Real Leaders Chastise Their Charges Privately And Praise Them Publicly

Police Commissioner Dr Carl Williams yes­ter­day blamed inef­fi­cien­cy on the part of some of his sub­or­di­nates for many of the country’s unre­solved crimes.

Williams on Thursday said he was con­cerned about reports of crime ‎in var­i­ous divi­sions and felt that many of the prob­lems could be solved if offi­cers on the ground were oper­at­ing more effi­cient­ly. The com­mis­sion­er said effi­cien­cy could be achieved with greater lev­el of mon­i­tor­ing of ground offi­cers by their supe​ri​ors​.As report­ed by the JamaicaObserver.

The prob­lem of inef­fi­cien­cy in the pub­lic sec­tor is noth­ing new in Jamaica. In fact inef­fi­cien­cy is per­va­sive in most gov­ern­ments across the globe.
This though true of the police depart­ment is not unique to it.
Inefficiency, though a ter­ri­ble drain on scarce pub­lic resources and the cred­i­bil­i­ty of the agency is part of the rea­son Carl Williams is the Commissioner of police.
It’s part of his job descrip­tion to fix those problems.
Williams did not get the job as the first PhD to talk down to rank and file offi­cers who take the risks and do the dirty work but receive none of the accolades.

Real lead­ers chas­tise their charges pri­vate­ly and praise them publicly.
Ballooning crime sta­tis­tics under Carl Williams lead­er­ship may not be total­ly his fault, but his com­ments indi­cate to an old crime fight­er like myself, that inso­far as crime is con­cerned in Jamaica Commissioner Carl Williams has no clue how to bring the num­bers down.
It may very well be that inef­fi­cien­cy is part of the prob­lem, but Williams is the head of the team , he is the coach.
We hire coach­es to fix teams , not bad ‑mouth them.
On that note Williams has already failed the team.

I under­stand full well that each and every per­son has opin­ions on the way polic­ing is to be done effectively.
Of course yours tru­ly is no dif­fer­ent than any oth­er opin­ion­at­ed out­sider in that regard.
Jamaica has char­ac­ter­is­tics which are unique to itself, as such some things which work in oth­er local­i­ties may not be applic­a­ble to our Jamaican situation.
I do how­ev­er believe that the per­for­mance based eval­u­a­tion DCP Novelette Grant spoke about recent­ly, ought to be at the fore­front at any strat­e­gy aimed at increas­ing per­for­mance in the department.
What ought to be left out how­ev­er, is the notion that per­for­mance means fill­ing quotas.

There are oth­er ways to mea­sure per­for­mance ‚which will not fur­ther bur­den the already over­bur­dened pop­u­lace, than to issue more tickets.
The best way to increase mea­sur­able pro­duc­tiv­i­ty is to revamp and recon­fig­ure the way homi­cide inves­ti­ga­tions are done.
Teams should be assigned to run down leads in each case with a view to solv­ing each one as quick­ly as pos­si­ble. Once sus­pects are in cus­tody much senior offi­cers should dou­ble-down on ensur­ing that the lead Investigator is sup­port­ed in pre­sent­ing to the courts , a case which will stand muster.

Each uni­formed Officer who is called to a scene must present a full report on the way each report is han­dled by him or her. Sub-Officers must then doc­u­ment these reports as soon as they are resolved.
This will enable the depart­ment to access that data in the even it’s cus­tomers com­plain that they received no help from the department.
Before all of this can be done how­ev­er Commissioner Williams must have work­able depart­men­tal poli­cies which offi­cers are con­ver­sant with.
I sug­gest the com­mis­sion­er get to work devel­op­ing these and oth­er strate­gies instead of say­ing what every­one already knows.
As I have said on many occa­sions, to be a top cop does not require a PhD . If the top cop has a Doctorate it’s all good, but it is noth­ing if the peo­ple still get no return on their investments.
Policing is not exact­ly rocket-science.
A bad work­man blames his tools.