Hardly a day passes by without a news release from the Office of the Prime Minister announcing something done to deliver on the SLP’s 2021 General Elections campaign promise to ‘Put People First’ – subsidizing energy costs, increasing social assistance payments, expanding social services, paying pensioners better, helping banana farmers, building The Youth Economy, planning house repair and affordable housing, improving health services, increasing community projects, creating jobs and admirably keeping the economy afloat.
No new Government of Saint Lucia, before or after Independence, has ever made publicly satisfied deliveries on campaign promises to end ‘Corruption’ or ‘Crime’, both interrelated but each impossible to erase; yet parties and politicians everywhere continue to pledge, on the hustings, to address, redress and otherwise reduce — even ‘eliminate’ — both.
But neither can be prevented – and for the same basic reason: both are products of the mind that no minister or government can read, far-less predict or control.
So, instead of concentrating on the impossible objectives of ‘preventing crime’ and ‘ending corruption’, government’s emphasis always has to be on continuous improvement and strengthening of investigative and prosecutorial capacities, while constantly engaging in processes of internal review aimed at strengthening leadership and implementation training, as well as identifying and weeding out cops who put the Force to shame…
Successive administrations since 1979 have wasted time, energy and national resources on misleading citizens and voters into believing any political party can handle crime better than another, engaging in the deadly exercise of comparing statistics of death, exchanging blame for numbers of homicides like counting bananas or mangoes, sounding like not caring that each death left countless people mourning.
Since Independence, Police Commissioners have included: Eugene Lawrence, Cuthbert Phillips, Brian Bernard, Vernon Augustine, Francis Nelson, Ausbert Regis, Vernon Francois, Severin Moncherry and Milton Desir (excluding non-nationals from Dominica, Trinidad & Tobago and Britain), most of who retired after they reached the prescribed age.
One local commissioner was charged, convicted and eventually pardoned for causing the death of a child, but was never publicly treated like a felon — and each left their fingerprints, footprints or other imprints on the Force.
The last commissioner was appointed by contract ahead of the last General Elections to replace a predecessor who was laterally transferred to a prime ministerial advisory post.
The new commissioner is the first woman to be appointed to the top cop’s post here, with just over three decades of service; and she’s led several divisions and departments, including Corporate Services and Strategic Operations.
And she’s also a Graduate of The University of the West Indies (The UWI) with a bachelor’s degree in Management Studies and a Certificate in Public Administration.
Commissioner Descartes has been given responsibility for tackling the grave crime situation, the latest wave of which has bedeviled the nation for at least the past five years, with the public generally but mistakenly expecting that every new change at the top of the police force should automatically or hopefully result in early reduction in the number of gun crimes.
Gun crime is by no means new here, but Regime Change following General Elections (of which there have been five here since 1997) often results in discontinuation of inherited policy approaches criticized during the campaign.
For example, the Government of Saint Lucia between 1997 and 2006 built almost a dozen new police stations and a modern prison and launched a gun amnesty scheme that brought guns in and off the streets, but which became a victim of Regime Change by the succeeding administration, in which the Home Affairs Minister was a former Deputy Police Commissioner with known political associations and ambitions.
Gun crime has since been back with a vengeance, leading to the disastrous 2010 Operation Restore Confidence that was allegedly meant to rid the island of ‘bad guys’, but instead landed the Force in its worst period of international disrepute, sanctioned and punished by the USA — alongside the likes of Colombia and El Salvador — for about a dozen alleged extrajudicial killings that apparently haven’t gone through the complete judicial process 12 years later.
Acting Commissioner Crusita Descartes-Pelius has inherited very serious challenges from her predecessor — and her sex, while making a powerful political and social statement, will not (in and by itself) impact the crime rate.
Citizens will continue to pray and dream for the day when they’ll wake-up and not hear or expect news about someone being killed or badly-wounded, by bullets or resulting from avoidable vehicular accidents.
But even before she starts pulling the new strings now tied to her fingers, the island’s first Madam Commissioner may wish to first undertake a complete review of the RSLPF’s operations since Independence, starting with the ‘Yamaha’ incident that long preceded her arrival in 1988, as well as the Report of the Karl Hudson Philips Commission of Inquiry that resulted in the retirement of a commissioner in the public interest and a comprehensive review of the effects of the fallout from Operation Restore Confidence on morality and operations — and public respect.
She will be expected to follow the road map designed by the Ministry of Home Affairs and the Minister for National Security, but she can also request a comprehensive review of all previous reports aimed at fixing the force.
As she can also break new ground by showing RSLPF’s concern about the families of victims of police shootings or deaths in police custody, many of which still cry for justice.
Community Policing should be revisited, alongside the need for new approaches to neighbourhood watches, development of new mechanisms to encourage public cooperation (like witness protection and upgrading of intelligence gathering).
All in all, the island’s first lady police commissioner must be welcomed and supported, no less (and probably even more at this time) than all her predecessors in what many still mistakenly regard as “a man’s job”.
Let the Lady lead!