The Tribune

THE lead story in today’s Tribune shows the government is halfway towards thinking about a solution to a problem that has long vexed the nation.

This isn’t a problem that’s unique to The Bahamas – in fact it is one that has led to protests around the world over incidents in other nations, especially right next door to us in the United States.

It is a problem that can be summed up by two simple questions – what happens when a uniformed officer oversteps the mark, and how does the system respond when they do?

A Cabinet sub-committee is being formed to look at how the government can stop racking up costs from court cases from brutality from uniformed officers. Presently, the government is paying out millions in damages and costs – and that means all of us footing the bill as taxpayers.

Just last week, a man was awarded more than $80,000 in damages and costs after an officer punched him in the mouth in 2019, damaging eight of his teeth, while earlier this year another man was awarded more than $163,000 in damages after an officer punched out his teeth in 2015.

We don’t have to look far in our records for cases of brutality – and we have lost count of the number of court cases where a defendant claims to the judge that they were beaten by officers.

Latrae Rahming, communications director in the Office of the Prime Minister, said yesterday that the “Office of the Attorney General has undertaken an exercise to identify categories where we are seeing material, and in instances, recurring damages against the government and to propose a way forward and a strategy aimed at minimizing these instances. One example of this is litigation involving brutality by uniformed officers.”

Now, you can see the problem here, right?

This is an upside-down way of looking at the problem. Brutality is ending up costing the taxpayer too much – how do we stop it from costing so much? You see the flaw there?

What we need to do is stop the brutality.

Why did an officer feel it was appropriate to punch someone’s teeth out? Or how about the incident in 2019 when attorney Christina Galanos reported that a client had been beaten by seven police officers, leaving him having to limp to an ambulance from the police station?

Or how about the three people who say they were tortured by police in Eleuthera in 2018, handcuffed, beaten and fishbagged before being released without charge? They brought their complaint to police in a timely fashion only to be told they were out of time for the matter to be heard by a police tribunal. That matter is now before the courts.

These aren’t isolated incidents – we have all seen video of beatings over the years. The problem isn’t the costs, it’s that officers feel empowered to do it in the first place.

That’s before we even get to immigration matters, such as Douglas Ngumi, who was locked up illegally for nearly seven years and only walked away with $750,000 in damages. How much is seven years of your life worth?

If you want to cut costs, stop the problem from happening in the first place. Make uniformed officers keenly aware that if they break the law they will not be protected. Break up the culture that sees groups of officers act in such a way knowing they won’t face repercussions. Make sure that the good officers have the back-up and support if they report wrongdoing, including readily available video footage of all interactions with suspects in jail cells and making bodycam footage of officers involved in incidents publicly available.

Let there be no place to hide for bad officers, and no expectation they will be allowed to continue in the job if they beat, torture or brutalise citizens.

And the good officers who don’t do that? Hold them up as the example. Promote them, support them, encourage them.

Minister of National Security Wayne Munroe has talked this week about the need to get rid of bad apples – and he’s right. So where’s the Cabinet sub-committee on human rights? On eliminating criminal behaviour among uniformed officers? On reforming the immigration department to root out the officers named in complaints of beatings at the Detention Centre or who illegally locked people up for years without charge?

The focus must not be on how much this behaviour is costing the public purse. The focus must be on preserving people’s rights in the first place, and stopping the brutality before it even begins.

When that is the conversation, we’ll know the government is serious in tackling the real issue.