Jamaica’s state policy of police extrajudicial killings

ON a per capita basis, and for decades, Jamaica has had one of the highest police killing rates in the world. Over that period prime ministers and ministers of national security have made statements supporting these killings thereby giving the stamp of approval of the state at the highest level. In other words, the explanations about rogue cops and untrained policemen are but scapegoats.

In the sixties, for example, prime minister Hugh Shearer exhorted the police to ‘shoot first and ask questions later’. In the seventies Michael Manley presided over the dreaded Suppression of Crimes Act, which gave the police unlimited powers to abuse civil liberties. Dudley Thompson, Manley’s minister of national security at the time, casually stated that ‘no angels’ died in the 1978 massacre of five men at Green Bay, an army firing range. In the eighties under Edward Seaga the killing rate soared to over 318 in one year. In the nineties prime minister PJ Patterson promised to buy hearses for the police so they could pick up the bodies of their victims. The worst record to date is that of Prime Minister Bruce Golding who presided over the 2010 police killing of 73 to 200 people in Tivoli Gardens.

The origins of the policy? Well, the justification has always been that Jamaica also has one of the highest murder rates in the world and, with a dysfunctional justice system, the only way to get rid of these gunmen is to kill them. Whether this idea is supported more among the middle class or working class people is hard to say. But it should be said that in the inner city communities, there have been numerous demonstrations against these type of police killings. Perhaps as many as the number killed. In 2013, for example, the police killed 258 people.

International human rights organizations — Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, IACHR, and the US State department — have produced numerous reports condemning the government for doing nothing to stop the killings. There was even a time when the British government temporarily banned sales of weapons to the police for fear that they would be used to kill innocent citizens. Local human rights organizations — Jamaicans for Justice (JFJ) and the Independent Jamaica Council for Human Rights — have also been very vocal in condemning the practice.

After years of being in denial about the killings, government finally set up the Independent Commission of Investigations (INDECOM) in 2010 to investigate police killings. Supposedly with an independent investigative body — the police no longer investigating themselves — rogue policemen would be brought before the courts and convicted for violating citizens’ right to life. The result? Police killings have continued unabated, and have increased dramatically especially over the past three years. In its almost four years of existence, INDECOM has not been any more successful in breaking the decades-old drought of not a single policeman being convicted for any of these killings.

The police have fought back against INDECOM. It’s main body, the Jamaica Police Federation, has been very aggressive in expressing its annoyance with INDECOM and have even gone to court to challenge INDECOM’s power to arrest them. Though the Court disagreed with the police, their aggressive tactics seem to have succeeded in intimidating INDECOM. They like the JFJ, against whom the same tactics were employed, now feel compelled to release an obligatory statement of regret each time a police officer is killed. Supposedly this will convince the police that INDECOM like JFJ is not ‘anti-police’.

Things seemed to have reached an impasse — with some commentators like Gleaner columnist Ian Boyne throwing their support behind ‘hard policing’ and the police commissioner Owen Ellington — thanking him for his support. Hard policing is just another euphemism for saying that the police have no option but to kill in order to defeat the gunmen. And the police always maintain, no matter how obvious it is that they deliberately targeted and killed their victim — that it was a ‘shootout.’ The constant refrain, which any high school student is probably able to recite, is that ‘the police came upon a group of men, the men opened fire, the police returned the fire and when the dust cleared one man was found suffering from gunshot wounds and taken to the hospital where he died. The others escaped and the police are looking for them.’ There are of course slight variations such as that the police went to a man’s premises at 4 AM and when they knocked on the door the man opened fire and the fire was returned and the man was killed. As to be expected the police never receive a scratch in these alleged shootouts.

So, could this impasse ever be broken? Well, an opportunity may have presented itself with a front page Sunday Gleaner story where the writer says that two policemen, one of whom is retired, have admitted to him that these killings are often planned and directed by senior police officers. “That (police executions) cannot be done by any likkle policeman. That has to be ordered [at a higher level] explained the ex-policeman, who had told stories of how he saw alleged gangsters executed in a rural area . . . If any likkle police try that, he is on his own when INDECOM and dem people deh start come down on him. If the (police officer) order it, him know how him will take care of the report on the incident already.”

The fact is that though many observers have already deduced that this is how the killings take place, the Gleaner has never before bothered to investigate any of the killings. The Gleaner editors for example staunchly supported the police version of the killings in Tivoli Gardens in 2010 even though they did publish and video tape some of the contrary stories of the victims. The Tivoli Committee which is pushing for the Tivoli massacre to be referred to the International Criminal Court for investigation and prosecution has publicly asked INDECOM to immediately convene a public enquiry into this policy of extrajudicial killings.

It is hoped that at such an enquiry, senior police officers, ministers of government, not excluding the prime minister, and whistleblowers within the force, would be called upon to tell what they know about the policy.

Only time will tell if INDECOM responds to this request but unless something dramatic like this happens there is no sign that the policy of police extrajudicial killings is likely to end anytime soon.

Lloyd D’Aguilar
Tivoli Committee