We were just watching the Dominica police brutality video over the protest for the arrested bloggers for flying their drones, and I got to thinking: The police force are just gangs sanctioned by the authorities. No more, no less.
Sure, we need them to protect us, but at the root of it they are armed bands of men and women just looking for work- and in this case, their line of work is finding bad guys and putting the fear of God in them. However, we have seen far too often in the Caribbean that them looking for more work leads to disastrous consequences for decent people.
This is not the first time a video crossed my path about police brutality in Dominica. It happens from time to time there, and it has not eased up one bit in the last 5 years I see. Let’s hope they don’t get as bad as we have in Jamaica or Venezuela where extra-judicial killings can become a state of being.
The Bahamas too is having a problem with extra judicial killings and the worse part about it is with most of these cases, there is hardly an inquest into the matter and no one is held accountable for trigger happy and angry police officers.
We have to blame the society, but that is about all we can do. As the society is not up to any single one person’s hand or initiative to fix- it is a collective decision that we will treat other people better. But when you have allegations that your leaders, the ones who are supposed to be the crème de la crème of your society, the ones who are the best of the best, using the police forces to intimidate and harass the people who put them in power to protect them, the problem is much bigger than just crying and complaining for better leadership on this.
But I have seen enough to know that police brutality is the way of life for the Caribbean and very few police forces around the region are immune to it, and we simply cannot turn our eyes away from our own problems and turn to problems in Haiti and the ongoing gang violence and protests and then feel as if we are above it all when the English speaking Caribbean has major issues with civility, tolerance and the rule of law.
To me, the police are appearing as if they are just armed gangs, empowered by the state. No better than the ones who roam the streets looking for someone to victimise.