MINISTER of National Security and Peace Dr Horace Chang has made it clear the police will not be wearing body cameras on operations where they are confronting armed criminals, dismissing the call for them to do so as “a crazy idea”.

Dr Chang, who has been at loggerheads with civil society groups — in particular Jamaicans For Justice — which have repeatedly called for cameras to be worn on planned operations in light of a sharp increase in fatal police shootings, said to do so would put the police at risk.

On Wednesday he removed any ambiguity about where he stands on the matter when he addressed the weekly post-Cabinet media briefing at Jamaica House.

“This thing that you must wear a camera when you going to look for a man who has a M16 that’s firing 60 rounds per second is a crazy idea,” declared Chang, who is also the deputy prime minister.

“When gunshot start blaze across your head or over your head, you’re going to dive, you’re going to find cover even if you’re a policeman, and look a place where you can find a space to in fact return fire,” he remarked.

He went further, declaring that for a planned operation at 3:00 am in search of a gunman, the police will not wear cameras.

Noting that such wanted men tend to move around rapidly, Chang said “the hunted moves much faster than the hunter”.

“You can’t send an officer in there with a marked car with lights blaring; they’re gone. So you send a special squad in there, they’re at risk; they will be killed if they’re not careful and they can’t go with cameras. Cameras make them a target,” the security minister outlined.

He reiterated that the police are trained to use cameras, and that cameras are available for members of the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF) with 1,000 more on order. However, he insisted that it is Commissioner of Police Dr Kevin Blake who determines how they are deployed.

During his contribution to the sectoral debate in Parliament on Tuesday, Chang told civil society groups that they can’t instruct the police on how to deploy the cameras.

Pointing out that all police operations are planned, including the national coordinated road check system which serves to disrupt gangs and detect firearms, the security minister told Wednesday’s media briefing that at least one of those officers conducting road checks will sometimes wear a camera.

He reiterated that the decision to assign body cameras is the sole prerogative of the police commissioner as only he decides “who wears a camera, where and when. It is part of police equipment like anything else, so we buy the cameras and the police issue them”.

According to Chang, no research has shown that cameras are a valuable tool in special operations. He pointed out that in the United States where SWAT teams were made to use cameras, it was in a context where racial profiling by officers was prevalent in places such as the Los Angeles Police Department. The cameras allowed for a full recording of the interactions between drivers and the police, a situation Chang said would be equivalent to members of the JCF’s Public Safety and Traffic Enforcement Branch interfacing with the public.

Locally, he said cameras are mostly worn by personnel involved in road checks and those monitoring entertainment events. He noted that the road checks are particularly important, highlighting that since the introduction of cameras, confrontations involving the police and taxi operators have become less frequent.

“When last have you seen a video — because they used to go viral — of a policeman and a taximan fighting, or a policeman has to beat up a taximan? They don’t, because when the taximan or any driver sees a policeman with a camera and he stops a car, they behave themselves,” said Chang.

“You don’t get the string of colourful words anymore,” he added.

The security minister argued that there is a legacy issue in Jamaica, a holdover from colonial times “where elements of the public assume that those of us who are elected are corrupt. It assumes that those who have authority are corrupt, so the idea that the police is a corrupt body out there to extort people is a wrong legacy. It’s incorrect and I cannot support anything that seeks to reinforce that and that’s what the call for cameras to be used all the time does”.

Chang assured that “we’re not objecting to criticism, but it’s time we trust our own people; it’s time we respect our own professionals”.

He also acknowledged that at 14,000 strong, the JCF will not be perfect and indeed has elements who will commit crimes. “But it is a small number,” he insisted.

Statistics from the Independent Commission of Investigations (Indecom) support this, showing that in recent years only 3.4 per cent of police officers charged are convicted.

As he did the day before in the sectoral debate, Chang said civil society organisations should allow oversight bodies like Indecom to complete their investigations and report before they make comments or pass judgement.