The Tribune

By Tyler McKenzie

A SERIES of stories in recent times have again raised questions over how people are treated who get caught up in dealings with our forces in uniform.

One that particularly stood out to me was the doomed bid by Fox Hill Prison to seek accreditation from the American Correctional Association.

Last October, Minister of National Security Wayne Munroe announced the bid, saying: “What we’re seeking to do by this intervention by the global service providers of the American Correctional Association is to measure how close we are to the standard.

“This is a needs assessment, but they will tell us how far on there to that standard and the steps that we need to take to hit that standard, and our commitment is to address shortcoming.”

Well, last week the news came in on how the country fared. The report came back earlier this year, and the Acting Commissioner, Doan Cleare, admitted we had failed – and that officials knew the prison would “fail miserably”.

The biggest problem we faced? Apparently that our prisoners are still having to slop out.

He said: “If we don’t solve the toilets, we will still fail the inspection. We can’t be 80 percent complete with the necessary improvements if we don’t solve the toilets.”

The cost of that is $1.8m. To do it would involve uprooting floors and cutting walls, apparently. However, $1.8m is not that much money in the grand scheme of a government Budget. If $1.8m can make prisoners live in slightly more humane conditions, that seems like it should have been money spent long ago. So the question becomes why do we choose to treat people this way?

Another story this week saw five men claim that officers beat them repeatedly after taking them into custody in Bimini.

The incident started with a bar fight between the men and police officers – though one of the men said he did not know the others involved were officers, saying they did not wear insignia or uniforms.

“They were just drinking and carrying on at the bar,” he said. “Nobody knew they were officers.”

The man, Leo Sands, went on to say: “When we were in custody, they beat everybody. They used a PVC pipe, a garden hose and a baseball bat. They struck and beat until everyone was black and blue. It was five of us in custody. There were three police officers.”

A complaint has been filed, but it brings back memories of a case in 2018 in Eleuthera when three people claimed that police tortured them before releasing them without charge – and their complaint ran out of time to be addressed by the police even though they filed it in a timely fashion.

In that instance, the three involved claimed they were handcuffed, beaten and fish-bagged.

We hear a lot about body cameras - but where are the cameras in the police stations?

Then there is the mix of stories we have heard about the incident where police shot a dog and ended up hitting a woman at the same property.

First, the bullet supposedly ricocheted off the dog – now we are told the bullet went through the dog. Police Commissioner Clayton Fernander said: “I had experts revisit the scene and what we discover in their findings is that after the bullet hit the dog it exited to the side, to the left side, and it went down into the ground on the concrete pavement. And there are damages there that indicate that the bullet hit the concrete pavement.

“The victim was not too far from that general area, and we suspect she didn’t even realise that she was hit. It wasn’t until some of the officers saw that she was bleeding and everybody in the yard say, ‘oh she was shot;’ she didn’t even realise that she was shot.”

Presumably, then, the ricochet was off the concrete, but that still doesn’t answer why officers would open fire in the direction of a dog while someone was standing close by. Not only was there a risk they might hit that person – they actually did.

Commissioner Fernander admonished reporters over claims that the woman had been breastfeeding at the time, saying: “You are investigators as well. Be very careful with that: Get the facts.”

Well, reporters have been asking for the body camera footage from the incident – that would be one sure way to get the facts. So where is it?

Speaking to the famiy of the victim, relatives suggested that there seemed to be no imminent fear for officers in the situation at all.

“When the officers came to the yard, they stand at the gate and the first thing they did instead of saying ‘we have a search warrant for so and so’ or whatever the case might be, what they did was stick their gun straight through the gate, shoot at the dog and then shoot at the girl,” one relative said.

“That’s out of order, you can’t do that. Then you are shooting through the gate and people inside their yard, no man, they all the wrong. I don’t care what they do or how much they try to cover it up, they are in all the wrong because there is no gun in that yard.”

Then there are two recent cases where the Coroner’s Court has ruled that police-involved killings are homicide by manslaughter, the latest on Friday in the case of Shanton Forbes, where three officers shot Forbes multiple times in the chest in the backyard of a Yellow Elder Gardens home in 2018. Officers said Forbes was armed. That follows the case of Azario Major, whose death in 2021 outside a bar when shot by police was also ruled homicide by manslaughter.

Curiously, since that verdict, the National Security Minister suggested that the lawyer for the police officers involved in that case was trying to quash the findings based on pre-trial publicity for the case – citing a widely circulated video raising questions about the incident. The lawyer had not at the time – though now has, making some wonder whether Mr Munroe was mistaken or was instead offering a suggestion.

Collectively, what do these incidents show? We see a lack of prioritisation for those in custody, to the extent of efforts to meet international standards being doomed to failure. We seek a complaints process that seems not fit for purpose. We see – if allegations are true – that officers seem to be willing to collectively engage in abuse of detainees. And we see a coroner’s process long derailed finally starting to give some answers.

What level of confidence does this give us in our authorities? Everyone will have their own opinion – but if we are to really see accountability, then let’s see some of that video footage in disputed incidents. Let’s see a complaints process that completes swiftly. Let’s see a minister who doesn’t speak out in defence all the time but waits for the evidence and verdict.

We have all heard more stories than this – but here’s the thing. There are a lot of good officers out there representing us. It is the officers who lead to stories such as these who drag the reputation of those good officers down.

Torture is breaking the law. Manslaughter is breaking the law. The officers who do these things are criminals – and deserve to be investigated as such, for the sake of all of those on the force who uphold the law.