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Trigger-happy cops? More than 2,000 civilians killed in alleged gun battles with police between 1999 and 2009
Published: Sunday | August 8, 2010
Tyrone Reid, Sunday Gleaner Reporter
IN JUST over 10 years, members of the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF) fatally shot more than 2,000 civilians in alleged shoot-outs and other confrontations.
Data from the Bureau of Special Investigations (BSI), obtained through the human-rights lobby group Jamaicans for Justice (JFJ), show that 1,963 civilians were shot fatally by the police between July 1999 and December 2009.
This includes 272 fatal shootings in 2007, the highest in any single year in recent history.
Official data for this year are not yet available, but the latest unofficial count shows more than 150 fatal shootings involving members of the security forces.
This does not include the more than 70 persons killed during the May 24 incursion by the security forces into Tivoli Gardens.
The fatal shootings by the police have attracted the attention of human-rights activists locally and abroad, with increasing concern about the slow pace of the investigations into these incidents, and the even slower pace of trials in the cases where cops are charged.
Dr Carolyn Gomes, executive director of JFJ, decried the high number of police fatalities during the last decade.
"It's an appalling number. It's more than should be tolerable, more than should be acceptable," she argued.
With numerous allegations that many of these fatal shootings were extrajudicial, Gomes lamented that of the approximately 2,000 during the period, only one policeman was convicted of manslaughter.
He was subsequently freed on appeal.
Extra-judicial
"There has been no justice for any of them," Gomes said, even as she was quick to point out that not all the police killings during the period were extrajudicial.
According to Gomes, "The problem is that there is no system in place for credibly clearing policemen of having acted lawfully or convicting them for not, because the systems are plagued with delays and doubts."
This is a concern accepted by the Bruce Golding administration, which recently established a civilian body, the Independent Commission of Investigations, to probe all allegations against members of the security forces.
The commission has replaced the Police Public Complaints Authority and will replace the Bureau of Special Investigations as the lead body to probe fatal shootings by the police.
In its annual report last year, human-rights group Amnesty International raised serious concerns about the number of persons killed by the police in Jamaica.
Unacceptable
Public Defender Earl Witter also found the high number of fatal shootings by the police intolerable.
"It is obviously unacceptably high, and if the trend continues, it will contribute to the culture of killing which has become endemic in Jamaica in recent times. Killing breeds killing," said Witter.
The public defender argued that the situation could be improved if the commissioner of police, "in a more determined way, enforces the use of force and use-of-firearms policy which he has promulgated".
Witter argued that if the police commissioner took a firm stance, the men and women under his command would aim less to kill and more to disarm, arrest and charge alleged gunmen and take them to court for trial.
"That is the promise of the rule of law which we professes," Witter said.
He also argued that the figures demonstrate the necessity for an independent commission of investigations.
A joint study by human-rights group JFJ and the George Washington University Law School titled Killing Impunity: Fatal Police Shootings and Extrajudicial Executions in Jamaica, noted that an average of 140 persons per year were killed by the police between 1990 and 2000.
The study, which levelled accusations of bias and unpro-fessional and inept practices against the BSI, the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), and the judicial system of Jamaica, was submitted to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights last Friday.
The BSI and the DPP were identified by the report as part of the problem of the impunity of the security forces in controversial killings.
The report also claimed that there was an absence of legal sanctions against police officers who failed to cooperate with the BSI.
The report charged that the BSI was overworked and overwhelmed.
It accused the BSI of not completing investigations in the required time of six weeks.
At the start of 2010, the BSI had 24 investigators. At that time, head of the body, Assistant Commissioner Granville Gause announced that the BSI's complement of sleuths was to be beefed up by an additional 25 investigators in an attempt to effectively investigate fatal shootings by the police.
The BSI boss also expressed concern about the high incidence of police shootings in some divisions.
- tyrone.reid@gleanerjm.com
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