Where Are The Investigators…

How many times have we seen news reports of weapons and ammunition finds at Jamaica’s wharves with the caption the Police are investigating?
The answer is too many to remember . Yet how many times have we heard that detailed investigations resulted in arrest of the members of an intricate gun smuggling network ?
Never !
Or at least I cannot recall ever hearing that this has ever happened.

Law enforce­ment offi­cials have made a major arms and ammu­ni­tion find at the Kingston Wharves.

The items com­prise an AR-15 assault rifle, two hand guns, a .44 mag­num, a .45 pis­tol, a smoke grenade and some 1,011 assort­ed rounds of ammu­ni­tion. The police are now inves­ti­gat­ing. PHOTOS: Major Gun, Ammunition Find At Kingston Wharves.

It’s nat­ur­al and total­ly under­stand­able that we cel­e­brate and feel a sense of relief that at least these weapons and ammu­ni­tion did not make it to the streets. Who knows just how many lives will be saved just because this par­tic­u­lar ship­ment did not make it out. As a pri­vate cit­i­zen I share the sense of relief which comes with know­ing that they caught this one.

As a for­mer police offi­cer I have an addi­tion­al response to this as well as every weapon/​ammunition and con­tra­band find for that matter.
I under­stand that each indi­vid­ual case has it’s own unique set of char­ac­ter­is­tics which nec­es­sar­i­ly deter­mine how a poten­tial inves­ti­ga­tion would pro­ceed going forward.
My con­tention is that a mere con­tra­band find should nev­er be the end of the road, it should be the begin­ning. I total­ly under­stand the eupho­ria and the adren­a­line rush such finds must elic­it. I am not too far removed from the suc­cess­es of the late 80’s ear­ly 90’s of the suc­cess­es of the Constant Spring CIB to for­get those adren­a­line rushes.
The adren­a­line rush should not be a way to say “see we are on the job” . It should serve as an accel­er­ant to the engines of investigators.

POINT OF ORIGIN

Every ship­ment has a point of ori­gin. Every ship­ment has a man­i­fest. In today’s world there are cam­eras every­where , even if the ship­ment was deliv­ered to the wharf by third par­ty shipper/​trans­porta­tion that per­son know from whom he/​she received the shipment.
It is not dif­fi­cult to trace the ship­ment back to it’s point of ori­gin. We are oper­at­ing in a inter-con­nect­ed world where law-enforce­ment agen­cies coöperate >
The police depart­ment must oper­ate on the premise that for every one ship­ment it con­fis­cate, sev­er­al more gets through.
Why ?
If the method was­n’t seen as a viable option those behind it would not have opt­ed for it. The police depart­ment must begin to think this way .
It must also assume the way crim­i­nals think, that ship­ment may also have been a” gimme”, mean­ing “here take this lit­tle gift and get exit­ed while we sneak the real ship­ment through”.

DESTINATION POINT

In order for Jamaican police to access the point of ori­gin it may have to train offi­cers to bet­ter inves­ti­gate crimes. I know despite the fluff there isn’t much inves­ti­gat­ing being done by the JCF.
It can­not be out­side the scope of whats pos­si­ble for the JCF how­ev­er to track a ship­ment at home.
Why reveal that a ship­ment of guns and ammu­ni­tion was discovered?
That ship­ment and every oth­er was con­signed to some­one or some orga­ni­za­tion. This is where inves­ti­ga­tors should patient­ly wait until the ship­ment is signed for and picked up. The next step is to fol­low it to see where it lead to before arrest­ing the perpetrators.
If a ship­ment of guns and ammu­ni­tion are arriv­ing at a loca­tion I believe it is a safe bet to imag­ine that the prin­ci­pal play­ers are in place at the des­ti­na­tion point.

Making arrests at this point is like­ly to yield a trea­sure trove of valu­able prin­ci­pal play­ers. If Investigators are inter­est­ed in fol­low­ing the trail to where it leads.
If the Police depart­ment is seri­ous about crime it must first fix the per­cep­tion it has about it’s methods.
As for this writer , the method­olo­gies being use does not exact­ly elic­it or engen­der con­fi­dence that there is a desire to find out who are behind these ship­ments of weapons into our country.
Just this morn­ing I read that the JCF will be train­ing some mem­bers to deal with domes­tic vio­lence. This train­ing is sup­posed to be made pos­si­ble with out­side help.
I stand to be cor­rect­ed but why is it not stan­dard pro­ce­dure that offi­cers are trained in domes­tic vio­lence aware­ness and how-to at the acad­e­my? Why aren’t the for­eign Governments not offer­ing help in fight­ing crime?

There seem to have been a step­ping up of police raids and aggres­sive­ness in recent weeks . Whether it is relat­ed to the change in Government is yet to be determined.
What appears evi­dent is that there is entrenched oppo­si­tion to aggres­sive law enforce­ment in the coun­try . The for­mer admin­is­tra­tion and pre­vi­ous PNP admin­is­tra­tions was not pre­pared to expend any polit­i­cal cap­i­tal to get crim­i­nals off the streets.
As such crime fight­ing in Jamaica has been total­ly politicized.
If the new Administration uses even a lit­tle of the polit­i­cal cap­i­tal it has in the fight against crime it will be char­ac­ter­ized as being against poor people.
There is a com­mon non­sense-notion which per­me­ate a wide cross sec­tion of Jamaica which believes peo­ple have a right to com­mit crimes.
A gov­ern­ment which make deal­ing with crime a pri­or­i­ty is by default a Government against the people.
Welcome to Jamaica !
There is a huge sub-sec­tion, maybe the major­i­ty of Jamaicans who are inher­ent­ly opposed to the rule of law . This sub-set is quite will­ing to have a one-par­ty state in order to avoid con­form­ing to the rule of law.
I much rather see great inves­tiga­tive polic­ing ‚it is the great­est deter­rent to crime. I know that the courts have not yet received the memo that crim­i­nals belong in pris­ons but the police can at least do it’s job.