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20th September 2012
No Preference, Police Say
Stan Bishop

The Royal Saint Lucia Police Force says that despite public opinion, the Force does not treat cases they investigate in a preferential manner.

During a press briefing held last Friday afternoon, Assistant Commissioner of Police (Crime and Intelligence) Frances Henry said that every case is unique by its own circumstance. The crime chief was responding to public sentiments expressed over the handling of several recent cases the police were called in to investigate.

She cited the cases of seventeen-year-old Christal St. Omer and forty-three-year-old Tathenao Eugene as examples in which, she said, the circumstances differed.

“One of the things I want people to be very clear on is that with Christal we had a missing person,” ACP Henry explained. “This is how this matter actually started: with a young girl who had gone missing. The first report was about a missing person, so we were pursuing the possible preservation of life. As it unfolded, we recognized we had a shift from a missing person (report).”

The crime chief added that the high level of sensitization and publicity in the Christal St. Omer case attracted the attention of numerous individuals from various quarters that came on board. That scenario presented a situation where the efforts from the massive public response gave a significant impetus to the prominence of the case itself.

“In the Forestiere matter, the police responded to seemingly an incident of a burglary. As we pursued the investigation, we realized that while responding to an alleged burglary that it was not just a burglary but had turned out to be where someone had lost her life. I think it is very unfair to equate the two (cases),” ACP Henry said.

One man has since been charged with causing the death of the teenager and the crime chief said she is positive that charges will be laid shortly against an individual/s in the case of the Forestiere woman.

Both St. Omer and Eugene died less than three weeks apart. But since St. Omer’s death on August 22, there has been a spate of killings that grabbed national attention, some seemingly having more prominence than others. The crime chief explained that media hype surrounding the cases may be a key factor.

“While it is seemingly true there has not been the media hype (in the Forestiere case), I think it would be very unfair to judge the police or to indicate that we were more sympathetic (in certain cases),” ACP Henry emphasized.
 
 

She also urged the general public to not seek instant gratification in the pursuit of justice. There are instances, she said, in which cases can be deemed “open and shut”, while in other instances the police need to employ more strategic ways of finding a solution. Such cases, ACP Henry explained, often entail the expending of valuable time, resources, intervention from other agencies, use of forensics, among other factors.

The crime chief noted that every effort is made by the police to present each case to the best of the Force’s ability and within the rule of law. That effort, she lamented, is often compromised by the very people who sometimes want to see justice done.

“What concerns me is that while there is all that hype, there are pronouncements by persons who supposedly are responsible,” ACP Henry told reporters. “They start leading evidence by saying anything that they would have known. They would give an antecedent, they would give information as to presenting the person as being ‘a good person’ and they start to speak to a number of things that the person may have been engaged in.”

Such utterances, she indicated, can potentially contaminate the jury pool that exists within a small society as Saint Lucia. In Saint Lucia’s case where jurors are rarely – if at all -- sequestered, the problem becomes magnified. She called on the media to assist the police in that regard.

“When it comes to the media, I have advised as to what you should say and what you should not say,” ACP Henry said. “I want to make it abundantly clear that when you’re dealing with stories that have to do with incidents of crime, you need to understand that there are families who hurt. There are families who are grieving. There are families who believe in the legal system and want to see justice served. In the whole quest to sell a paper or to make a story or get a top rating, the possibility of having that whole matter thrown out on a technicality because we cannot find a juror who has not heard the story and who has not formed an opinion is doing a disservice to the people who seek after justice.”

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