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Egg on the face of Mark Shields and the JCF
Some parts of this just don't mek any sense. But that Wignall for you.
Egg on the face of Mark Shields and the JCF
Mark Wignall
Thursday, June 14, 2007
At this crucial time, Dr Ere Seshaiah, government pathologist, needs to discover and fall in love with the economy of words. He has been conducting post-mortem examinations in this country since the days when then government pathologist, the late Dr Royston Clifford, ran the dilapidated morgue at Spanish Town Hospital as if it was his own, his personal fiefdom.
On one of those days about 10 years ago, I received a call from a junior pathologist working with him. The doctor was African and he sounded quite scared and I could almost picture him cupping his hands around the phone as he spoke. He told me that Clifford had maintained strict rules about the staff interacting with journalists and if it should be discovered that he had made the link with me, he would be fired instantly.
Within days he had sent me a document setting out the terrible state of the morgue at Spanish Town. After assuring him that I would protect his identity I made a call to Dr Clifford. He was unavailable but I left a message with a lady, telling her that I would like to speak with him about the general state of the facility. Not surprisingly Dr Clifford never returned my call.
One of the shocking items on the list was the simple lack of basic equipment. The young doctor told me, as an example, that at times the high-speed rotary saw needed to cut open the skull was not functioning. That necessitated them to use an ordinary carpenter's saw to chip and hack away at the head on the dead body. All of that in a 20th-century world!
His list included a lack of refrigeration space which saw bodies removed from the packed freezers in the morning and piled on top of each other, fluids leaking into other bodies as they thawed out, to await their turn with an archaic approach to modern, scientific, forensic pathology. I wrote a column outlining the general problems, but I eventually lost it in my first hard-drive crash.
The government was very aware of the problems but chose to do nothing about it as the vast majority of the bodies (cases) involved poor, black Jamaicans who could only watch cricket through cracks in the fencing. Newly formed groups like Jamaicans for Justice pleaded with the uncaring voice of the government to address the matter. (Wignall speaking nicely about the JFJ?!? How times have changed!) All to no avail. At one stage an important piece of forensic equipment ran overtime until it too died. The replacement cost was a paltry $2 million. It took the government five years to import it.
I do not know if Dr Seshaiah came out at the top of his graduating class. Even if he was unusually bright then, and hopefully is still so now in his profession, he needs to ask himself, quietly, what is it that three other senior pathologists operating in First-World conditions have found that he is unable to see from behind the ramshackle of his operating room in Spanish Town.
The higher the monkey climb...
People in the know inside the police force have told me that Les Green, the other British import into the officer corps of the JCF, has chalked up more respect for hard, effective police work than Mark Shields has been able to get. Shields became a big fish in a little pond when he arrived in paradise a few years ago. He was a part of the Crawle killings investigation and, just for the records, Reneto Adams and his crew were found not guilty. (Assinine to mention that Adams and crew were acquitted right after you spoke about our serious challenges in forensics and pathology.)
In the Bob Woolmer death, Shields became the face of Jamaican policing which we showed to the world. We embraced him then as he expropriated the hangover of our need to believe in white-talking faces while he peppered the international media with blow-by-blow accounts of the Bob Woolmer homicide with a smooth, seamless segue into murder.
In a parochial sense, in hindsight, the certain winner is Lucius Thomas, the real commissioner of police. Like Shields, Thomas would have known about the atrocious state of the facilities utilised by the government pathologist.
But unlike Thomas, who seems to have given Shields more than enough room to paint himself into a corner, Shields went to town and the rest of the world in introducing murder into the equation even though he must have known that Woolmer's body, when it was discovered, was so pressed up hard against the inside of the hotel room door that it would have been difficult to arrive at murder even in the early parts of the investigations.
Thomas has "won" because Shields has exposed too much of that part of him which only high climbing can reveal. And it ain't pretty. Thomas has also played it smart by rapping both Shields and Adams for their public statements on the matter.
Shields is very obviously on the way out and he must be encouraged not to disappoint us at this stage. Bright and competent police officers like home-grown Novelette Grant and Owen Ellington need to be given their due in the force even if they will never be able to see the monumental pay package of someone like Shields.
My chatty-chatty friend Reneto Adams
There seems to be no middle ground in making public judgement on Adams. He is either passionately loved or violently hated, something I can empathise with. What made him do that TV interview in which he tore Mark Shield's policing is anyone's guess.
A little more measured in delivery, Adams is just as articulate as Shields. Egged on by the corporate elite in Jamaica, supported by the then Commissioner Forbes, endorsed by then prime minister PJ Patterson and lauded by a scared and hobbled public, Adams was the "cure" the force threw up when mad dogs began (all over again) to overrun us. In the context of the violent criminality on the streets, he was the point man the rabid dogs feared. It was the policing he knew and we gave him hero status for it. That said, I resent Shields making derogatory statements about Adams in Adams' own backyard. Shields is as botched a policing experiment as he may believe Adams is, but in these matters Shields should have kept his foreign mouth tightly shut. (Why should he? I guess Wignall would want all our Jamaican immigrants to shut up and take what's dished out to them in the US, Canada and Britain, huh?)
observemark@gmail.com
Egg on the face of Mark Shields and the JCF
Mark Wignall
Thursday, June 14, 2007
At this crucial time, Dr Ere Seshaiah, government pathologist, needs to discover and fall in love with the economy of words. He has been conducting post-mortem examinations in this country since the days when then government pathologist, the late Dr Royston Clifford, ran the dilapidated morgue at Spanish Town Hospital as if it was his own, his personal fiefdom.
