POLICE Commissioner Lucius Thomas who has been in the Jamaica Constabulary for 36 years, mostly in intelligence at Special Branch, often had one-on-one meetings with his predecessor, and so understood what the top job was all about.

"But the reality of being here now has made me recognise that the motivation of our members was pretty low. So I have set out on a journey, which is a little bit taxing," said Thomas.
In his own words, these are the staff and resource issues that engage him daily as manager of the force.

"I get here in the mornings around 7 o'clock, 7.30. It's a bit of a free-for-all, so to speak. I allow members of the JCF to come in and I see them one-on-one, until about 9 o'clock. They don't make appointments and they come in from all over the island.

One of the key issues discussed is welfare. For instance, where an officer may be stationed at Elletson Road (East Kingston) and lives in say Manchester, he incurs high transportation costs, and payment for rent. I have to look at his welfare and adjust that by assigning him closer to his home. I take pleasure in that.

I have also been travelling across the island visiting police stations to see the conditions under which police personnel work and live and operate. We are getting there.

Resources is a critical area for us. We pick up over 600 guns off the streets on a daily basis; 90 per cent of them are not analysed, so we have difficulty tracing them to determine whether it is so many guns being used in crime or the same guns being recycled. Also, we want the Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS), for fingerprint identification.

We picked up 74 persons in Tivoli Gardens on Tuesday and we held them for several hours. With the quick processing the AFIS system offers, we could run the fingerprints in a minute or two and determine, 'We don't want this man', and release him. Our communication system seems to be again running down, but I understand that government has a move afoot to adjust that."

Commissioner Thomas is working on another important crusade.
"Some communities have been isolated. We talk about community-based policing but we have not really gotten to the point where we have gone out there and connected with the communities.

And, we are not going to succeed as a police force if the intelligence is not coming from those persons who we must police.

So, my drive is to get out there, in different forums, whether in the street in the school yard, church, service club or whatever, and let Jamaica know what really it is that I would want to see us achieve as partners working together."

The fear factor

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