A NEW COMMISSIONER OF POLICE TO TAKE OVER
The following was a statement by Fred Mitchell on Friday 27 December 2024 as a new Commissioner of Police Shanta Knowles prepares to take over the force as Commissioner on 3 January 2024:
So one of the first and most important decisions in the New Year and the execution of that decision will be the transfer of power from one commissioner of police Clayton Fernander, who ends a distinguished career after 40 plus years of service to king and country. He hands over on the 3rd January 2025 to a new commissioner of police Shanta Knowle, She will be the first female to command a mainly male force and with this, she supersedes many of her juniors and joins the footsteps of a former head of customs, who was a female head of another male dominated force.
Here’s the point I’m seeking to make. It seems to me that the society unfairly puts on the head of the police, the commissioner police, that they have the responsibility to solve the crime problem. This is wrong, misguided and ill-conceived. Just as it is wrong, misguided and ill-conceived to think that the government or the political party in power can solve the crime problem.
What is happening in our society on the crime front bears no other responsibility but on the society itself, We are all dramatis personae in a multiact play. The new commissioner of police can pledge to do her best to fight crime, to prevent and catch the criminals, but the wider society. must be actively engaged in stopping crime itself.
The suspicion is, for example, that in the most recent murders in Fox Hill, they are part of this tit-for-tat scenario I predicted in the country a few months earlier this year. It seems to me that the intelligence community and the social services community and the psychologists and psychiatrists have a more vigourous role to play in rooting out the crime problem. And of course, the administration of justice to so many people seems to have failed us.
On the day of the general election in 2017, as Hubert Minnis was coming into power, the police arrested and detained a sitting member of parliament and accused him of stealing his own TV set. The whole thing seemed politically directed by the incoming administration, even before they had the power to do so. Someone felt empowered to act against the PLP.
We hope to win the next January election so that there can be no repeat of this abuse of power.
It is our hope, that in the execution of the duties by public officials that are appointed, those officials will act without fear or favour. We wish the new commissioner, well.
End