Orville Taylor | Insight, incite, in spite and interdict

“Without favour affection malice or ill will.” As simple as this sounds, it is one of the most beautiful professional oaths anyone can live by. Recognising that the larger good can only be accomplished, when we accept that the rules apply to the powerful just as much as they apply to the powerless, is the best guideline for behaviour.

Last year, at a gathering of police officers, I said that it was a dangerous thing when one puts the mind of the oppressor in the body of the oppressed. It was not a comment specific to the Constabulary. In fact, they were made long before chairman of the Jamaica Police Federation, Corporal Rohan James, was interdicted by the police high command under circumstances which national consensus seems to disagree with.

Indeed, there was no insight because the suspension caught me beaten and flatfooted and therefore, it could not have been a direct criticism or even response to his treatment. Forgive me the temptation of remembering that James was the first apostle killed, being ordered by Herod to be put to the sword, in a year ending with ‘4’. Unwittingly, a martyr might be created out of a situation which could have easily been internally handled.

Given the years of research and experience and the conduct of police officers and others who are infected by the virus of abuse, it is dangerous thing to mistreat people, who then are put in positions where they are vulnerable to the temptation of abusing others.

SCARRED DEEPLY

Our experience as a plantation society has scarred us deeply. When one looks at some of the accounts of maltreatment among the slave population, one would be surprised to know that much of it was carried out by other enslaved Africans themselves. Unlike the United States, where blacks were the minority, the Jamaican slave drivers were not all white. Indeed, it is possible that as much as 50 per cent of those empowered to beat the enslaved Africans into subjection, were enslaved Africans themselves. These drivers were particularly vicious, often beating their peers with such zeal that they wore out multiple ‘cow cods’ in single whipping sessions.

Here is where policing began on this island, not formally in 1867 in the post-Morant Bay Rebellion developments, its seeds were sown from right in the belly of slavery. In its early iterations, the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF) was designed to detect and protect; to detect the crimes of the black underclass and protect the upper, middle and political directorate.

When the Jamaica Constabulary Force Act was passed, in 1935, Jamaica was still deeply plantation stained and unless one owned land or had some kind of licence, he had no vote. There were no equal rights or freedom of association, or speech. It was under the existing laws that Marcus Garvey was imprisoned for simply proposing that judges who act unfairly and disregard laws should be punished. Jamaica was a cauldron, which eventually boiled over three years later.

Though significantly changed now, the first century of the Constabulary had a rigid division of labour, just like the plantation. Like the current army, which has a sort of caste system, whereby recruits are separated into two categories; ‘officers’ and ‘other ranks’, the modus operandi for the JCF was a smoked glass ceiling of sergeant major, (Inspector) being the highest rank a black native could achieve.

Moreover, it was understood that when one joined the Constabulary unless one was of strong Anglo-Saxons stock, he would not be recruited as an officer and have no such prospect of becoming one.

As indicated in this column, it was not until 1973 when the JCF finally got a commissioner that was not only native-born, but that looked like us and Paul Bogle: not Thomas Jennings.

Retired Senior Superintendent Maurice Robinson and I were first-formers at the Pope’s college, and it meant the world to us. To assume that in a short 50-year span the vestiges of the plantation would have trickled away from the Constabulary is a myth. Like every other institution, it is vulnerable to those persons carrying trace elements of the drivers’ cultural DNA, even when are oblivious to it. Deep in our psyche, all of us, being persons who have been abused, can easily flip into driver mode and believe it is normal.

STRONG CORRELATION

In a country like Jamaica, which has the highest homicide rate of any Anglophone democracy, the evidence is scaringly imposing, that there is a very strong correlation between the way in which we treat each other in the world of work and other outcomes in the society. It is for that reason the female touch of Jevene Bent, Novelette Grant, Mary Royes, and the accommodating L.A. Lawrence, took sociological and human resource development knowledge and integrated it into basic training, junior and senior command courses and promotions policies.

It might sound like an old bell being rung; but the absolutely worst thing a country can do as it seeks to preserve its democracy is to have a demotivated constabulary, whose foot soldiers feel victimised.

Last week the High Court held that effectively, until the substantive matter of his interdiction is settled by our justices, James should return to interdiction. Their Lord and Lady ships sailed a legal course which was, in their considered opinion, ‘good law’. However, they would not have acted had the police high command changed direction, consistent with the view of multiple persons who have worn laurel wreaths on their epaulettes.

In the aftermath of my public criticism of the interdiction, a police officer warned me that some elements who took the oath in the first paragraph will forever remember my stance. Of course, my response is simple. Having a good memory and ‘carrying a belly’ is human. However, one should note that knowledge does not which makes persons good police officers. Rather, it is that simple obedience to the basic code to be followed in the performance of one’s official duties.

It would be interesting to know whether or not, with clear conscience, it is honestly believed that the interdiction followed the specific police principle and, most importantly, that it benefits the Constabulary on the whole.

Dr Orville Taylor is senior lecturer at the Department of Sociology at The University of the West Indies, a radio talk-show host, and author of ‘Broken Promises, Hearts and Pockets’. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and tayloronblackline@hotmail.com.