Letter of the Day | Need for transparent and accountable policing

THE EDITOR, Madam:

Murders dropped dramatically in 2025, a reality extremely welcome deserving celebration. With no one able, however, to put a finger on any single reason, might several components then account for the decline? If so, what are they?

Number one component is much better policing. This includes more highly educated police, more police on the ground, organizational improvement, quicker communication and much other technology. These are facts.

They are demonstrated by the specialised departments that now comprise much policing. The latest addition is the forensic unit. Alongside the JCF there is also MOCA – Major Crime and Anti-Corruption Agency; inside there is CTOC – Counter Terrorism and Organised Crime Investigation.

With the impactful reduction of court backlogs under chief justice, police are now more likely to see convictions in the cases they submit.

This policing reality is further demonstrated by component number two: its removal of a major murder agent from the scene: large gangs. Two such dominated Spanish Town and its environs for years. One of them, the Tesha Miller Klansman gang with its 23 members, is even now before the courts.

These realities have not gone unappreciated by the general public. A third component accounting for murder decline is the result: the community trust people are regaining. They are contributing key information.

This a critical gain. But with police fatalities reaching 311, up from 90 in 2015, the question remains: did this account for the murder decline? Were they in any case justified?

While murder appeared too deeply embedded to depart seemingly almost overnight, its departure in fact has been gradual: from 1,516 in 2022, 1,406 in 2023, 1,147 in 2024, to 673 in 2025. Violence is also still very much around.

It is the gradual decreases of these three components that have yielded the cumulative result. It is not one year’s surge in police fatalities, however well publicized and exaggerated by occurring often on planned operations and, Commissioner approving, without employment of body-worn cameras.

The hesitation provoked by the 311 fatalities is because it is clearly wrong – and not just to Human Rights advocates – to shoot dead the suspects who hands in the air and credible witnesses declare to be innocent. And why the refusal, by the use of body-worn cameras, to verify? This is manifestly inexcusable.

The delay in rolling them out cameras to those on planned operations (Peter Espeut has identified the conflicting announcements in his article published in The Gleaner on January 23) are the source of the puzzlement and confusion of many people. The police fatalities represent a clear case of overkill. Suspicions of a death squad are widespread, tarnishing reputation.

This non-use of cameras deprives the Independent Commission of Investigation (INDECOM) of the data it deserves to verify police assertions of what actually happened. It raises questions about the JCF’s adherence to its own Use of Force policy. Former Police Commissioner Hardley Lewin made this point sharply in an article last year.

“As we celebrate [the murder decline], we must be mindful that we may be merely driving criminality deeper underground and into greater sophistication. Any policing strategy that employs a tactic of elimination will force the criminal elements to lie dormant for a period, and then….,” he wrote in the Observer newspaper.

Security forces successes alone will not reduce criminal activities to acceptable and sustainable levels. The only sure way is to remove the conditions which stimulated criminality in the first place… raising the standard of living, improving health and education facilities, engendering faith in democratically elected government ... The cause, not just the effect, of the problem must be removed. This requires leadership ...”

Commissioner Blake needs to act strongly to ensure that every member of his specialised operations team is equipped with and actually employs the body-worn cameras that are now available. He needs to put a full stop to the propensity of two or three hundred to kill. To weakly do otherwise would be to do a grave injustice to the other seven thousand policemen and policewomen also in the field. Transparency and accountability, adherence to the law by the upholders of the law, are what democracy demands.

HORACE LEVY