that the Met had a deep culture of misogyny, racism and other forms of corrupt behaviour. Dame Cressida was not deemed up to the task of transforming the force. She was too defensive of the criticisms.

Transforming police forces with entrenched cultures of corruption involves overhauling systems and improving accountability. But very often, too, it demands addressing the people aspect of the institutions and the excision of the corrosive elements that contaminate them.

In this regard, as he moves to the next aspects of the reform of the JCF, Dr Chang might wish to review case studies from several jurisdictions, going back several decades, to, say, Singapore in the 1960s, Hong Kong in the next decade, Northern Ireland post ‘The Troubles’, and the Eastern European country of Georgia after its Rose Revolution.