ASSOCIATE professor in the Faculty of Liberal Studies at the University of Technology Jamaica, Balford Lewis is questioning the reasons for the still-antagonistic relationship between members of the police force and citizenry, despite data showing that six out of 10 Jamaicans are willing to work with the police.

“What we found, though, is although we have that strong support and people’s strong commitment to work with the police, we find that we still have a situation where communities are not participating in any activities to any great extent away from the police youth clubs — and we have seen a situation recently where the police were trying to make an arrest and women were creating a barrier,” Lewis pointed out.

According to the associate professor, who was one of several panelists commenting on the 2021 report of the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) Lab which was released last Wednesday at The University of the West Indies, Mona in St Andrew, “The question is, why can’t we improve police-citizen relationship despite the fact that the security force has as one of their major components of the fight against crime, community policing?

“I am going back to the point that was made recently that it is all about the trust factor — the people are not trusting of the police. And we have two different types of trust – interpersonal trust where people in the community trust each other and therefore trust the police, but we also have institutional trust at the level of the national police where we see people are not trusting the police,” Lewis pointed out.

“Over the years we see the police in the same category as politicians in terms of the level of trust. Only 30 per cent of Jamaicans have trusted the police since 2006, the highest was 2012 when it was 41 per cent,” he noted further.

The LAPOP study, which focused on 20 countries in the region, said eight out of 10 Jamaicans believe that the pathway to any sustained crime control and to citizen security is going to be a better-quality relationship between the police and citizens. It, however, found that “only about one in three Jamaicans trust the national police”, with “trust being higher” towards police on the ground in neighbourhoods. LAPOP also said those “most willing to engage with the police are older, male, less educated, and from Surrey” [the parishes of Kingston, St Andrew, Portland and St Thomas].

“They also tend to be less fearful of gangs, more trusting of police and their neighbours, and more likley to believe that cooperation between citizens and police helps to stop crime,” the researchers said.

“The whole situation therefore is that what we need to be focusing on, if we want better working relationships with the police, is to find ways of improving trust,” Lewis suggested.

He, in the meantime, said increasing contact between the police and the citizenry was not the solution.

“It is not necessarily through more contact because one of the things we have seen is that the Jamaica Defence Force have enjoyed higher levels of trust over the years and there are now concerns that the fact that they are on the streets so often, getting involved in hard policing, getting involved in these paramilitary police approach, over time this trust level is going to fall also,” Lewis stated.

“The commissioner [of police] made the point that people interacting with the police more may improve that level of trust, but that is kind of contradictory if we take a look at the relationships with the army and the police right now,” Lewis added.

Noting that there is voluntary and involuntary interaction, Lewis said, “if maybe we can improve that involuntary interaction where people go into communities and work beyond the police youth club approach”, there could be a change.

“We have seen for example where the Grant’s Pen [St Andrew] experiment worked for a little while, but the problem is sustainability. We have seen where the August Town [St Andrew] experience or experiment worked for about a year and when people started to celebrate by the following January, they were back to the crime problem. The challenge that we have is how do we improve community police relations on a long-term basis to make sure that we can use that approach in the fight against crime,” he added.

He, however, questioned whether recent indications by Prime Minister Andrew Holness intimating that the Government was now moving away from depending to any great extent on eyewitness reports to the use of scientific methods is an admission that the “community policing approach has failed”.

“There is no question that we need to move in that direction [using the science], but to say that we are moving away from this overreliance upon eyewitness report is an indication that we have given up on this community policing type of approach that we have been pushing and we recognise — based upon citizens reports — that we need to go forward in terms of reducing crime in Jamaica,” Lewis said on Wednesday.