Tag: Police killings

Every Now Has its Before

In Jamaica it should be #Poorlivesmatter not #blacklivesmatter coz some black lives do matter here and the police doing the killing and maiming are just as black as their victims…

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The column below from a couple of weeks ago about the need for a #poorlivesmatter campaign in Jamaica has been getting some attention. #Blacklivesmatter as a rallying call has little traction in Jamaica where if you’re black but middle class or upper class you’re–for all intents and purposes–an honorary white. Social blackness is reserved for those who are black and poor, not just those who may be dark-skinned, regardless of class.

I thought as much when I saw Fabian Thomas’s ‘Black Bodies’ almost a year ago–a play that aimed to “tell the stories and honour the memories of four Jamaicans (Vanessa Kirkland, Jhaneel Goulbourne, Michael Gayle, and Mario Deane) killed by the police or while in police custody” while attempting to draw a somewhat facile connection with the US’s #blacklivesmatter campaign which was then just beginning to gain momentum.

And in a move to rival the truth in strangeness, a very bougie, uptown Kingston nightclub named Fiction invited patrons to come and show their support for #Blacklivesmatter by partying the night away. Fittingly they aroused the wrath of social media with tweeters like Matthew McNaughton @mamcnaughton saying “Never been more disgusted with Jamaica UPT Culture than when I saw this @FictionJamaica flier.” The flier is at the top of this post, my column is below:

Gleaner, July 13, 2016

The #BlackLivesMatter campaign has rightfully been hogging media attention worldwide with American Police being shown up as less respectful of human rights than you would expect from a nation that regularly monitors and penalizes other countries for their alleged violations of these universally agreed on rights. Superficially there appears to be a resemblance to the way Jamaican police behave except for a crucial difference.

Here it’s the intersection of class with race that arouses the savagery of the Police and seemingly gives them the right to detain, imprison and on far too many occasions murder a ‘suspect’ whereas in the US the detention and deaths in question seem to be largely racially focused. In 2009 for instance the very distinguished Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates was detained and imprisoned by police after forcing open the stuck door to his own house. A neighbour, misconstruing the scene, reported a robbery in progress, the police arrived, and despite the erudite Professor’s explanations he was carted off to jail.

This would never happen In Jamaica. Here you might be black and suspect until you display your rightful ownership of certain markers of privilege—and therefore legitimacy–of which the ability to speak English fluently is one. This is another stark example of how Patwa-speakers are discriminated against in their own country. Many parents tell their sons that when stopped by police they are to speak perfect English, and mention that they ‘come from somewhere’—that is, an uptown community rather than a downtown or inner city one. Almost instantaneously this frees them from suspicion.

There is no direct way to relate the #BlackLivesMatter campaign to police abuse in Jamaica without acknowledging or starting a local “#PoorLivesMatter campaign. Less than two weeks ago policemen shot a schoolgirl in the head when they wantonly fired bullets at a taxi downtown. Do you think this would have happened in Liguanea or Manor Park? And then to add insult to injury the initial response of the Police was that they had no evidence to suggest that the shooters in question were police officers. What could be more alarming than a possible scenario involving five men disguised as policemen firing their weapons at taxis? Well, actually, duh, a scenario involving five POLICEMEN firing at a taxi which is what in the end it turned out to be.

These are the same police the Attorney-General, in the wake of Lotto-scam generated crime ramping up in Montego Bay, wishes to endow with more leeway to abuse citizens by  insisting that “To successfully tackle the murder problem, some of the fundamental rights and freedoms which we have guaranteed to people may have to be abrogated, abridged or infringed.” In fact she forgot to mention that this has been the state of affairs for so-called downtown people forever; the outcry now is because the warning is addressed to English-speaking, uptown-dwelling, middle-class bodies.

