INDECOM Tells Us There Are Plenty Of Oversight Of That Agency..

We some­times look at our Parliamentary demo­c­ra­t­ic sys­tem in Jamaica and say we do have a great system.
But do we?
It’s dif­fi­cult to argue with most Jamaicans who live at home, par­tic­u­lar­ly those whom have nev­er trav­eled out­side the coun­try that we don’t have the best sys­tem in the world.

There is a sense among us Jamaicans that our patri­o­tism is tied to the fact we live on the Island, or may have left and returned for what­ev­er rea­son. Even those whom have had a one way flight back home , preach their undy­ing patri­o­tism as if where they are forcibly domi­ciled now, is a func­tion of their own doing.

The truth is that our sys­tem is pat­terned off the British Monarchistic sys­tem, and still today has the British Monarch as the tit­u­lar head of our Government, even though we derive no real mea­sur­able ben­e­fit from the reten­tion of our Colonial Rulers as head of our Government.

WHERE AM I GOING WITH THIS ?

The Jamaican Government just made the deci­sion not to cre­ate over­sight which would over­see the sev­en year old Agency INDECOM cre­at­ed under the Bruce Golding administration.
The Government of Andrew Holness miss­es no oppor­tu­ni­ty to tell Jamaicans that the INDECOM Act is an act of Parliament and as such it is going nowhere.

At the risk of sound­ing flip­pant ‚I agree with that per­spec­tive, just that I see the Agency going nowhere from a dif­fer­ent perspective.
Did the Government make the deci­sion not to have over­sight of INDECOM or did that deci­sion come from a sin­gle indi­vid­ual , Andrew Holness?
The Gold stan­dard of account­abil­i­ty peo­ple look at the world over is the American sys­tem of checks and balances .
If the inten­tion of the Government is to cre­ate sit­u­a­tions in which best prac­tices are adhered to , we must ask why INDECOM is immune from oversight?

The com­mit­tee of the Parliament which has respon­si­bil­i­ty for over­sight of INDECOM strug­gles might­i­ly just to get it’s full mem­ber­ship to attend com­mit­tee hear­ings, much less to mount mean­ing­ful over­sight of an agency which has out­side sup­port and is rapid­ly becom­ing an out of con­trol behe­moth in my opinion.

In response to the Police Federation’s com­plaints that INDECOM is oper­at­ing with­out over­sight , Terrence Williams, INDECOM’s com­mis­sion­er asserts that his agency does have over­sight in the per­son of a retired high court judge.
Strangely it appears that no one out­side of Williams and Andrew Holness is aware of this overseer.

Terrence Williams alleges that this sin­gle over­seer has been empow­ered for over two years and since then there has been not one report against INDECOM.
Could it be that the rea­son for that is that no one knows about this person?

So I placed a call to INDECOM, and spoke to pub­lic rela­tions offi­cer Ms Anderson who assured me that the police were made aware through writ­ten com­mu­niques at the time retired high court Judge Mrs Marjorie Cole-Smith was appoint­ed to head the com­mit­tee which would over­see her agency .

She was unable to pro­vide me with a con­tact num­ber for Mrs Cole-Smith , but she assert­ed that the Police also has the right to judi­cial review under the law which if they have com­plaints against INDECOM.
Of course the ini­tial com­plaint would have to be made to INDECOM before they, or any oth­er agency or indi­vid­ual would have rem­e­dy through the pre­scribed review.

I inquired of her whether there was­n’t a bit of hypocrisy in that process , since the whole premise of INDECOM was that report­ing to police in order to have a pos­i­tive out­come was problematic.
She indi­cat­ed she did not see it, as the con­cerns weren’t about to whom reports were made , but the out­come of said reports of police improprieties.

I would have liked to debunk that notion using INDECOM’s own sta­tis­tics as well as sta­tis­tics which exist­ed before INDECOM, but I though that con­ver­sa­tion would be bet­ter direct­ed at Terrence Williams.
Ms Anderson told me she has no idea why the Police Federation would not know about these avenues of com­plaint avail­able to them.

So who is telling the truth?
Only one way to find out.
I called the Police Federation and asked to speak to Sgt Wilson, or any­one who could shed some light on whether the Federation was aware of the avenues open to it’s mem­bers in the event they have com­plaints against INDECOM.
The per­son who answered the phone (a non JCF staff mem­ber) took my num­ber and assured me Wilson would get back to me as the entire staff was at a meeting.

As the dead bod­ies pile up the police need to know when they go out to do their jobs they have the full back­ing of their civil­ian bosses.
That is the way it works , except in Jamaica where the direc­tion seem to be less and less sup­port for law enforce­ment officers.
If this body to inves­ti­gate com­plaints against INDECOM does exist , how could the police not know about it?
How come INDECOM was unable to fur­nish me with a con­tact num­ber to this over­sight person?
And so we are left with more ques­tion than answers as to where the truth lies in all of this.