Sport
May our force not be with them
Published 09 April 2007
Anger over white police officers imported to serve in Trinidad and Tobago
Here's how a Trinidadian calypso, circa 1962, celebrated the end of British rule in the Caribbean islands. ". . . colonialism gone/our nation is born;/We go follow our leaders/who always do their best/In order to achieve/we got to aspire/and we bound to be a success". At the same time, the commissioner of police and the chief superintendent packed their bags and bid the islanders farewell. Locals replaced them.
That was 45 years ago, in the same month - August - that Jamaica, too, raised its flag and sent the British colonials on their way.
Readers of this column might recall a piece from a year ago which reported that, in Trinidad and Tobago, 39 white police officers were imported from the UK to join the Trinidad force.
They were recruited through an agency which represents retired police officers from senior ranks, and were all sent to the Port of Spain Special Anti-Crime Unit of Trinidad and Tobago (SAUTT) in order to improve the detection rate. Their success has been limited and senior police officers in Trinidad are livid.
They see the appointment of these white officers as an insult, particularly since the police from England receive wages way beyond the locals, and are housed in salubrious surroundings. The road to the top of the profession is blocked - even to those locals who have university degrees backed up by extra training at Hendon here in England - as long as these white officers remain on the island.
One local policeman told me that he baulks at the thought of being subordinate to white men so many years after independence, particularly since their success rate, while in Trinidad, has not been great. Take the case of Vindra Naipaul-Coolman, a local businesswoman kidnapped, raped and mur dered late last year. At the time of going to press, the white expatriate officers seemed unable to effect an arrest although three men confessed to the crime to their lawyer this month. Failure all round.
The death of Bob Woolmer, the Pakistan cricket team coach, seems to add more evidence of incompetence and proves Trinidad isn't an isolated case. Woolmer's death in a Kingston hotel has become an international incident. At the top seat during the police press conference sat Mark Shields, former head of City of London police's special branch, on long-term secondment from Scotland Yard. And white. This, remember, is Jamaica in 2007. Next to him sat Jamaica's commissioner of police, shoulders hunched and face taut with the agony of public humiliation.
Shields hogged the limelight with a dramatic statement that Woolmer was murdered. His allegation might not have matched the first medical reports that suggested he could have suffered a seizure, possibly brought on by food poisoning or a fit, but then Shields was reported as saying last year: "I've got this sixth sense when something is going on. So my arrest rate has been extremely high throughout my career." He may well back this up with an observation that the less fortunate black Jamaican police officers under him have only five.
The discovery of Woolmer's naked, bloodied and apparently strangled body might have stimulated Shield's sixth sense, but the days following his claims of foul play seem to reveal some major doubts. After two weeks, there were still no suspects and mounting speculation that the coach had died from a tragic accident. In Trinidad and Tobago, the presence of these white officers can no longer be sustained when there is little change in detection rates and what success there is cannot necessarily be attributed to them.
The situation may yet turn nasty. Only a few years ago, Scotland Yard sent officers to Trinidad and Tobago to root out corruption in the local police force. Two white officers visited a senior policeman in pursuit of their investigations. He drew his pistol and threatened to blow their "fucking heads off". He later told me that he had read my book: From Bobby to Babylon: blacks and the British police.
These foreign policemen are not just advisers. They are non-nationals half-lodged between national police officers and special reserve police. They lack what local officers have: a cultural sense of who is who and who does what to whom and why. And an Essex police officer like Shields cannot transcend these cultural barriers in just a couple of years.
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