March 22, 2002
JAMAICANS UNITED AGAINST POLICE BRUTALITY Dear Friends: Well-known CVM TV journalist Michael Pryce and his cameraman Milton Reid took oaths at the Coroner's inquiry to tell the truth about what happened on the fateful morning of March 14 when seven young men lost their lives to police bullets. But instead of telling the truth they lied most disgracefully. Their lies served not only to bring Jamaican journalism into further disrepute but also to remind us once again of how the Jamaican media contribute to the culture of police impunity. Civilian witnesses who were on or near the scene on that morning testified in court to hearing gunshots intermittently between 4:30 a.m. and 6:45 a.m. They heard young men begging for their lives. Pryce and Reid, admitted friends of senior police officer Reneto Adams, leader of the execution squad, and a guest at Pryce's wedding, claimed that they arrived at Braeton around 5:a.m. and while there until about 9:a.m. heard no gunshots and heard no one begging for mercy. They claimed that by the time they arrived the shooting was over and seven men had either been killed or injured. (I have been reliably informed that someone who refuses to testify said that they saw a CVM TV van arriving on the scene with a convoy of police vehicles at the beginning of the operation. This would have been around 4:30 a.m.) Pryce and Reid did little interviewing of neighbors or the gathered crowd who urged them to turn on the camera at about the time that the last youth was being killed. Pryce and Reid ignored them. They produced no more than half an hour of supposedly unedited footage. There was no videotaping of the bodies being taken out of the house because it was considered unethical to do so but quite ethical for them to have a beer with the police who were celebrating after the operation was over. Their broadcasted version shown to the jurors was a pitiful police version of what happened. According to the judges at a recent National Journalism Awards ceremony put on by the Press Association of Jamaica "This was not a good year for journalism." The standard of investigative journalism was described as "ranging from mediocre to poor." "Instead of protecting the public interest" journalist John Maxwell has written, "many of us have sold out to the powerful, to the financiers, the politicians, to the businessmen and the gangsters, while leaving neglected, our duty to protect the interest of the ordinary people." Having beers with policemen celebrating the killing of "seven chickens" is the epitome of corruption among Jamaican journalists and the media houses. While foreign journalists have produced numerous stories on police killings the Jamaican media are satisfied to repeat press releases put out by the Jamaican police. After having watched national security minister Peter Phillips being grilled by Tim Sebastian of BBC TV's Hard Talk, callers to local talk shows expressed amazement at how docile in comparison are Jamaican journalists who allow politicians to get away with long winded answers that stray from the point. Within the past weeks police killed five men in a car followed soon thereafter by four more in another car. Not one policeman was injured in any of these alleged shootouts. Apart from cursory reporting of the police version there was no attempt by the media to further investigate what might have really happened. On investigation however, Families
Against State Terrorism (FAST), has discovered a completely different version
of the events from what was claimed by the police and reported in the media.
In both cases FAST discovered what commonsense suggested were cold blooded
executions.
According to a FAST informant, after coming upon a roadblock set by police and citizens "the men did not attempt to come out of the car . . . . The police open fire on the car and the shots went inside the car killing all five men. One of them try to run out; however he was cut down by bullets from the police guns." In the second incident which happened a few weeks later, a woman reported on CVM TV that "she saw when the young men were searched, lined up, beaten, kicked, put to lie face down on the ground, handcuffed two together, and put in a police jeep. A policeman drove the car, and the vehicles proceeded toward Worthy Park estate, six miles from Clover Hill." (FAST Forward no. 11, March 21, 2002) There they were then killed in what police claimed was a shootout but based on investigation by FAST was another typical execution. Columnist Ken Chaplin writing in the
Observer has opined that because of the supposed radical past of the new
minister of national security (he once was a dreadlock), police
brutality will not be tolerated. Well, Ken, the police have killed
more than 30 persons since the start of the year. How many more killings
do you think our former radical will tolerate before he does something?
Lloyd D'Aguilar
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