IN 2004, if anyone white-skinned or coloured told someone else that in the next four years America would elect a black president, that other person would suggest that he get his head examined.

Two years before the Wall Street meltdown was felt throughout the financial centres of Europe, Asia and just about every place else, if someone had said — and a few did — that in the latter part of 2007, and immediately beyond, Wall Street would have thrown a spanner into the global financial network, most others would have declared it as madness.

The fact is, social, economic, and political changes all gnaw away the old order in bits and pieces until a critical mass occurs and, seemingly overnight, the change is upon us. When it is happenning, the curve is almost invisible on the graph.

It wasn’t too long ago that commissioners of police were little more than the most powerful enforcers of the political party in power. In addition, many of them were simply men who had slogged it out throughout the ranks for umpteen years. Many had open political biases and, when the time came about, they were placed as commissioner more as a street extension of the party in power than the head of a national organisation whose members swore to serve and protect the public. In reality, they would act to ensure that organised wrongdoers belonging to the ‘other side’ were kept under pressure — sometimes under lock and key — and their side would run riot without any pressure from rank-and-file members of the police force.

I do not want to draw any timeline as to when the change began to ‘gnaw at the floorboards’, but I believe those readers who have been keen observers of the Jamaican socio-political landscape know the period I am making reference to and the individuals who, in their time, did little to advance the cause of a commissioner of police.

And, here it is, Jamaica — land of wood, water, ganja, a horde of people acting in concerted indiscipline, with too high a rate of violent criminality, and economic growth only barely peeping at us — now has a commissioner of police with a PhD!

Dr Carl McKay Williams — doctorate in criminal justice — who has been appointed commissioner to replace Owen Ellington — no slouch of a man himself in his academic credentials — comes to the post at a time when few of us even knew that people with a degree beyond a master’s were even inside the police force.

In the last 10 years there has been a relatively large influx of men and women with multiple university degrees inside the JCF. Part of it, I believe, is that the job market outside of the JCF for those with advanced degrees that are not focused on the science and technology fields have dried up. Many Jamaicans with those academic qualifications seek visas to foreign shores, and most never return.

It must be said, however, that although the JCF is not situated on ‘perfection’ island, there does exist the psychic satisfaction of respect, and especially long-term job tenure that is fast disappearing from what used to be accepted in the general job market even up to the late 1990s. Things have changed radically.

I do not know Dr Williams, but one ace reporter for one of the daily newspapers who did not want his name called, said to me two days ago: “Carl Williams is not just a bright man in the sense of a sterile university ‘brainiac’. He knows his job acutely, and in many of the press conferences that I have attended to question him, he is media savvy in the way he delicately moves away from answering questions that intersect with sensitive operational matters. He is a man who knows what he is about and the responsibility placed upon him.”

I asked him, “So why do you not want me to call your name?”

He said: “You would be surprised at how many senior members of the police force are bright, talented, and capable in their jobs. I don’t want to make it appear that I am making out Carl Williams as the only talent in the police force.”

In 2005, after an outbreak of violence had taken place in Denham Town and Tivoli Gardens (against the police force), I sought refuge inside the Denham Town Police Station after a few Tivoli residents had ‘roughed me up’. The conversations I had with many policemen who were battle-ready and didn’t seem to be above the rank of sergeant plainly shocked me. I say this because the men were the intellectual equals of any professor at the UWI Mona campus, plus, they were talking to me about pragmatic solutions to many of our crime problems.

It was far from the ‘lick dung door, box dung smaddy’ method of policing that many of my police friends of the era before saw as the proximate solutions.

So, the change had been on for many years, and knowledge of it eluded us because too many rogue cops were on a personal mission to make their names, as if they were criminal semi-dons. We would see them on camera proudly pumping bullets into people who were unarmed, and the State would eventually endorse their actions by freeing them in the courts of the land.

We have still not been officially informed of the sudden reason for Owen Ellington’s resignation, but I accept, based on the information I have pieced together, that US policy in assisting Jamaica’s crime-fighting objectives may have had an undue influence in his quick exit.

A key question is, did the panel which recommended Dr Williams to the post of top cop seek the endorsement of senior personnel at the US Embassy before he was named? I ask this question not in any way to tarnish Dr Williams, but to suggest to readers that once Owen Ellington had been impelled to move aside by what appeared to me to be outside influence, it was always a given that whoever occupied the post after him would always be under the microscope.

With all of that, I congratulate Dr Williams, and I am assured by many in the second-tier leadership of the JCF that they have his full support. That is most important.

Outside of childbirth, I do not believe in miracles. Indeed, childbirth is no miracle, just another wonder of human physiology. Dr Williams will be expected to work miracles, but he cannot do more than his ability to gain the support of those he will lead, plus effective official policy from the political directorate. He cannot be our national midwife for the next generation.

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