[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n recent conversation with an old schoolmate, he brought up his run-ins with the police. He told me of the time his meeting with an evangelizing pastor had gone terribly awry. He was invited to the pastor’s headquarters, had been preached to, had discussed the intimacies of his relationship with the most high and had set out on his way. A few days later, police showed up at his job requesting information regarding his encounter with the pastor. He gave honest answers. Alas, it turned out my old schoolmate had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. The pastor had passed on his name and his work address to police investigating a robbery at the place of worship. The pastor claimed my old school friend was the only one who had been in the building when certain items went missing.
The young man was invited to accompany the police to Rodney Bay Police Station for further interrogation. Instead he found himself in a police cell. He tried to remain calm. “I did nothing wrong,” he told himself, “everything will be all right.” Nearly a year later he was arrested and locked up a second time while gambling on some bleachers at the Sir Arthur Lewis Community College during class down time. The cops showed up and drove two van loads of students to the Central Police Station in Castries.
Both episodes came to nothing. In the first instance nearly eight hours went by before my 20-year-old schoolmate was released; the police failed to discover the pastor’s stolen items at his place of residence. Before setting him free, however, the police decided to cut his three-inch plaits with a pair of shears. “I can’t recall exactly what the officer said,” my friend told me, “but it was something expressing his prejudice against people with plaits.” He was sent away with an “ugly patch” to the top left of his head.
During the second incident, in a different station, the duty officer saw to it that the students spent a night in the cells “to teach us a lesson” my old schoolmate said. He also took the liberty of cutting the hair of some of the students. As he haphazardly scissored my former schoolmate’s hair, he seemed to be talking to himself:
“I don’t like that nonsense on your head . . . look at that . . . look at that . . . you going to school and that’s what you have on your head?” My friend told me he “felt, violated but, if you retaliate, you will just make things worse. I had to brush it all under the table.”
When I conducted my own investigation of what I considered police abuse of their power, this was one officer’s uninterested reaction: “I am not aware of any such situations so I won’t be able to comment on that. We would first have to look into the incidents.” The local police do not have the best history with “bongoed” tresses. The average reader would know Caribbean officers are notorious for cutting off the locs of Rastafarians who, for years, were targeted for their unconventional beliefs. The situation, I’m happy to say, has improved. The ill-treatment of my friend and his friends happened some five years ago. But every now and then we hear about police abuse of members of the Rasta fraternity. Ironically, my friend has never been a Rastafarian. He was persecuted simply because the police made personal, uninformed judgements of him and his hair. If I may be permitted a personal note: I remember going shopping with my mother, who has wavy to almost bone-straight hair, while my own hair enveloped my face, Afro-style. An acquaintance pulled her aside: “How can you have hair like that and give her that?” The interloper considered it fine to be wearing artificially straightened tresses but would deny me my right to wear my own hair as I please. It seems to me high time we all understood the true meaning of freedom, that enslavement does not always involve chains!
