Be prudent with detention power

AS IF they didn’t know already, Arlene Harrison Henry, the public defender, has, though indirectly, reminded Jamaica’s legislators why they should be wary when the police come calling for more powers to detain people as the constabulary has done with regard to the anti-gang law.

It’s conventional wisdom that criminal gangs are the scourge of Jamaica. The police estimate that there are hundreds of them engaged in everything from petty theft to organised shakedowns and murder.

So when an anti-gang law was passed in 2014, with strong lobbying by the police, it was universally welcomed. But four years on, there have been only two convictions under the legislation, although the police say that there have been more than 400 gang-related arrests and that many of those cases remain before the courts.

The fact is, gangs remain a major problem, responsible, according to the police, for 61 per cent of Jamaica’s more than 1,600 homicides in 2017 and the wave of murders at the start of this year, which caused Government to declare a state of public emergency in St James in February and in two other regions since then.

The anti-gang law is under review by a joint parliamentary committee, and among other things the police want inserted in it is their right to hold suspects for up to two weeks without having to charge them or bring them before the courts for bail hearings.

“I don’t want us to leave these chambers with the belief that we are saying that police are asking for a willy-nilly approach, where we just pick up someone we suspect,” Deputy Commissioner of Police Selvin Hay told the committee. “We are talking about the instances in which we have reasonable cause (to believe) that these people are creating mayhem.”

That, of course, may seem a reasonable argument in a society with Jamaica’s epidemic of violent crime, and in the face of an overall 20 per cent – and by more than two-thirds in St James – decline in murders this year, for which the states of public emergency have been credited. Under the emergency regulations, the police have wide powers of search and arrest, including, depending on the rank of the officer involved detaining persons for up to 30 days before having to bring them before a court.

But based on an analysis of data on the St James emergency, which Mrs Harrison Henry presented to Parliament’s Internal and External Affairs Committee on Wednesday, we do not find compelling DCP Hay’s assurance about the capacity of Jamaica’s law-enforcement establishment to manage the powers requested with the restraint and discipline it would require.

DETAINEES

Up to October 9, she reported, 3,687 persons had been detained, of whom 139, or 3.8 per cent, were charged for offences. But when you subtract persons who were held for outstanding warrants for minor matters (40), for the use of indecent language (10), and selling in non-vending areas (3), then only 2.3 per cent of the detained persons were charged with criminal offences. She also complained about sloppy record-keeping by the authorities, including 1,057 cases, or 29 per cent of the detentions, in which the dates on which a detainee was either taken into custody or released were not recorded. Such failures are openings for abuse.

The norm should be for the police to build their cases before effecting arrests. Only in exceptional circumstances, and on the basis of credible arguments before a judge, should extended detention be countenanced. On this matter, Attorney General Marlene Malahoo Forte and Opposition Senator K. D. Knight stand on good ground. Fundamentally, the matter is about an efficient and trustworthy police force.