Have We Got The Cops We Deserve?

Once upon a time in the UK of my youth there was Dixon of Dock Green. The TV series conceivably contributed much to the notion of the British bobby as a gentleman crime fighter, armed only with an inconspicuous baton while maintaining law and order with human understanding and commonsense. Even to this day when egregious violence in the streets of London is commonplace Britain’s police maintain throughout the world a reputation synonymous with the role played by leading man Jack Warner in the BBC series that ran from 1955 to 1976; in all, 432 episodes. In 1961 Dixon of Dock Green was voted the second most popular program on British television. 

In the telling of one historian, Constable Dixon was the embodiment of “a typical bobby who would be familiar with the residents of the area he patrolled and often lived in himself.” The quoted observation reminded me
as I read it of several WhatsApp exchanges during the headier days of IMPACS, with a young man who may or may not still be alive. We never actually met. Our conversations usually started with his reaction to something I’d said or written about how our police dealt with particular crime suspects, all of whom seemed to live at the same address: the more notorious Castries ghettoes.

I remember well his comment after I’d said on television that the police were the only protectors of our communities and deserved the benefit of the doubt whenever there were cries about police brutality. Additionally, that anyone who pulled a gun on the police was asking for it and ought not to be denied his or her death wish. Reading this now I am reminded of the several other occasions I’d been a tad too knee-jerk with my public remarks. But then my WhatsApp friend had underscored with the best of motives my prejudiced disposition at the particular time revisited.

“You don’t get it, Rick,” he wrote with touching restraint. “The communities you claimed were protected by the police did not include Wilton’s Yard, Grass Street, The Slums, Bois Patat and so on. When the cops show up in my community it’s usually to harass certain individuals, or to instigate fights that end with the death of a marked man.”

He assured me he knew what he was talking about, that in effect he lived in the belly of the beast. When I asked whether he agreed that it was suicidal to pull a gun on cops armed to the teeth with automatic weapons, he replied: “That’s just how it looks from a distance. That’s how it sounds when the police are the tellers of the story.”

He stumped me when he asked: “How many of the ghetto brethren ever appear in court to tell their side of what went down? Dead men tell no tales.” I referenced one of the victims associated with IMPACS. “The guy was still quite young,” I reminded him. “Was the life he chose worth it in the end? Did he make any money from drugs?”

“We are not given a choice,” he said. “You don’t have to pick up a gun or be a drug pusher to find yourself in trouble with the cops. Check this: we are the police and the police are us. Just like us they grew up in the ghetto—and many of them still live in the ghetto. They do what the rest of us do to get by. Only they are better organized and equipped, and they have that uniform that makes whatever they do legal.”

I returned to the IMPACS-related casualty. “Did he have any money, any
property?” I asked. “Did he leave a will?” He reminded me that words don’t always mean what the dictionary says they mean. “It all depends on where you are. You ask if the guy had a will? It wouldn’t matter, anyway. He had boats, jewelry, cash, drugs, weapons, land . . . A couple days after the police killed him the bossman took his boats. Everything else was shared among certain people. Even the police.”

Lost for words, the best I could do was: “You’re kidding me.” “No I’m not!” He cited some lines from Kenny Anthony’s televised address of March 8, 2015. “It’s true,” he assured me. “You have the regular gangs and then you have the uniformed gangs. That whole IMPACS thing, I tell you that ain’t going nowhere. The politicians won’t touch it. I know what I’m talking about.”

In an earlier exchange he had revealed some personal details: he was better educated than most of his neighbors. He attended the Castries Comprehensive School. Like most other kids at 15-16 he had dreams, he and his younger sister who attended St. Joseph’s Convent. They lived with their mother, at Marchand. Soon after they were born their fathers had deserted their mother. She worked as a vendor at the Castries market but took every other job opportunity that came her way. She, too, entertained ambitions for her children. Then one day, as the siblings were heading home together after school, “something happened that changed everything.”

