Recent media reporting that the police high command is demanding the names of members who reported sick to press home their demands for better pay is shocking and should be seen as another attack on the constitutional rights and freedoms of members of the rank-and-file.
Rest assured that this action if true as reported, is not merely a function of the incompetent high command, it is coming directly from Jamaica house.
What reason would the high command of the force have for mining the identity of members who were sick unless their intentions are expressly retaliatory?
The Police high command have been a tool of politicians for decades. This is true across administrations of both political parties.
This ineptitude and blatant yard-boy proclivity on the part of the men in the highest echelons of the force have created a sieve-like effect which sees almost 600 young men and women leaving the force each year.
The latest bit of underhanded chicanery by the high command is just the latest in a series of actions taken against average hard working officers in which the high command has dirty hands.
The recently legislated ZOSO act had as a critical part of its infrastructure a component which makes it a crime for officers to leave the police department without first submitting a resignation letter six months in advance.
It was under the Bruce Golding Administration that the nation was given INDECOM, a blatantly divisive and onerous law to law enforcement, which easily could have been drafted better to deal appropriately with errant cops without the rancor and chilling effects it has had on law enforcement.
It is important to remember that the sitting Prime Minister Andrew Holness, has himself now been forced to come around to the onerous nature of the INDECOM law. A full 7 years after we have been hammering home almost daily, the dangerous nature of the law.
From social media accounts, there is a general feeling that members of the JCF are tacking toward the PNP and have been for some time now.
I respectfully ask the JLP Government and those who support the administration slavishly, “are you not aware that people are able to think for themselves”?
The police have been an important voting bloc in the nation for decades. In fact, the saying was ” As goes the police so does the nation.”
There was never anything wrong with the police voting their conscience as long as they act impartially in the daily functions of their duties.
The vote swings of the police en-masse have always been reflective of the general mood of the nation at every given time in the nation’s young history.
It’s downright arrogant of anyone to believe that the actions of the Golding administration as it relates to the INDECOM act would not have lingering bad blood.
You cannot keep poking the lion and not expect a response.
The Police high command in place today is a product of a high command which was before it.
What that means is that the conniving, punitive, incompetence and the currying of favor with politicians are learned behavior.
That is part of the real reason young men and women who join are leaving in droves.
They can try to criminalize attrition all they want, people are going to drop everything and walk away as I did many years ago.
The very same tired and despicable punitive components the police high command employed two and three decades ago are still the very same pathetic tools it has in its depleted toolbox today.
Demanding that officers who have just returned from duty hand over their service weapons in a country which just recorded over 1600 homicides in the year just concluded, is a telling testimony that the police high command has criminal intent.
If the reporting is true that they are in fact demanding that officers hand over their service weapons leaving themselves defenseless it goes to the heart of their desire to see young officers killed because they took a stand for better pay.
The police high command has always prostituted itself to politicians, the nation is gripped by a seeming endless murder rate which the high command has no solutions to.
Clearly, in the face of its inability to do anything substantive about crime the high command is now dedicated to bootlicking only, something it has done quite well for decades.
The quality of a police department is a direct result of its leadership, it is not the bad officers who are leaving monthly.