POLICE Commissioner Dr Carl Williams has admitted that not enough is being done to curb corruption within the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF).
“Of course not enough is being done,” Dr Williams said last week in response to a journalist’s question on the issue of corruption. “If enough was being done we would not have corruption in the force. It would have been a thing of the past.” The commissioner said the “accountability systems” needed strengthening, and added that “we have to ensure that we change the culture” of the force. “You would have seen in the last years or so where a number of police officers have found themselves on the wrong side of the law. What we found is that several of them are young police officers, between one and five years service,” said the commissioner during a briefing with senior journalists at his Old Hope Road office in St Andrew.
“Perhaps some of them have been exposed to a culture in the police force that has caused them to go on the wrong side, but in the majority of cases, these persons came into the force with their deviant behaviour. In other words, they had already had those bad intentions before they came in. We recruited them with those bad intentions, with those bad habits,” Williams added.
Williams said that the polygraphing of all new recruits seeking to join the force will be one way of resolving that issue. The force has intensified its anti-corruption drive since 2007 to weed out corrupt cops and prevent them from moving up the ranks.In a 2013 column in the Jamaica Observer, then Police Commissioner Owen Ellington wrote that anti-corruption policy had helped to rid the force of some 400 individuals of questionable character between 2007 and that year. Updated figures were not available from the police up to press time yesterday. During his outline of the thrust in the 2013 article, Ellington noted that the anti-corruption strategy had “been supplemented by a strengthening and careful application of administrative tools available”, which encompasses areas of the recruitment, promotion and re-enlistment, rotation and separation. Between 2010 and 2013, some 236 members had been denied permission to re-enlist, Ellington wrote. The process of early and retiring police officers in the interest of the public are other well known methods of ridding the force of bad apples.
The force also utilises its Ethics Committee in the fight against corruption. The Ethics Committee allows the Police High Command to confront such members about their conduct, while at the same time providing the member an opportunity to address the allegations. “This allows management to gauge the risk a member may pose to the organisation and take appropriate action. In some instances, this process has led to the voluntary separation by the member, while in others, it has highlighted the need for further investigations, resulting in cases being re-routed to the [Anti-Corruption Branch] and the [National Intelligence Bureau],” Ellington wrote then. In an effort to ensure that the top brass of the JCF isn’t injected with questionable characters, promotions no longer hinge solely on the concept of candidates’ knowledge of the job and being hard workers.
“Not only must they demonstrate knowledge of the job and competence, but their conduct both on and off the job is scrutinised at length. Gazetted officers are held at an even higher standard as they undergo a gruelling process of psychometric evaluation, panel interviews, ethical screening and mandatory polygraph testing. All candidates must be compliant with the provisions of the Commission for the Prevention of Corruption, which stipulates the yearly submission of declaration of assets and liabilities. They must also submit to the High Command, receipts from their last three declarations,” Ellington said then.
‘We have to change the culture’