I adapted the title of this column from Kei Miller’s novel The Last Warner Woman. “Every now have its before”, she warns, although few heed her. Police Commissioner Williams has rightly said that the problems in Montego Bay are not something harsher policing measures or a state of emergency can solve. They are systemic and need social intervention, for what gone bad a-morning, can’t come good a-evening. Imagine the scene in the United States if President Obama used the current crisis to give American police even more draconian powers than they already enjoy. Wrong move. Racism in the USA has a long and troubled history just as the virulent classism in Jamaica does. There’s no moving forward without addressing either.

We would do well to heed the words of social commentator Nadeen Althia Spence, who invoking the late great Jamaican writer Michelle Cliff, said:

If I could write this with fire I would set ablaze some ideas on this page. I would talk about the black boys in Montego Bay who no longer know the value of life. They don’t know because their black always needed to be qualified for it to become fully ‘smadditized’. It needed land, and money or an accent. When you grow up in communities that are built on captured land, what does it mean for the girls and boys who develop their personhood in a place where land and property and money helps to define your person.

Capture is a legitimate philosophy, because dem nuh own nutten. When Daddy Sharpe led his rebellion, when he set Kensington ablaze the white people in Montego Bay were angry, they punished, maimed and killed, and Daddy Sharpe gave his life in the middle of Sam Sharpe Square Downtown Montego Bay, right across from the Kerr Jarrett’s Town House.

How has Montego Bay changed? Who plans for the children of Sam Sharpe and his soldiers, the Christmas martyrs. Dem used to state of emergency, di blinking city was born in a state of emergency. What they are not used to is justice and equality and rights and development. Give them that Minister, give them justice and mek it stretch back to 1831 and remember Sam Sharpe. Start with the land…mek dem stop capture…because all lotto scam is another capture philosophy…

Say YES to INDECOM if you want to be taken seriously Mr Crawford–

A Jamaican Minister inexplicably asks for a police oversight body to be shut down. what does this mean??

What a disappointment Member of Parliament and Minister of State for Entertainment & Tourism, Damion Crawford, is turning out to be. Check out his tweet, pictured above, about closing down INDECOM, before its had a real chance to show what it can do. Why such  unseemly haste Mr. Crawford? Why aid and abet police men and women who may be abusing their powers, by shutting down the one agency empowered to investigate police killings and other crimes?

Clovis Toon
Clovis. Jamaica Observer. Nov. 12, 2013

Earlier this year, on May 23 to be precise (the third anniversary of the Tivoli Massacre), a group of us decided to make extra-judicial killings by the police and security forces  the subject of Jamaica’s first  Blogging Day. We did this because the police seemed out of control, there is no accountability for such killings, and no police personnel are ever held responsible, emboldening the police to kill more wantonly, more frequently, more brazenly.

The only ray of hope recently has been the creation 3 years ago of a unit called INDECOM, an independent commission to investigate cases of police abuse, and prosecute officers guilty of corruption and murder. Although their success rate has been less than stellar there has been so much pushback recently from within the police, now escalating all the way to the level of a state minister that it makes you wonder if they may not be on the verge of making an example of some bad cops.

In fact I’m beginning to wonder in the wake of MP Crawford’s astonishing tweet whether what my Labourite friend has been telling me for years isn’t true. He claims that police killings go up astronomically once the PNP are in power, because the police feel licensed to terrorize the population under the guise of hard policing. If this is true then its up to us the citizenry to muzzle those who represent us in Parliament, to let them know in no uncertain terms that we will NOT put up with the casual murder of so many citizens by those the state has hired to protect us.

Some months ago Baroness O’Loan, a former police ombudsman of Northern Ireland spoke in Montego Bay during an Independent Commission of Investigations (INDECOM) Open Day held at the Old Hospital Park. Her speech was reported in the Jamaica Observer and is well worth noting:

“There is an unparalleled level of police shootings in Jamaica,” she said, citing figures in a 2002 paper presented by the local human rights group Jamaican for Justice, which showed that “police killings of civilians were running at around 150 a year.”

“In the 10 years since then that number has almost doubled. In 2011 there were about 210 shootings, in 2012, 219 police fatal shootings and between January and June this year there were 147 fatal shootings by police,” lamented Baroness O’Loan.

