Editorial | Police must respond to INDECOM
Two months ago Antony Anderson, the constabulary’s chief, found little to complain about in Security Minister Horace Chang’s shoot-to-kill advice to police who find themselves in confrontation with alleged criminals.
“I hear calls all over the place to ask me to comment on what the minister had said about shooting,” Major General Anderson said. “Every single time that the police and gunmen engage, the police must win.”
That was an unfortunately un-nuanced response to a serious matter that bears on how the police do their jobs within the confines of the law, while protecting their own lives and the rights and safety of citizens.
We expect a different kind of engagement – of greater subtlety and intellectual rigour – from the police commissioner to last week’s report by the Independent Commission of Investigations (INDECOM) highlighting not just that Jamaica’s police kill a large number of citizens, but that there are some officers for whom fatal shootings seem routine. And worse: that the leadership of the police force appears unwilling, or incapable, of addressing the matter.
For a lack of acknowledgement of the document’s findings risks suggesting unconcern and could cause a deepening of the distrust citizens have of the Jamaica Constabulary Force.
Established a dozen years ago, INDECOM investigates citizens’ allegations of abuse against the security forces, and, as a matter of routine, their discharge of service weapons – especially in cases of injuries or deaths.
Jamaica has one of the world’s worst rates of civilian homicides. More than 1,400 people are murdered annually, at a rate close to 50 per 100,000. But the island also has an extraordinarily high rate of security forces’ killings – 127 deaths at a rate of 4.38 per 100,000 in 2021.
EXPLAIN FATALITIES
The Jamaican authorities often explain this high rate of fatalities by the police, and the soldiers who support them in policing missions, as the result of being engaged by armed and dangerous criminals.
But in its report, INDECOM observed: “In the seventeen years (2005-2021) the Jamaican Security Forces have shot and killed 3,105 citizens, yet despite this enormous number of deaths, the civilian homicide rate continues to increase.”
What, however, deserves deeper and focused attention is INDECOM’s broader analysis of the data – using as its take-off the 12-month period up to the end of last June – and what the numbers perhaps reveal about the culture of the constabulary.
Over the year the security forces killed 129 people in 110 shooting incidents. Seventy-seven other people were injured. Eight-seven per cent (112) of the homicides were by police.
INDECOM found that 250 police officers were involved in the 129 fatal shootings, having discharged their weapons at least once during the encounters.
Seventy-five per cent of the officers, INDECOM noted, had one or more complaints and/or incident records against them, totalling “917 other matters”.
“Of these 188 officers, just over half (96 or 51 per cent) had been involved in at least one other previous fatal shooting,” the report said.
Of this group of officers, one was involved in 18 fatal shootings; one in 13; another in a dozen; three in 11; and two in 10. Further, INDECOM noted, 14 officers (five per cent of the group) were involved in 30, or 23 per cent of the fatal shootings.
The agency also recalled a previous, 2016, analysis in which it identified 41 police officers, who, at the time, had been involved in the fatal shooting of 400 people.
“Eleven of those officers had each been directly involved in ten or more fatal shooting incidents, which resulted in 118 (30 per cent) deaths,” it said. One of those officers, INDECOM recalled, was “responsible for 22 fatalities, a number of which were identified as suspicious”.
OPERATIONAL REASONS
It is quite possible that for operational reasons some officers may be involved in multiple shootings. However, “a core minority of police officers appear more frequently than others”.
Said INDECOM: “The Commission believes this matter has not been fully or sufficiently addressed in a transparent manner by the JCF High Command. Citizens within islandwide communities are able to identify certain officers, with a reputation for their engagement in fatal shootings and known monikers, which acknowledge their activities. [This] is not a feature which inspires community confidence, nor representative of a modern policing service.”
We share the concern.
Jamaica’s police force has been notoriously resistant to reform, skilled at co-opting security ministers and at keeping at bay police chiefs with deeply transformative agendas.
We don’t believe that will be the case with Maj Gen Anderson who is keen to craft a modern and accountable police force.
But there are the deeper cultural issues to deal with, which Maj Gen Anderson may believe are best addressed outside of the glare of public scrutiny. That would be wrong. The approach robs changemakers of the ability to build public support for the reform process and of insulating themselves against those who seek to maintain the status quo.
Commissioner Anderson, therefore, should talk frankly about his views of the INDECOM report. If he believes they missed the mark, he should say so – and why. In studied detail.