With just over a month left before the end of 2010, human rights lobby groups are warning that this could become a record year for extra-judicial killings.

According to figures from Jamaicans For Justice (JFJ), more than 270 fatal shootings by law enforcement officers were reported across the island up to November 6. Since that date, more have been reported. This does not include any of the more than 73 persons killed during the security forces’ operation in West Kingston in May while they searched for former fugitive Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke.

“At that rate [at which police shootings are occurring], by the end of the year we will be at about 340 people killed by them in one year,” said JFJ Executive Director Dr Carolyn Gomes.

She was speaking at a recent press conference where the group highlighted recommendations made by the United Nations on human rights issues the country needed to address.

JFJ spokesperson Susan Goffe also noted that the record for extra judicial killings was set at 340 in the early 1980s. That period was marked by civic and political unrest and high fatalities of civilians at the hands of special police patrols.

According to the JFJ website, the groups tallied more than 700 deaths resulting from police shootings since 2004. The website also claimed that roughly 20 per cent of all homicides in Jamaica in 2007 were alleged cases of unlawful police killings.

But Dr Gomes says more appalling than the numbers is the wait that relatives of victims killed by the police have to endure before they can get justice.

“It is excruciating for the family and problematic for the delivery of justice,” said Gomes.

“The matters that we’re getting this year out of the Kingston and St Andrew Coroner’s Court began in 2003… often two or three years after the person was killed. It is hazardous and traumatic,” she lamented.

An attorney with knowledge of such extra-judicial killing cases, but who declined to be named, also took issue with the length of time a victim’s family had to wait for answers or even redress.

“It has to go through the investigation, which include all of the ballistics tests, the statement gathering, the post-mortem reports…,” he lamented.

The attorney said that after the investigations are completed, the file is then sent to the Director of Public Prosecutions, who decides whether or not the accused officers are to be charged, or if the matter should be referred to the Coroner’s Court.

“And it is devastating on the family members. Because everytime a decision is made to move it to another level, there is a little bit of excitement that the matter is going to be dealt with, and then there is ultimate disappointment,” the attorney said, adding that the length of time results in witnesses becoming unwilling to testify in court.

Maurice Edwards — whose father, 62-year-old pastor Trevor Edwards was fatally shot by police while travelling in a taxi on Alexander Road on November 17 — is already lamenting the agonising wait.

“I am outraged and angry at the way the police and the Government have been treating the killing as if it does not matter,” he said. “When a police dies they create one big thing in the media, but when an innocent person is killed by the police nothing comes out of it.”

He said that he was yet to receive any information about his father’s killing from the police hierarchy.

Edwards’ plight followed the highly publicised complaints by former government minister Claude Clarke, whose brother Keith Clarke was killed by the security forces during an operation at his Kirkland Heights home in St Andrew in May as they hunted for Coke, the former Tivoli Gardens strongman. Clarke described the killing as “savage”, and lambasted the authorities for dragging their feet in investigating the matter.

In August, the Independent Commission of Investigations (INDECOM), the body given the mandate to investigate police killings of civilians, took over the probe into the Clarke killing after JFJ complained about the pace of police inqueries.

INDECOM said a week ago that it had also added Edwards’ controversial shooting to the list of cases on its growing list.

When contacted, Assistant Police Commissioner Glenmore Hinds said the Jamaica Constabulary Force had implemented several measures to address the JFJ’s concerns about the numbers of civilians being slain by bullets fired from police guns.

“We are doing a number of things. For example, we have re-trained all our police officers,” Hinds told the Sunday Observer in reference to a recent programme to re-certify all police officers in the use of firearms.

— Additional reporting by Kimmo Matthews