Legalise undercover cops, starve gangsters – ACP Hinds
ASSISTANT Commissioner of Police Glenmore Hinds has asked the government to enact legislation allowing cops to infiltrate and gather evidence against organised criminal gangs.
Hinds made the call during a roundtable discussion entitled ‘Guns, Gangs and Governance’ hosted by the United States Agency for International Development/Community Empowerment and Transformation Project (USAID/COMET) at the Hilton Hotel on Tuesday.
“If a policeman goes to court and stands up and says ‘I was working undercover’, they will say ‘no. he provoked the crime’,” Hinds said of the current situation.
“We need to go to a stage where policemen can legally infiltrate gangs and go to court and tell the judge that such and such is part of a gang,” he added.
Hinds is calling for a situation similar to what exists in the United States and Britain.
“In America police infiltrate gangs and in England… they have laws to facilitate [such], whereas in Jamaica you are told that you are provoking the offence and you might very well be charged,” he said, noting that he would like to see legislation making even membership of a gang a criminal offence.
Yesterday the ACP also called for legislation to take the profit out of organised crime including a stop on the awarding of government contracts to known gang leaders and their cronies.
“We must consciously seek to starve criminal gangs of funding, and one way of doing this is to ensure that they do not benefit from government contracts,” he said.
“It is to my knowledge that some of these gangs benefit from government contracts and I stand here waiting to be corrected by persons. We can’t be serious if we are helping to enrich these gangs,” he added.
To assist in preventing such an occurrence, Hinds said the police were more than willing to perform ‘clean bill of health’ checks on any prospective contract awardee at the request of a government agency.
He also urged private sector entities to make full use of this service, noting that currently several private sector entities could unwittingly be sponsoring events staged by dons.