Baroness O’Loan said she has worked across the world, even in places like Liberia and in Timor Leste when there was an attempt to assassinate the president, yet she has not seen police fatal shootings in the numbers as she has seen them here.

She underscored the need for a thrust by INDECOM, to not only identify the cops involved in shootings, but also their commanders.

“They will need to see the intelligence or information which the police had before and after the shootings. My experience was that once the police concentrated on proper planning of operations; once they risk-assessed each planned operation and send police officers out — briefed to use minimum force to carry out the arrests or searches — the level of police violence dropped dramatically,” Baroness O’Loan argued.

She noted also that proper proactive police management, modern intelligence-led policing, human rights compliant policing — rather than just sending squads of heavily armed police officers out to do a job — can save lives, and make people more trusting of the police.

“When that happens people support the police more and are prepared to come forward as witnesses, and then the police can do their job better,” she said.

Among other measures she recommended was for Government to increase the staff at INDECOM.

“INDECOM needs more resources. They don’t have enough investigators to do this work. They have only 37. I had 91 in a country with fewer fatal police shootings and a smaller geographical territory and I did not have enough,” Baroness O’Loan argued, adding that civilians and members of the JCF should also report police officers involved in wrongdoing.

Also check out Think Jamaica’s blogpost on INDECOM for more statistics on police killings.

NOT dead on arrival! No Sir! I will not rest in peace!

A ‘dead’ man lives to tell the tale of his near execution by police…but is now under police guard!

Lie perfectly still...taken from How to Play Dead

Some years ago I had occasion to write the following in one of my Herald columns. I later resurrected the column in a post on this blog called “‘Pronounced Dead’ Resurrected Three Years Later…”

‘Pronounced Dead’

What I wanted to talk about this week were the distortions of the English language one frequently hears and reads in local media reports starting with the much abused phrase “pronounced dead”. This term often appears in radio newscasts recounting police shoot outs where “shots were fired”, “the fire was returned” and then “the injured men” (rarely members of the police force) are taken to hospital, where “upon arrival” they are invariably “pronounced dead”.

I dig up all this now because of a really great story i read in yesterday’s Star in which a man declined to allow himself to be pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital. The police had shot the man, the man played dead, and as soon as he arrived in hospital with doctors in attendance, he sat up saying that not only was he alive but it was the police who brought him in who had tried to kill him! What worries me now is that he is in another hospital recovering from his wounds under police custody!



Read the following excerpt from the Star article for yourselves:

A man shot by the police and believed to be dead, gave the lawmen the shock of their lives when he ‘awoke’ at the hospital and accused them of trying to kill him.

The man who had been transported by the cops to the Spanish Town Hospital to be officially pronounced dead, surprised the doctors and cops when he opened his eyes.

Information reaching THE WEEKEND STAR indicates that the incident took place on Christmas Day in the ‘Old Capital’.

It is understood that the man had been shot earlier in the day in an alleged shoot-out with a police team who claimed that he is a known associate of the recently slain Clansman gang member, Navardo Hodges.

Furthermore, it is alleged that the man was shot and thought to be dead because he appeared motionless which led the lawmen to carry ‘his body’ to the hospital for a doctor to pronounce him dead.

However, after he was transported there, he opened his eyes and began to give his account of what happened, telling the doctor who had gone to the vehicle to pronounce him dead, that the police attempted to murder him.

THE WEEKEND STAR understands that members of the police party who travelled with ‘the body’ and medical staff alike were astonished and were shaken up at what they had witnessed.

An alleged witness informed THE WEEKEND STAR that the injured man told doctors that he was at home when members of the police team kicked-off his front door and shot him unhesistantly without asking any questions.

“The man seh the police kick down the door and try kill him, him affi fake him death or else dem woulda shoot him again,” the witness said.

The man was later transferred to another hospital for treatment under police guard.

smh. “…transferred to another hospital for treatment under police guard.” I sincerely hope the media will monitor the progress of this case. Otherwise no prize for guessing what happens next. Police killings are quite common here, and this was by no means the only such event to take place recently. Only yesterday another man was killed in Denham Town by the police. What disturbs me about the case of the latter-day Lazarus who was shot on Christmas day is that we don’t even so much as know his name.

