Jamaica is taking advice from a former Scotland Yard detective to help reduce the number of its citizens killed by police each year.
Fatal shootings committed by Jamaican law enforcement officers saw the deaths of 13 people in the first 13 days of 2014.
The government of Jamaica set up the Independent Commission of Investigations (INDECOM) in 2010 in response to claims about violence meted out by the county’s police forces. New assistant commissioner of INDECOM Hamish Campbell, former head of homicide at London’s Scotland Yard, has moved to the island to try to help reduce the death rate.
“There is a widespread belief that the police are killing people who can’t otherwise get to the courts,” Campbell told Britain’s Daily Mail.
“The courts have huge backlogs. Trials are years and years behind. Some cases are dismissed by the courts because the police evidence is simply not up to scratch.”
He added that it was “completely unacceptable and inappropriate” for the police to undertake extra-judicial killings in an attempt to cleanse the streets of criminals.
Police claim that they are reacting to powerful gangs that have taken over neglected inner-city areas. Gangs and guns are rife on the island, which has one of the highest murder rates in the world.
“Around 1,100 people were murdered in Jamaica [population three million] last year,” said Campbell. “I can put that into context by saying that across the whole of London [population 8.3 million] there were 100 murders in the year before I left.”
Witnesses to police shootings say that many of the victims were killed in unprovoked attacks.
When 19-year-old Tevin Davis was gunned down in Kingston on 6 February, witnesses were urged to come forward. Steve McGregor, head of the Kingston Western Police Division, said that Davis was killed during an alleged confrontation with the police. However, several observers have claimed that Davis was shot while relieving himself near a gully in the area.
In January two informers told a Jamaican newspaper that senior officers arranged shootings at pre-operation briefings and assigned illegal guns to place on the bodies.
The high number of police shootings are in stark contrast to that of the UK, where the 2011 shooting of Mark Duggan by Metropolitan police sparked nationwide riots and an inquest.
