Geisha Kow­lessar

Two days af­ter Beetham Gar­dens res­i­dents con­front­ed po­lice dur­ing vi­o­lent protests over the shoot­ing death of res­i­dent Christo­pher Greaves, Deputy Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice Mervyn Richard­son has said that in a bid to en­sure of­fi­cers act with trans­paren­cy at all times, they will be equipped with small video cam­eras to mon­i­tor their ac­tiv­i­ties.

Speak­ing at yes­ter­day's po­lice press brief­ing, Richard­son said the de­vices would be at­tached to the of­fi­cers' uni­forms or per­son for in­stances when they had to go in­to hot-spot ar­eas and would record ex­act­ly what had tran­spired."We in­vest­ed in the body cam­eras be­cause we saw it had an op­por­tu­ni­ty to boost the con­fi­dence lev­el of the pub­lic. It is all about trans­paren­cy and ac­count­abil­i­ty," Richard­son said.

He said a note had been tak­en to the per­ma­nent sec­re­tary in the Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­istry to or­der 24 cam­eras for of­fi­cers of the In­ter-Agency Task Force (IATF) for a pi­lot project lat­er in the year. How­ev­er, he said some IATF of­fi­cers were al­ready us­ing the de­vice on a tri­al ba­sis but it would even­tu­al­ly be made avail­able to oth­er of­fi­cers.

Asked what was the cost of the cam­eras which were or­dered, in a tele­phone in­ter­view af­ter­wards, Richard­son de­clined to say, adding that it was not ap­pro­pri­ate at this stage to do so.How­ev­er, Po­lice Ser­vice So­cial and Wel­fare As­so­ci­a­tion pres­i­dent Anand Rame­sar yes­ter­day warned his mem­bers to on­ly wear the cam­eras on a vol­un­tary ba­sis, as of­fi­cers had not been man­dat­ed to use the de­vices.

Con­tact­ed by phone last evening, Rame­sar ex­pressed dis­ap­point­ment that the as­so­ci­a­tion was not con­sult­ed by the po­lice ex­ec­u­tive be­fore the de­vices were pur­chased and put in­to op­er­a­tion."We are dis­ap­point­ed by the de­ci­sion that is be­ing made by the ex­ec­u­tive with­out en­gag­ing the mem­ber­ship," he said."This stands out as the many quick fix and some­times cos­met­ic so­lu­tions be­ing tak­en by the ex­ec­u­tive. At this stage, the use of the body cam­eras is pure­ly vol­un­tar­i­ly."

He said the idea of the cam­era was in­tro­duced by Pro­fes­sor Sher­man, of Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty, who is lead­ing an ev­i­dence-based polic­ing ini­tia­tive to tack­le crime in hot-spot ar­eas. The ini­tia­tive, he added, was ex­pect­ed to start at the end of the month."As we un­der­stand this, the cam­era will be used to record in­ter­views be­tween po­lice and civil­ians," Rame­sar said.

"I am not aware there is sup­port by the mem­ber­ship for the cam­eras and that the de­vices would de­ter po­lice of­fi­cers in en­gag­ing sus­pects and oth­er per­sons un­less we be­lieve it is an in­ci­den­tal free in­ter­ac­tion."Dur­ing yes­ter­day's press con­fer­ence, Richard­son al­so tack­led the Beetham protest, say­ing if res­i­dents were ar­rest­ed, that would have "trig­gered a greater storm," es­pe­cial­ly since the ma­jor­i­ty were young preg­nant women, young men and chil­dren who were used to form hu­man chains.

But he made it clear that no one group would hold the na­tion to ran­som, de­spite the cause.He said when he went to the Beetham on Mon­day, he went with aim of hav­ing a dis­cus­sion with res­i­dents. He said, how­ev­er, that it be­came clear to him that res­i­dents were bent on block­ing traf­fic by form­ing hu­man chains."Had we ar­rest­ed the peo­ple then, to­day you would have been ask­ing why we used such a high-hand­ed man­ner," Richard­son said.

Prais­ing the po­lice and sol­diers for show­ing a vast de­gree of re­straint, Richard­son said there were al­so no in­juries."Yet I hear on the me­dia about ex­ces­sive force," he said."So where do we stand? We should have a con­ver­sa­tion whether we want to be a so­ci­ety that is law-abid­ing, or a so­ci­ety where we could mash up the place and that is all right.

"Not one per­son was bru­talised, not one per­son got a cuff, not one per­son was ver­bal­ly abused. There were bot­tles and stones rain­ing down on the po­lice and sol­diers, I eh see that pub­lished nowhere."He said the po­lice had met with the Pro­fes­sion­al Stan­dards Bu­reau and sub­mit­ted an ini­tial re­port on Greaves' killing. He said the re­port al­so con­tained state­ments from the of­fi­cers of the IATF who were in­volved in Sun­day's shoot­ing.

The se­nior cop al­so gave the po­lice's ver­sion of what tran­spired. He said IATF of­fi­cers were on pa­trol when they en­coun­tered a group of men, one of whom was Greaves."There was a stand-off and a gun was bran­dished and point­ed in the di­rec­tion of the of­fi­cers, and the of­fi­cers, in or­der to pro­tect them­selves, they had cause to use their firearm and un­for­tu­nate­ly Mr Greaves was in­jured and tak­en to hos­pi­tal and sad­ly he died," Richard­son said.

Asked what type of gun was bran­dished and whether it was in Greaves' pos­ses­sion, Richard­son re­fused to di­vulge those de­tails. He said, how­ev­er, that the gun was re­cov­ered and sent for foren­sic analy­sis.