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Monday, October 15, 2007

Mike Henry's visit to Mobay

He came, he saw, and there's no money in the budget so it looks like we'll be stuck in traffic for a loooong time. Thanks Omar!

Wednesday, October 03, 2007

One gun salute

After reading about a police officer's gun salute for his fallen colleague, two questions came to mind.

The first was "if a police officer broke the law so brazenly in the presence of the commissioner, what has he been doing when no one was around?" The answer to that question can probably be be found somewhere in the plethora of stories about extra-judicial killings, bribery, murder-for-hire, drug-running, and various other illegal activities "allegedly" carried out by the police.

The second question was "why did the commissioner have to order other police officers to arrest the trigger happy cop?" You would have thought that, given the number of police officers that must have been at the funeral, the man would have been arrested before the shells hit the ground!

The underlying issue here is the calibre of people that are recruited into the police force and the resultant behaviour of the graduates of the academy. Any man on the street can tell you some kind of story about the police, whether it's suffering a beating or worse for no apparent reason, being called "bwoy" by a cop 20 years younger than you are, being asked to "buy a rounds fi the squaddies" in lieu of a speeding ticket, or suffering the piss poor customer service that most Jamaicans have sadly come to expect from police on all levels. I say most because, as we all know, if you're rich or related to a police officer then things are very, very different.

A big part of the solution to Jamaica's crime problem is getting citizens to cooperate with the police. That won't happen if the police continue to treat the lives and issues of the very people they're sworn to protect with contempt. Simply increasing the size of the force or giving them bigger guns or more cars or giving them a raise of pay won't solve the problem. The fact of the matter is that we need better police officers.

We need more police officers who have more than just a basic education. We need more police officers who can speak standard English. We need more police officers who truly want to serve the citizens of Jamaica. We need more police officers who know how to act professionally and responsibly, even when the people they're interacting with don't. We need more police officers who will do the job for which they were hired - to "serve, protect and reassure with courtesy, integrity and proper respect for the rights of all."