“What was that?” I asked. He wrote back without answering my question. “There was nothing I could do. I had no choice but to stand there . . . helpless. Soon after that I got myself a gun. I promised myself I would never again be in a situation where I was unable to defend myself or my family.”

It took several more exchanges before he told me I had once written about a street fracas in which he was involved. Despite my pleas for further details he just chuckled. He insisted on being anonymous. He revealed he had joined a gang soon after leaving school, survived gang wars sometimes involving the police. He felt especially lucky to be alive. At different times he had been shot in the legs. Now he got around in a wheelchair.

“Keep in mind the cops think and act like we do, Rick,” he said, not for the first time. “Don’t believe everything they tell you. I’m not saying they’re all bad. But if you are not with them, then you’re against them—whether or not you are a fellow cop. It’s the law of the ghetto.”

Several years ago, when I was editor of the Voice, a police officer came to see me after working hours about something I’d written concerning “our faction-riddled police force.” I listened in disbelief to his stories of theft from the police canteen, deals with well known   characters of the local drug community, with suspects and their lawyers, threats of transfers from Castries to the Siberia of out-district stations and so on. 

He saved the best for last: “Everyone wants to work on the Defender,” he said. “That’s where they make real money.” I said I didn’t get his point. “It’s quite simple,” he explained. “The Defender intercepts drug deliveries at sea. By tapping into phone conversations they learn about drug deliveries from
Martinique or St. Vincent, often by boat but sometimes by small aircraft that drop off their load at designated locations. Usually there are no arrests
and no complaints. Sometimes only a small quantity of the retrieved contraband is handed over as exhibits, no questions asked.”

“So since you know all of that,” I said, “why haven’t you reported to the commissioner or some other officer?” The look in his eyes said it all. “In the first place you have no idea the person you reported to is not himself dirty.”

He lowered his head, as if in deep thought. “The first thing a plant
has to do once he sets foot on the Defender is prove he is not a plant. He has to commit himself. On the slightest suspicion that he’s not what he says he is, that’s it. It’s all over for him. Or for members of his family. When you’re miles from shore in the dark, it’s not all that difficult to lose your footing and fall overboard. Accidents do happen, right?”

I actually published the Defender article in the Voice—but very, very carefully. When I related the story to my WhatsApp friend, he said: “See? That’s what I mean when I say what separates the gangs is a police uniform. That’s why IMPACS is dead!”

The following, taken from Norman Mailer’s Some Honorable Men, is instructive: “There have been few studies on the psychological differences between police and criminals, and the reason is not difficult to discover. The studies based on the usual psychological tests fail to detect a significant difference. Perhaps they are not sufficiently sensitive . . . The criminal attempts to reduce the tension within himself by expressing in the direct language of action whatever is most violent and outraged in his depths; to the extent he is not a powerful man, his violence is merely antisocial, like self-exposure, embezzlement, or passing bad checks. 

“The cop tries to solve his violence by blanketing it with a uniform. That is virtually a commonplace. But it explains why cops will put up with poor salary, public dislike, uncomfortable working conditions and a general sense of bad conscience. They know they are lucky; they know they
are getting away with a successful solution to the criminality they can taste in their blood. This taste is practically in the forefront of a cop’s brain; he is in a sink of perspiration whenever he goes into action; he can tolerate little in the way of insult, and virtually no contradiction; he lies with the simplicity and quick confidence which will stifle the breath of any upright citizen who encounters it innocently for the first time.

“The difference between a good cop and a bad cop is that the good cop will at least do no more than give his own salted version of events—the bad cop will make up his version . . . the guiltier the situation in which a policeman finds himself, the more will he attack the victim of his guilt!”

We need not permit ourselves to experience what happens when an immovable object meets an irresistible force. Given all of the above, it’s difficult to understand why successive governments encourage the worst in our police officers, either by turning a blind eye to the real problems of the force generally or by one way or another offering succor to suspects of criminal wrong-doing.

The recent people explosion in Ciceron is fair warning that disaster awaits just around the bend. Either the authorities heed the writing on the wall and take the necessary remedial steps—or we pay the price. Yes, all of us!