Police Officers Lives Are At Risk…

From con­trib­u­tor Truthteller.

Recently we have seen a few videos on var­i­ous social media plat­forms depict­ing police offi­cers try­ing, yes try­ing, to arrest sus­pects. I’m not here to look at what the sus­pect did or didn’t do but let’s look at how the lack of account­abil­i­ty from the police high com­mand over the years is putting offi­cers who are on the front lines lives in seri­ous danger.

In any mod­ern police depart­ment, effec­tive com­mu­ni­ca­tion is extreme­ly impor­tant as this helps to with quick­er response time to inci­dents. When the offi­cers go out there and step out of the ser­vice vehi­cle that has the radio that has direct con­tact with police con­trol and oth­er police units, you are basi­cal­ly on your own because you have no imme­di­ate access to con­trol or con­trol has no imme­di­ate access to you. When a sit­u­a­tion gets to the point where the offi­cers on the ground need assis­tance a sim­ple push to talk request­ing back up which can take less than 10 sec­onds can be the deter­min­ing fac­tor if a police offi­cer los­es his life while doing his job.

The videos being cir­cu­lat­ed we see where offi­cers are in uni­form doing their law­ful duty and face much resis­tance, threat and assaults from the sus­pects and cit­i­zens who choose to inter­vene to aid the sus­pect evade arrest. In the USA those same Jamaicans who read­i­ly inter­fere and obstruct police in the law­ful exe­cu­tion of their duties wouldn’t dare do it! No mat­ter how “right” you think you are or even how “right” you are. They know that inter­fer­ence can lead to a quick com­bi­na­tion of arrest, seri­ous injury or death.

Now you have a bois­ter­ous crowd while you are arrest­ing an offend­er if each police offi­cer were equipped with a portable radio and the nec­es­sary attach­ments for easy use and flex­i­bil­i­ty and with­in min­utes you see police units com­ing out of every nook and cran­ny peo­ple will respond to the effec­tive pres­ence. And yes the show of rapid force and coör­di­na­tion to make even one arrest then peo­ple will know to stand back. Of course, they have a right to video­tape what­ev­er they want but from a safe dis­tance as stip­u­lat­ed by the offi­cers on scene. However,you dare lay hands on the police try­ing to stop them from doing their job and that’s anoth­er matter.

Others will argue, oh the offense is com­mit­ted against the state not against you. This kind of thought process is one of lazi­ness and just an excuse to not do the job who­ev­er came up with it.
So if the offend­er com­mit­ted mur­der should the offi­cers put it off until a next time because the crowd says so? Police actions must be swift and deci­sive and this is where effec­tive com­mu­ni­ca­tion equip­ment is need­ed for the front line offi­cers. This takes vision­ary lead­er­ship to see and push it through and it’s appar­ent that the pow­ers that be do not want a coör­di­nat­ed and effec­tive Jamaica Police Department. The high com­mand can get any­thing they want from the gov­ern­ment just that they have spaghet­ti backs and tend to feed into this anti-police rhetoric, so not sup­port­ing the police even though you are in its lead­er­ship is the order of the day.

Equipping the police depart­ment with ade­quate tech­no­log­i­cal tools will cost but this takes strong vision­ary lead­er­ship. Here’s an idea: roll it out in a phased basis through a divi­sion that oper­ates in a high­ly dense area and use that urban set­ting that the offi­cers fre­quent as a base­line and see how the sys­tem han­dles the load and do the nec­es­sary test and diag­no­sis, get out the bugs and then scale up through­out the island when you get it right. The coun­try is not short on exper­tise in this area. There is two major telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion com­pa­ny on the island with the right incen­tive would help imple­ment such sys­tem plus its good pub­lic rela­tions for their brand.

Contributor ( Truthteller).
Contributor Truthteller has cho­sen to remain anony­mous at this time, he is a for­mer mem­ber of the JCF who has a wealth of expe­ri­ence as a police offi­cer in Jamaica.
We would like to wel­come him to our tal­ent­ed team of blog­gers who have decid­ed to speak out on top­i­cal issues affect­ing our country.