Community Policing Helping to Douse the Flames of Violence

Imagine a blazing inferno, with extremely high flames, where the heat is unbearable and all you can do is run for cover. Now imagine that the same blazing inferno is violence in a community, and despite the heat, the residents have nowhere to run.
Today, thanks to the Community Policing initiative in the Gregory Park area of St. Catherine South, and the vision of Community Police Officer, Constable Jeremy Rhoden, residents will not have to run because he is confidently saturating the area with the presence of his colleagues and advancing social programmes for self development, to ensure that violent incidents are contained.
“Community Policing is like fighting fire,” Constable Rhoden tells JIS News. “When a fireman fights fire, he has to saturate the outside, so it doesn’t spread. Where the fire is.we don’t just leave it, we put men to contain it and saturate the external areas, so when we go inside the communities we don’t try to tell the bad man to put the gun down, we tell his friend not to start using the gun, because you will be killed. Unite or perish is a better way and we begin to show him areas where he can channel his energies. That is the approach,” he continues.
“It is not the fire we are fighting, but we are saturating the area around, so the fire can’t spread. When we do that, we contain the fire and it will have to die out. It will have to!” the Constable declares.
One of three Community Police Officers assigned to the Gregory Park area, which includes communities such as Caymanas Gardens, Meadowvale, and Walkers Avenue, Constable Rhoden, who is a son of Grants Pen – an inner city community – is a firm officer, although this is hidden by his seemingly quiet personality. In his late 20s, he has gained much from the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF) during the past five years.
“Growing up in the inner city was tough and in those days a child was parented by everybody and they instilled a certain level of discipline in me, so when I was growing it still lingered in the back of my mind that you are not supposed to do certain things, irrespective of your circumstances.and that has guided me through,” he relates.
“I was able to resist certain pressures and I thought I was being tough but now being a member of the JCF, having done the training..the experiences gained by working as law enforcement in Jamaica has made me very strong,” the Community Police Officer points out.
Like others who are engaged in the process of community policing on a daily basis, Constable Rhoden is shunning all views that it is soft policing. While he contends that it may have a ‘soft’ approach, the strategies involved are not.
“Community policing is everything but being ‘soft’ policing. For somebody to go into the inner city with the idea to change things, whether bit by bit or to improve life overall, is not soft. When you can tell a youth to get off the corner and find a job, or tell a mother to get her child registered and in school, there is nothing soft in that. What is soft on the outskirts is the approach,” he explains.
According to Constable Rhoden, Community Policing is like porridge – a popular Jamaican breakfast.”If you ever drink porridge, you would know that when you pour it in a bowl, it forms a little layer on top that is very cool but the moment you lift that, there is a great amount of heat. Now that’s a Community Police Officer, on the surface he is very calm, but he has to be firm coming face-to-face with the roughest of the rough,” he says.
“You cannot be soft, you have to be tough.it’s a porridge like thing, and you have to be smarter than the ordinary cop. Community policing forces you to think and always to stay ahead, because criminals are not books, they have a brain and they watch you and work around you, so you have to be double smart,” Constable Rhoden tells JIS News, adding that it is a 24-hour job.
He says that the communities see the officers regularly. “We are their eyes (and) they are our eyes, so the moment somebody sees something that will interest the police, we get a phone call.either at home or work, wherever you are at any time of day,” he informs.
“It is pretty taxing.a 24-hour job, because the community is depending on us and they say we are the experts in crime prevention and should work miracles and sometimes we tend to believe we can do that,” Constable Rhoden says.
The Constable, who has been in the JCF since 2003, sees the Community Policing initiative as an opportunity to befriend members of the community and receive information that can be used to help the police and ultimately the communities.
“What we need to do is be friends with the people, because it’s only a few of them in the community who want to do a particular thing [violence], the majority of them do not want to.but circumstances force them. When you are friends with the community, persons start to trust you and they confide in you,” he notes.
“It is effective when we are privileged and people in the communities give you first hand information, because if they are not on your side, you can only act on what you see when you enter the community and it’s usually not a true reflection of what happens there in your absence, and we are reaping benefits because of that approach,” he explains.
While not underestimating the fact that residents may give misleading information to officers, Constable Rhoden ensures that the ‘privileged’ information received is accurately processed and disseminated to the relevant authorities.
“Sometimes they will trick us, but we are not gullible, so we process the information received among ourselves and diffuse it to the various sections that would be interested, such as Narcotics, Divisional Intelligence Unit or the Special Branch. We have reaped benefits and it only could have happened because of some trustworthy persons,” he points out.
Meanwhile, President of the Caymanas Gardens Citizens’ Association, Mertlyn Murdoch, while happy with the Community Policing initiative, is of the view that it could be more effective with an increase in the number of officers on duty, and a bigger police station with more vehicles.
“They are capable of doing a better job and they need to be in my area [Caymanas Gardens] more often,” she tells JIS News.
For her, additional officers would be good, since they would be able to “reason with the young boys and girls, but especially the boys who usually hang out on the street corners and they need more vehicles. Lack of vehicles shouldn’t be an excuse not to patrol,” she says.
According to Miss Murdoch, the Community Policing initiative should have been “up and about a long time ago.it is a good thing. Some policemen and women do not know how to deal with people, but Constable Rhoden and the others are cool,” she notes, adding that when they are in the community other residents and herself feel “more secure and protected.”
Community Police Officers have been trained in areas, such as conflict mediation, crime prevention, how to organize youth clubs and other community groups, juvenile delinquency, crime management, and domestic violence.
The initiative embraces partnerships between citizens and the police to address the root causes of crime, disorder, and fear of crime.