Crawford has a point on state of emergency
DAMION CRAWFORD’S declarations, delivered mostly like breathless recitations and practised alliterations with an intention to shock, make the young People’s National Party (PNP) politician too easy to dismiss – even when he has something sensible to say. Which is what we fear is the case with his intervention in the Senate debate last week on the extended state of public emergency in the St Catherine North Police Division.
Succumbing to his party’s whip, the opposition senator voted for continuing the state of emergency for another three months, but his heart and conscience were not in it, Mr Crawford admitted. That, though, is not the matter on which this newspaper agrees with Damion Crawford, for it is obvious that the enhanced powers afforded the security forces under the state of emergency have shown their efficacy since being enforced, in arresting rampant crime in St Catherine.
We agree with Mr Crawford on two fronts. One is that emergency powers are just that – for emergencies. The erosion of individual rights and freedoms is not sustainable over the long term in a democracy.
Second, there is his observation of about how the state of emergency has been deployed in the parish of St James and whether, when it ends, the advance made against criminals there can be sustained. For, like Mr Crawford, as was noted in previous columns within days of the declaration of the St James state of emergency, we are concerned that its deployment was done in a net-fishing fashion, rather than a deliberate and targeted approach.
Indeed, data offered by Mr Crawford, and unchallenged by government senators, highlight the misgivings about the management of the state of emergency, which, judiciously controlled, could weaken support for what, up to now, is a popular and effective operation. The emergency’s efficacy, thus far, can be measured by the fact that criminals who had created a state of near anarchy in St James have gone underground. From nearly three dozen murders in the parish in the first two months of this year, there have been approximately three murders in St James since the state of emergency orders were announced. People obviously feel safer in their communities.
But, according to Mr Crawford, at the time of his Senate intervention, 1,200 persons had been detained by the security forces with enhanced powers to search and arrest, but only 61 had been charged for offences. Put another way, only five per cent of the detainees had been charged. Or, more dramatically, the police felt they had no cause to charge 95 per cent of the people they picked up.
POOR PLANNING
We do not agree, or Mr Crawford provided no evidence to support his assertion, that these numbers pointed to a deliberate harassment of an underclass, or of poor, black youth, by the security forces. But we believe that these numbers suggest poor planning and execution of the state of emergency by the security forces, including a failure to obtain credible intelligence.
Given the experience of the 2010 security operations in west Kingston and the ability of crime boss Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke and many of his private militiamen to escape the cordon of Tivoli Gardens by police and soldiers, we would have expected that the operation in St James would have been done properly with this in mind.
At its launch, the security forces would be expected to have credible information of where most of the people they want would be found and go for them. They would then be appropriately charged. The process should have been clean and efficient.
After all, the decision to declare a state of public emergency in St James can’t have been spontaneous. The Government was being urged to such action for months.
Similarly in St Catherine, in the first 24 hours of the state of emergency, a quarter of the people detained were released, while the police sought to determine what should happen to the rest. If the key crime producers are not in custody and face no charges, they may soon be back to their old ways once the emergency powers have been relaxed.