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Jamaica: police killings - a human rights emergency
AI Index: AMR 38/010/2001
Publish date: 10/04/2001

JAMAICA: Killings and Violence by Police: How many more victims?
INTRODUCTION: A PATTERN OF VIOLATIONS

"We serve, we protect, we reassure with courtesy, integrity and proper respect for the rights of all." Jamaica Constabulary Force motto

On 14 March 2001, at around 5 am, approximately 60 police officers from the Crime Management Unit surrounded a house in Braeton. According to the police version of events, when officers asked for access to the house, they were met with a hail of gunfire. The officers returned fire, killing seven young men. Local residents told a different story. According to their testimonies, the police captured five of the young men, beat them in the front yard of the house, and then executed them one at a time. Neighbours described the heart-rending pleas of the young men as they begged for their lives. One neighbour responded to the pleas by visiting the house and was shot and killed. Another resident, passing by the house on an errand, was also shot and killed, toothbrush in hand.

More than 1,400 people have been shot dead by police over the past 10 years in Jamaica, a country whose population is only 2.6 million. The rate of lethal police shootings is one of the highest in the world. The police account of events -- usually that the victims were killed in ''shoot-outs'' after opening fire -- is disputed in many cases by eyewitness testimony and contradicted by forensic evidence. The truth is rarely uncovered. Not only are police officers overusing deadly force, but the authorities are failing to conduct prompt, thorough and effective investigations into killings by police.

Police brutality flourishes when police officers are not held to account for their actions. Amnesty International has documented many cases of police brutality in Jamaica, some amounting to torture. The most frequent victims are criminal suspects, generally poor, young, black men. Victims also include relatives of criminal suspects, children and women, as well as children and women. Methods have included beatings, burns with hot irons and mock executions.

Seven years after three men suffocated to death in an overcrowded police lock-up, the practice of holding people in police custody in appallingly squalid conditions continues. Amnesty International has also found that despite commitments given in 1999 to remove all children from police lock-ups, some children are still held with adults in these inappropriate and dangerous environments.

Amnesty International is gravely concerned that the authorities in Jamaica -- despite numerous assurances to the contrary -- are failing to prevent serious and systematic human rights violations at the hands of the police and other members of the security forces.

The task facing the Jamaican police is complex, dangerous and difficult. The level of violent crime is extremely high, exacerbated by poverty, domestic violence, drug and politically motivated violence. The murder rate, in particular, is extremely high and at least 112 police officers have been killed over the past 10 years. Amnesty International does not underestimate the perils faced by Jamaican police officers in the course of their duties.

However, the failure of the Jamaican police to uphold the law has led to a pattern of human rights violations by the police and a corresponding breakdown of trust. In September 2000, Amnesty International researchers investigated attitudes towards the police in deprived, urban areas such as Grants Pen. Many people described the police not as protectors from crime but as a force to be feared. In the communities visited by Amnesty International, almost everyone claimed to have had direct experience of police brutality.

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