It is bad enough that the tools available to the police are substandard, that they are forced to buy their own uniforms (real uniforms), that the pay is shitty, on and on and on.
I understand that the court system functions as an aid to violent criminals by turning them loose on bail and appeals and continuing to disrespect the hard-working officers when they haul the murderers before them to face justice.
The behavior of judges is once again a sore point that both the police federation and the police officers association must act on immediately.
Policing is a noble and respectable profession; police officers should [not] allow criminal-loving Jamaican judges an inch to disrespect them in the courts. Police have immense powers; learn your power to stop the disrespectful comments and actions of the criminals who disrespect you to curry favor with criminals.
They will tell you they are upholding the judiciary’s integrity; they are not; they are supporting criminals.
That said, there should be no circumstances under which a prisoner walks out of a police lockup. This is an issue that continues to occur repeatedly, and it has been happening for decades.
Poor management at the divisional level, commanders failure to apply the appropriate levels of leadership and oversight. This, however, comes from the top, where the top-tier of the force stumble from crisis to crisis without developing new policies and protocols to prevent these events from occurring again.
Instead, when prisoners walk out of police lockups, the constables and corporals are punished without a full top-down review to determine what happened to ensure it does not happen again.
This is something Deputy Commissioners of police should be working on; they are the most senior officers in the Department. However, if these most senior people have no experience in actual policing but were fast-tracked to the positions they hold because they earned a degree or kissed some asses, we have the same problem in the department as we have in the judiciary.
The Freeport Police station in Montego Bay is not an old facility by any stretch of the imagination, and it is not a facility that some guys can saw through a metal bar and escape in a back alley.
That someone could walk out of a facility like the Freeport police lockup and potentially kill a witness against him is inexcusable…
The police must maintain its standard in doing its best to protect the Jamaican people. It is up to the judges to turn killers loose onto the Jamaican society to shoot and decapitate innocent citizens.
Come on, JCF, you are better than that.
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Mike Beckles is a former Police Detective, businessman, freelance writer, black achiever honoree, and creator of the blog mikebeckles.com.