MANDEVILLE, Manchester – Many Jamaicans believe dishonest police personnel undermine the anti-crime fight by providing criminals with sensitive, confidential information. But Assistant Commissioner of Police Les Green has said that in many cases the leakage of such information -often linked to the witnessing of crimes – results from the lack of privacy at police stations.

“We know witnesses are reluctant to come forward. We know there is despair and misconceptions that police give out information to criminals (but) the trouble is that we lack privacy in police stations,” Green told a Chamber of Commerce forum at the Golf View Hotel in Mandeville recently.

“When you walk into a guardroom, there could be a prisoner sitting there, other members of the public are hanging around, so privacy is a real, real problem.,” he said.

The major difficulty, said Green, was that most police stations were built decades ago before the horrific increase in violent crime that now plagues modern Jamaica.

Those stations, he said, were “not built, or structured to provide a modern convenient area to interview members of the public, so often information is overheard by people and gets back out into the public domain where it shouldn’t be”.

The obvious long-term answer is for police accommodations to be improved with the modern requirements of crime fighting in mind. In the meantime, said Green, police were being asked to do their best – even with the physical limitations – to ensure confidentiality.

“We (police hierarchy) have to work hard to ensure our officers understand the need to interview people in privacy to obtain information, and to retain privacy and confidentiality,” he said.

For Green, a Briton, who has been assisting the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF) for the past five years, resource constraints such as poor accommodation explain to a considerable extent the inadequacies in the effort to fight criminals.

Jamaica, with a population of approximately 2.6 million, has had an annual murder rate in recent years of above 1,500 – one of the highest per capita in the world.

Green said any analysis of the JCF’s performance has to embrace the impact of a lack of resources, both material and human.

“The JCF with all its constraints and problems does deliver a reasonable standard of policing. What that standard is, is maybe not the standard we would like for Jamaica because a lot of Jamaicans travel internationally and see different policing. But you just look at the resources that the JCF has and look at the realities (resources). It’s just not a reasonable situation to be in, look at the vehicle fleet, look at police accommodation, and look at the international situation and we (Jamaican police) just do not feature anywhere near. that is a fundamental restriction to what we try to do.

“If you work in poor conditions that’s going to demotivate you and also won’t give you the ability to prove that you can do better (because) of the (poor) infrastructure that we have,” he said.

Green, a strong advocate of the year-old JCF Strategic Review which seeks to transform, modernise and rebrand the police force, also graphically illustrated the difficulties caused by a shortage of personnel in the police force. “In the UK if you have a murder, you have 30-40 detectives investigating one murder. They may investigate three or four murders that year. Unfortunately, we (in Jamaica) have 800 detectives across the island with 1,600-odd murders per year.,” he said.

The JCF currently has a complement of 8,500. The aim is to get numbers up to 12,000 over the next few years. Currently, the JCF is supported by auxiliary forces – 1,700 members of the Island Special Constabulary Force and about 1,500-1,600 district constables.

Green appeared to suggest that complex, sprawling urban shanty towns and the difficult terrain in some deep rural areas contrasted to more ‘normal communities’ as well as the varying requirements of policing at night as against day, in effect, made Jamaica “two different societies” for policing purposes.

“Jamaica has been two different societies for a very long time, night and day, different policing in different localities. There are some areas that have a very poor level of police service because those areas are extremely challenging for the police to provide a decent level of service to citizens.

“Governance and the ability to deliver to different parts of Jamaica are different across Jamaica, so policing has to be different as well.,” he said.

In some cases, he noted, police could only respond “a number of hours” after incidents had occurred in sections of the country because of the difficulty of the “environment” coupled with inadequate resources.

The assistant commissioner also expressed extreme frustration at what he felt was an absence of political will that had resulted in delays in legislation governing DNA, fingerprinting and the video recording of witnesses’ statements, which he believes would go a far way in assisting police investigations and the successful prosecution of criminals.

But for Green, it’s not all doom and gloom. Heavy investment in forensic training meant that soon there would be 170 trained and “internationally accredited” forensic officers across the island and the aim was to have 300 such officers across Jamaica over the “next few years. Investment in “a lot of new equipment” had added not only to the capacity to process forensic evidence but to its preservation.

“This year we will be providing new mini laboratories around the island to provide greater and deliver better forensic capability,” he said.

“Now we can find fingerprints where we couldn’t find them before, on cars, immersed in water, on bullet casings, shell casings where we couldn’t find them before. these are major steps forward,” he said.

A “totally new detective training programme” had vastly improved the “investigative approach” and come next year there were plans for “a more in-depth homicide programme supported by the US embassy” which will involve American investigators coming to train and work alongside Jamaicans.

A modern ballistic system had improved the ability to link different crime scenes. The unfortunate reality, said Green, was that “we have very few firearms which were used more than once for criminal shootings. That means an enormous number of firearms out there in the country”.

Also, some crimes were being carried out using licensed firearms and with weapons belonging to the security forces. The improved ballistic testing has allowed the Constabulary to put in the appropriate counter measures, the assistant commissioner said.

CCTV recording systems such as have been set up in the town centres of May Pen and Mandeville were having an impact, as were video identification and artist impressions’ systems.

Green said he was also heartened by the development of “more of a shared vision” among key stakeholders in the fight against crime.

“In 2004 when I first came here, there was a lot of negativity about the criminal justice system. There didn’t seem to be a vision and a way out, but I think in the last few years, there has been some real coming together of hope. Prosecutors, judges and the public and the police force have more of a shared vision of what we need to achieve,” he claimed.

Only recently, said Green, has there been “for the first time” joint training involving the Bar Association as well as the prosecutions office, clerks, magistrates’ courts, judges, “all in one location receiving similar training and influence on how to improve the criminal justice system”.

That type of co-operation, he claimed, “is going to help us to build, and over the next few years we will see some slow but steady progress to deliver a better criminal justice system”.