On one of those days about 10 years ago, I received a call from a junior pathologist working with him. The doctor was African and he sounded quite scared and I could almost picture him cupping his hands around the phone as he spoke. He told me that Clifford had maintained strict rules about the staff interacting with journalists and if it should be discovered that he had made the link with me, he would be fired instantly.
Within days he had sent me a document setting out the terrible state of the morgue at Spanish Town. After assuring him that I would protect his identity I made a call to Dr Clifford. He was unavailable but I left a message with a lady, telling her that I would like to speak with him about the general state of the facility. Not surprisingly Dr Clifford never returned my call.
One of the shocking items on the list was the simple lack of basic equipment. The young doctor told me, as an example, that at times the high-speed rotary saw needed to cut open the skull was not functioning. That necessitated them to use an ordinary carpenter's saw to chip and hack away at the head on the dead body. All of that in a 20th-century world!
His list included a lack of refrigeration space which saw bodies removed from the packed freezers in the morning and piled on top of each other, fluids leaking into other bodies as they thawed out, to await their turn with an archaic approach to modern, scientific, forensic pathology. I wrote a column outlining the general problems, but I eventually lost it in my first hard-drive crash.
The government was very aware of the problems but chose to do nothing about it as the vast majority of the bodies (cases) involved poor, black Jamaicans who could only watch cricket through cracks in the fencing. Newly formed groups like Jamaicans for Justice pleaded with the uncaring voice of the government to address the matter. (Wignall speaking nicely about the JFJ?!? How times have changed!) All to no avail. At one stage an important piece of forensic equipment ran overtime until it too died. The replacement cost was a paltry $2 million. It took the government five years to import it.
I do not know if Dr Seshaiah came out at the top of his graduating class. Even if he was unusually bright then, and hopefully is still so now in his profession, he needs to ask himself, quietly, what is it that three other senior pathologists operating in First-World conditions have found that he is unable to see from behind the ramshackle of his operating room in Spanish Town.
The higher the monkey climb...
People in the know inside the police force have told me that Les Green, the other British import into the officer corps of the JCF, has chalked up more respect for hard, effective police work than Mark Shields has been able to get. Shields became a big fish in a little pond when he arrived in paradise a few years ago. He was a part of the Crawle killings investigation and, just for the records, Reneto Adams and his crew were found not guilty. (Assinine to mention that Adams and crew were acquitted right after you spoke about our serious challenges in forensics and pathology.)
In the Bob Woolmer death, Shields became the face of Jamaican policing which we showed to the world. We embraced him then as he expropriated the hangover of our need to believe in white-talking faces while he peppered the international media with blow-by-blow accounts of the Bob Woolmer homicide with a smooth, seamless segue into murder.
In a parochial sense, in hindsight, the certain winner is Lucius Thomas, the real commissioner of police. Like Shields, Thomas would have known about the atrocious state of the facilities utilised by the government pathologist.
But unlike Thomas, who seems to have given Shields more than enough room to paint himself into a corner, Shields went to town and the rest of the world in introducing murder into the equation even though he must have known that Woolmer's body, when it was discovered, was so pressed up hard against the inside of the hotel room door that it would have been difficult to arrive at murder even in the early parts of the investigations.
Thomas has "won" because Shields has exposed too much of that part of him which only high climbing can reveal. And it ain't pretty. Thomas has also played it smart by rapping both Shields and Adams for their public statements on the matter.
Shields is very obviously on the way out and he must be encouraged not to disappoint us at this stage. Bright and competent police officers like home-grown Novelette Grant and Owen Ellington need to be given their due in the force even if they will never be able to see the monumental pay package of someone like Shields.
My chatty-chatty friend Reneto Adams
There seems to be no middle ground in making public judgement on Adams. He is either passionately loved or violently hated, something I can empathise with. What made him do that TV interview in which he tore Mark Shield's policing is anyone's guess.
A little more measured in delivery, Adams is just as articulate as Shields. Egged on by the corporate elite in Jamaica, supported by the then Commissioner Forbes, endorsed by then prime minister PJ Patterson and lauded by a scared and hobbled public, Adams was the "cure" the force threw up when mad dogs began (all over again) to overrun us. In the context of the violent criminality on the streets, he was the point man the rabid dogs feared. It was the policing he knew and we gave him hero status for it. That said, I resent Shields making derogatory statements about Adams in Adams' own backyard. Shields is as botched a policing experiment as he may believe Adams is, but in these matters Shields should have kept his foreign mouth tightly shut. (Why should he? I guess Wignall would want all our Jamaican immigrants to shut up and take what's dished out to them in the US, Canada and Britain, huh?)
observemark@gmail.com
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