The Police Gang

Jamaican police beat and kill Ian Lloyd, a citizen records this on video, providing evidence that Lloyd was unarmed and not dangerous when killed. This also contradicted the police force’s own statement that the shooting was an act of self-defence on the part of the police.

The police in Jamaica are once again at the centre of a maelstrom of criticism after a video surfaced showing some of them beating up and shooting a man in cold blood. TVJ (Television Jamaica), having learnt its lesson in May after deciding not to air its exclusive footage of masked men in Tivoli Gardens getting ready to defend Dudus (later beamed to the world by the BBC which had no such qualms) sent shock waves through the nation by airing the graphic video of the police killing, shot by an onlooker who sent it to them. The Constabulary Communication Network (CCN) had earlier reported that the man, Ian Lloyd, was shot dead after he attacked members of a police party. The video footage, captured by cellphone, however contradicted this story, clearly showing an unarmed and subdued man lying on the ground.

Lloyd was reportedly a drug addict who had just killed his female partner and was generally considered a nuisance to the community, members of which were seen on video cheering the police on as they circled the man beating him and then shooting him. Still, at the end of the day the question remains: is this what the police are paid to do?

This is not the first time i’ve had occasion to write about the excesses and corruption in the police force. The very first blogpost i ever wrote, in January 2008 when i started this blog, was about Detective Constable Cary Lyn-Sue who confessed in the Montego Bay Resident Magistrate’s Court that he had fabricated witness testimony in the trial of 22-year old Jason James, allegedly a member of the Killer Bee gang.

Lyn-Sue openly admitted that it was frustration that had driven him to invent a crown witness complete with incriminating testimony when fear prevented any actual witnesses from testifying. He was aware of various crimes committed by the accused, he said, and thought that getting James off the streets even for a day would be doing society a favour.

In September that year I had occasion to publish a piece called “Pronounced Dead” in which i was discussing the distortions of the English language one frequently hears and reads in local media reports starting with the much abused phrase “pronounced dead”. This term often appears in radio newscasts recounting police shoot outs where “shots were fired”, “the fire was returned” and then “the injured men” (rarely members of the police force) are taken to hospital, where “upon arrival” they are invariably “pronounced dead”.

In December last year I wrote about the police killing of  Robert ‘Kentucky Kid’ Hill, a musician who had predicted his death and actually named the cops who would be responsible. According  to the Sunday Herald, Hill, virtually in tears, said he was convinced that cops were stalking him and he felt intimidated. Within a few weeks Hill was killed during a shootout with a police party on Wednesday, December 9, 2009 causing leading journalist Cliff Hughes to declare on Nationwide radio that this wasn’t the Jamaica Constabulary Force, it was the Jamaica Criminal Force. Virtually nine months later nothing has come of the investigation into Kentucky Kid’s killing by the Police.

My focus on police excesses has not been restricted to the Jamaican police. In January i published a piece called Police states, anthropology and human rights by an Indian anthropologist named Nandini Sundar who had suffered abuse and harrassment at the hands of police in India. At the time I wrote:

Just in case we thought that the Jamaican police were unique in their brand of brutality we are reminded that police forces anywhere can be equal opportunity purveyors of brutality and state terror. This is a depressing way to start the new decade for true. Are police forces merely gangs licensed to torture, bully and kill by the state? Packs of wolves hired to keep rebellious sheep in line?

In the United States many counties do not permit citizens to videotape police in public. I sincerely hope this will not be the recommendation of the committee investigating the killing of Ian Lloyd. If it is i hope they will also recommend that the Jamaican police follow the example of certain police departments in the US which are equipping their members with video cameras so that in case of accusations being made of abuse and excessive force they can provide their own footage to corroborate their stories of killing in self-defence.

More details on this can be found in this pithily titled story: Police turning to self-mounted video cameras to protect themselves from us.