Government Must Find Out Where (JFJ) Gets Its Funding From And Why…

At the risk of wad­ing too deep into the his­tor­i­cal­ly thorny and pre­cip­i­tous issue of police pro­mo­tions, I want to observe a few points regard­ing the rul­ing of the United Kingdom’s Privy Council in the case involv­ing now retired Senior Superintendent Delroy Hewitt. 

Before I delve into the case argued by the anti-police JFJ, I will talk a lit­tle about the Delroy Hewitt I knew, and with whom I worked.
My com­ments are a result of hav­ing the priv­i­lege of work­ing for years with a man whom many offi­cers young and old­er, weren’t par­tic­u­lar­ly keen on, because of his fideli­ty to dis­ci­pline, hon­esty, and adher­ence to the let­ter of the JCF’s code of ethics.
It is sad that a bunch of anti-police trolls can gar­ner such pow­er in a coun­try inun­dat­ed with mur­ders and oth­er vio­lent crimes, as to besmirch the char­ac­ter of a good man who does not have the same plat­form to clear his good name from the stain and stench cre­at­ed by these peo­ple with agen­das.
The shock­ing real­i­ty in all of this is that Delroy Hewitt has not even been charged with a sin­gle crime or breach of oper­a­tional protocol. 

It was in the year 1983 that I was trans­ferred to the Mobile Reserve from the then Beat-And-Foot patrol Division which was locat­ed at the bot­tom of West Street in Kingston.
Delroy Hewitt was a cor­po­ral of Police who had already tak­en it upon him­self that he would work full time and pur­sue high­er aca­d­e­m­ic stud­ies.
This was before the unavail­abil­i­ty of jobs in the econ­o­my forced col­lege grad­u­ates to decide that they want­ed to become police offi­cers.
It was also before peo­ple with degrees were giv­en police Uniforms and com­mand, with­out street polic­ing creds.
And it was cer­tain­ly before raw civil­ians were giv­en the Uniform of Assistant Superintendents. 

Corporal Hewitt was pro­mot­ed to Sergeant while I was still attached to the Mobile Reserve.
As I said pre­vi­ous­ly many offi­cers weren’t too keen on work­ing with Hewitt because he was seen as too strict.
I loved doing patrols with Hewitt exact­ly because of the fact that he was a strict no-non­sense cop who oper­at­ed by the let­ter of the law. His qui­et author­i­ty was exem­plary and was a buffer to some of the things which befalls less focused police offi­cers.
I felt a kin­ship with him because I was that same cop.
Hewitt was a cop of impec­ca­ble cre­den­tials who no one could point a fin­ger to.
It is because of my knowl­edge of that Delroy Hewitt, which caused me to decide to write this Article.
Long after I left the Force, Delroy Hewitt con­tin­ued to serve our coun­try as an upstand­ing police offi­cer of impec­ca­ble char­ac­ter and deter­mi­na­tion to the cause of law enforce­ment and jus­tice.
The idea that a pub­lic ser­vant can have is name besmirched and dragged through the mud even though he has not been charged with any wrong­do­ing is dis­grace­ful and rep­re­hen­si­ble.
Police offi­cers in Jamaica who do not hide and wait until crim­i­nals are gone before attend­ing to cit­i­zens calls are always going to fea­ture in vio­lent con­fronta­tions with the Island’s blood­thirsty thugs.
The fact that offi­cers names fea­ture into these inci­dents is cause for com­men­da­tion, not con­dem­na­tion.
And it cer­tain­ly is not cause for the self-serv­ing char­la­tans at JFJ to impugn their char­ac­ter for per­son­al agendas.

NOW TO THE RULING

Both low­er courts reject­ed the asser­tion that the Police Services Commission has legal a duty to con­duct, or to instruct anoth­er enti­ty to con­duct, inde­pen­dent, impar­tial and effec­tive inves­ti­ga­tions into an officer’s mis­con­duct when they are being con­sid­ered for a pro­mo­tion. 

The main issue aris­ing in the appeal was in rela­tion to what steps the PSC, as the enti­ty tasked with decid­ing on the pro­mo­tion and dis­ci­pline of police offi­cers, should take to inform itself about offi­cers rec­om­mend­ed for pro­mo­tion. JFJ raised this chal­lenge in response to a sys­temic prob­lem of pro­mot­ing police offi­cers against whom there were/​are alle­ga­tions of mis­con­duct to senior ranks with­in the Jamaica Constabulary Force, which under­mines attempts at police reform and taints the pro­mo­tion process with­in the police force. The legal chal­lenge sought to estab­lish in jurispru­dence that the Police Services Commission is legal­ly required to seek and con­sid­er reports of human rights vio­la­tions against offi­cers when con­sid­er­ing an officer’s pro­mo­tion – some­thing the Police Service Commission argued it was not legal­ly required to do. 

The argu­ments prof­fered by JFJ is that [if the PSC had done more Investigations it would like­ly have come up with a dif­fer­ent result].
On that score, it is like­ly that it may not have, and on that alone, since JFJ can­not prove a neg­a­tive the con­tention is moot.
Needless to say that Former SSP Delroy Hewitt is now retired and so as it is char­ac­ter­ized this res­o­lu­tion is pure­ly aca­d­e­m­ic as far as he is con­cerned.
Surely, as it relates to pro­mo­tions there is much work to be done. The high attri­tion rate from the Agency is one of the signs that peo­ple do not have con­fi­dence that their mer­i­to­ri­ous ser­vice will result in upward mobil­i­ty.
What we can­not have is an out­side lob­by with its own anti-police agen­da dic­tat­ing who gets pro­mot­ed in the police depart­ment and who does­n’t.
If that is allowed the coun­try may as well hand over the run­ning of the force to this par­tial­ly for­eign-fund­ed group which has no con­cern about the mur­der­ous ram­page crim­i­nals have been on over the last sev­er­al decades.
Neither does it have any con­cerns about the tens of thou­sands of Jamaicans(police offi­cers includ­ed) who have been mur­dered by the ram­pag­ing thugs.
That is of no con­cern for Jamaicans For Justice.
What con­cerns JFJ is the pro­tec­tion and enhance­ment of crim­i­nals and their con­duct in Jamaica.
And so we are call­ing on the Government once again, to tell the coun­try where JFJ is get­ting fund­ing to mount these legal chal­lenges from, and for what purpose?