Free advice to police commissioner

Monday, July 26, 2010

Dear Editor,

When I was clerk of courts over 40 years ago, it was my duty to give free legal advice to the public and the police as is the case today, and I am sure that most, if not all private practitioners have occasionally done the same and have even appeared in court for free.

It has been in the media that our Commissioner of Police Owen Ellington told journalists that the police were seeking to keep some people in detention who had been held during the State of Emergency at midnight. I do not know of any law to support what he seeks. My free advice to him is that false imprisonment is not only a civil matter, it is also a criminal matter triable only in the Circuit Court on an indictment.

I invite the people's Commissioner of Police to answer the people's cry for investigation with a view to prosecution to be brought against some public officials, which in this context includes politicians and some opulent members of the private sector who have links either as principals in the first or second degrees or accessories before or after the fact in connection with gun crimes. This, instead of directing scarce resources to the incarceration of thousands of innocent children of poor people residing below the figurative Torrington Bridge and areas of the kind throughout Jamaica to the exclusion of unenlightened so-called bakras (and their children), some of whom behave like plantation masters disrespecting men of higher social and intellectual classes as if the ancestors of those innocent children have not suffered enough as victims of the worst form of slavery.

Having been a member of the Constabulary Force working out of Clarendon Divisional Headquarters and leaving the force as virtually sub-officer in charge of crime, Area 3, I would be shocked if the police are not investigating the Manatt affair with special reference to the source of US$400,000 committed to the contract and the payments of a little less than US$50,000 and most recently US$15,000; the execution of the contract by Harold Brady, a private practitioner, not in the public pay, on behalf of the government of Jamaica, the denial of the prime minister that the government had no contract with Manatt, and I think asking Minister Samuda to investigate the matter. The prime minister subsequently admitted that he was the person who sanctioned the contract save and except that it was not to be done on behalf of the government, but on behalf of the Jamaica Labour Party, all in the public domain and on the files of police headquarters. May the Commissioner respond.

Must not Mr Golding who sanctioned the contract give the whole truth about the matter and the source of the US$400,000 committed and subsequent payments, assuming that Mr Golding, who is a businessman holding a Bachelor's degree in Economics, would not have sanctioned the matter without knowledge and assurance of the funding? Let me take off my prosecutor's hat while we await the commissioner's response.

By the way the commissioner must be seen as fit for the company of Commissioner of Customs Danville Walker and Contractor General Greg Christie, who are both virtually indispensable public servants operating at the highest level in the interest of the public, and so the public must expect the commissioner to demonstrate that he is qualified to be in that company.

Owen S Crosbie

Manchester

oss@cwjamaica.com

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COMMENTS (2)

Elli Deedo
7/26/2010

This is a very interesting article, however as far as the Jamaican people are concerned,based on the fact that Jamaica is a Manufacturing plant for Corruption, there will never be a investigation into the Manatt affair, by any Jamaican Source. There is more to be revealed from the United States Dept of Justice, on this Manatt issue. The Commissioner, has depicted himself as a Robot programmed one way.. He can also be describes as a Socialite..and finally; only the Poor must be detained. Strange!

miguel morales
7/26/2010

This letter writer obviously has a lot time on his hands.

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Free advice to police commissioner