When The Cost In Blood And Treasure Are Computed INDECOM’s Time Has Come And Gone..

You can have our own opin­ion but you can­not have your own facts .
I absolute­ly hate clich­es’ but here I am using a cliché’ to make a point, you will for­give me I hope.

On read­ing the INDECOM Act which was writ­ten and passed under the Bruce Golding’s JLP Government with the PNP ‘s bless­ings, I said crime would increase expo­nen­tial­ly, crim­i­nals would be embold­ened, and more and more Jamaicans would be killed , includ­ing Police officers.
All of the afore­men­tioned have been proven to be unmit­i­gat­ed truths.

At the time the INDECOM Act was writ­ten, term (“writ­ten” )used loose­ly , there was large scale con­sen­sus that some­thing need­ed to be done about the cor­rup­tion with­in the Jamaica Constabulary Force.
This for­mer mem­ber of the Force will not lie and pre­tend that I too was­n’t mad as hell, to see crim­i­nals invade the JCF I loved and turned it into a den of thieves.

What I did know after read­ing the cob­bled togeth­er piece of crap was it was either the work of a bunch of ele­men­tary school chil­dren, or it was delib­er­ate­ly offen­sive and anti-police .
Or both !!!!

I decid­ed that I would con­tin­ue to do what I could to impress upon whomev­er would lis­ten, that this law does not rem­e­dy police cor­rup­tion , it embold­ens crim­i­nals to com­mit crime , to be dis­re­spect­ful of the rule of law and would be a sig­nif­i­cant dri­ver of crime.

Laws can­not be cob­bled togeth­er in anger, angst, or in a knee-jerk respon­sive way with­out seri­ous consequences.
Legislation requires data input , it requires lis­ten­ing to all par­ties involved with a view toward incor­po­rat­ing all view­points into the debate.
It is hard­ly ever good law to do what seems the most obvi­ous. Sometimes what seem the most obvi­ous end up hav­ing the oppo­site of the desired result.

Raising the sales tax would seem like a good idea to take in more rev­enue for states.
But a per­son who goes in to pur­chase a pair of $100 shoes with 8% sales tax is con­di­tioned to take with him $108 to cov­er the pur­chase of the shoes and the tax.
Raising the sales tax to 10% makes a huge leap in assum­ing that that shop­per has access to an extra $2.

That shop­per may not have the extra mon­ey or may sim­ply decide it’s too much to spend.
Instead of receiv­ing $10 in sales tax the State los­es $8.
Multiply that across the econ­o­my and the cost is mon­u­men­tal . It means that stores sell less mer­chan­dise ‚so they lay off staff, or fail to hire new ones.
Given enough time, it con­stricts the econ­o­my and cre­ates even greater unfore­seen prob­lems as it relates to poten­tial investors refus­ing to invest in new start ups.
All because some genius decid­ed to raise the sales tax with­out think­ing or consultation.

Passing the INDECOM Act was exact­ly like the sales tax illus­tra­tion , com­ing down hard on what they thought were rogue cops with­out due def­er­ence to good police offi­cer or the larg­er issue of the rule of law had exact­ly the oppo­site effect .

AND SO.….

FEWER than six per cent of police offi­cers inves­ti­gat­ed by the Independent Commission of Investigations (INDECOM) in the first quar­ter of 2017 for fatal shoot­ings are cer­tain to face trial.
According to an INDECOM report tabled in Parliament, of 51 cas­es against the police inves­ti­gat­ed by the com­mis­sion, only three led to rec­om­men­da­tions for fur­ther action, and only two involved rec­om­men­da­tion of mur­der charges against the police.(Observer)

INDECOM’S Deputy Commissioner Hamish Campbell sug­gest­ed yes­ter­day that the fig­ures show that the com­mis­sion is not com­bat­ive in deal­ing with the police, but was seek­ing to nur­ture a cul­ture of account­abil­i­ty among its mem­bers involved in con­fronta­tions with the pub­lic which lead to the deaths of cit­i­zens.

Lets dis­pense with the niceties.
This is unadul­ter­at­ed bullshit.

INDECOM’s atti­tude toward the JCF was exact­ly the epit­o­me of con­fronta­tion­al for the most part since it’s unfor­tu­nate cre­ation in 2010.
Since then, hun­dreds of Jamaicans have been killed over and above pre­vi­ous years, except 2005.
What has changed is the way ordi­nary Jamaicans see the role of INDECOM .
The tide of pop­u­lar opin­ion has begun to shift as peo­ple see their loved ones mur­dered includ­ing police offi­cers killed in broad day­light in a part of Kingston which was once a pris­tine neighborhood.

Campbell claimed that the fail­ure of INDECOM to pur­sue most of the issues fur­ther was pri­mar­i­ly due to the fail­ure of wit­ness­es to fol­low up their accu­sa­tions with state­ments to the commission.
That’s because most of these accu­sa­tions were false to begin with, or hearsay at best

“These reports are based on whether there is any evi­dence from eye­wit­ness­es. In many of the cas­es there are no wit­ness­es. They say a lot at the time of the shoot­ing, but they refuse to give writ­ten state­ments,” Campbell said.
Welcome to Jamaica !!! some wit­ness­es claimed that they were threat­ened, or they just feared being involved in the case.
But they don’t fear the Dons and Gangs who send them out to tell lies about the sequence of shoot­ing events.

“The attri­tion of the wit­ness­es is sig­nif­i­cant, so we are left with a bland report,” he added.

Campbell claims INDECOM felt it was nec­es­sary to release the details of the 51 cas­es in response to fre­quent claims by cops that the work of the com­mis­sion was ham­per­ing the police in their jobs.“We chose to put the cas­es of fatal shoot­ings out there because they are the ones most often dis­cussed in the media.”

The truth of the mat­ter is that it is becom­ing clear­er by the day that the resources spent on INDECOM are a colos­sal waste on a poor­ly thought out idea whose time has come.
Sure police should have over­sight , this is cer­tain­ly not it.
A cost ben­e­fit analy­sis will bear out that there is con­tin­ued rise in seri­ous crimes.
The con­tin­ued mass killings by Jamaica’s heav­i­ly armed thugs.
The finan­cial cost being exact­ed on the coun­try as a result of the high mur­der and seri­ous felony rates are far more con­se­quen­tial than the dol­lars and cents wast­ed on this agency to pro­duce two cas­es rec­om­mend­ed for mur­der trial.
Mark you these rec­om­men­da­tions are not con­vic­tions, they are mere recommendations.

The bot­tom line is that as I have point­ed out over the years, there are cer­tain­ly bad police shootings.
No one should be com­fort­able with even a sin­gle bad police shooting.
We should as a soci­ety , do what­ev­er we can to ensure that we hold account­able the peo­ple in whom we invest the pow­er of life and death.
That we do that is of crit­i­cal importance.
What we can­not do in the process, is to empow­er those who would exter­mi­nate us ‚were it not for those very same peo­ple who step for­ward to take up that chal­lenge to run toward the bul­lets when every­one else runs away.