EXECUTIVE chairman of the Police Public Complaints Authority (PPCA) Justice Lloyd Ellis said yesterday that his agency was woefully under-financed and could not adequately address the more than 450 grievances that pour in from the public on a yearly basis.

The former Supreme Court judge told the Sunday Observer that insufficient resources severely inhibited the performance of the PPCA which was set up in 1993 to investigate complaints of police abuses.

“We have not been fully financed and that restricts our performance in dealing with the complaints of the public,” said Ellis, who has been at the head of the agency since 2002.

“We send up a budget to the Ministry of Finance every year, but the figure we receive is never enough to carry out the work we are required to do. Sometimes they cut it (the figure) down and this limits our ability to function properly,” he added.

“We get complaints very often. In a calendar year we get up to 450 cases from all over the island. People can report matters to the Montego Bay branch or the Kingston branch,” he said.

However, despite the limitations, Ellis said he and his team of investigators were committed to the task and were pleased with the sucesses they had achieved in the past.

“We could have done much more but we are doing well in addressing complaints from the public,” he said. “There are several of our cases which have been referred to the DPP for prosecution, including the Braeton case, the Crawle case and the case of Nicola Webb who was shot and paralysed by police officers.”

“We continue to investigate, the DPP has acted on some of our submissions and persons have been compensated.”

At the same time, Ellis said he was concerned that enough Jamaicans were not aware of the PPCA and the work that it does.

“We have not been able to advertise to make our presence more known and because we are an independent authority, we lack the proper resources to do so,” he said.