- FileSSP Reneto Adams
Bernard Headley, Contributor
THE nation that Senior Superintendent of Police Reneto Adams serves so diligently has one, and only one, dominant image of him. It's the image, a powerful one, filtered through television lenses, of a helmeted, balaclava-clad, tough-talking man of war. Too bad more of us who pay Mr. Adams' salary weren't on hand three or so days ago to observe and listen to him closely in an altogether different setting from his typical urban battlefronts.
On Monday and Tuesday of this week, Mr. Adams put in his long-awaited and long-anticipated appearance before the Commission of Enquiry looking into the violent West Kingston events of July 7-10. The senior police officer is, if my reading of him is correct, an instantly likeable man. He smiles easily, is polite, extremely accessible and deferential to a fault. He exuded for the occasion graceful charm that might have struck one as dissonant and disharmonious with what he does for a living. He was also well dressed. On both days he sported expensive, finely tailored suits that fitted perfectly his precise, supremely conditioned frame.
He looked as if he had just walked off the pages of an Esquire magazine; the bow-tie he wore on his first day giving a certain kind of exquisite eloquence to his witticisms and quick repartee with his interlocutors. The Senior Superintendent was more than enthusiastic to "extend" with me, in passing backstage conversations (since it's not likely we could sit and bend elbows together), his already on-the-record remarks.
UNWAVERING BELIEVER
In addition to being a sharp dresser on and off the "field," Mr. Adams is also passionately committed to, and an unwavering believer in, the righteousness of his particular project. He knows and clearly understands his special mission here on earth - his unblinking conception of which should give us all concerned and concerted pause. He says (and I have no reason to doubt him) that he believes in democratic governance and civilian rule of law. But he is at the same time intolerant of the ambiguity and oft-times necessary greyness in the formulation and implementation of public policy, and of the general give-and-take that characterises democratic systems.
He abhors particularly the timidity of national leaders on the matter of "dealing with crime." Government and the country want, and expect, him and his unit to reduce crime and violence, and to get criminals off the street. But they get all squeamish when he and his men go after the criminals. What do they want him to do, hug them?
What's wrong with the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF) today its weakening morale and arguable ineffectiveness is politicians' and civilian heads' deliberate plan (begun in the 1970s) to remove from it its militaristic praxis, ethos and esprit de corps; in effect, neutering it, taking away its cojones. Not that today's Jamaica Defence Force (JDF) consists entirely of brave hearts, he observed. He recalled to the Commission that, while coming "under heavy gunfire" on the streets of West Kingston in the morning hours if July 7, he saw at one time, safely cocooned in his M150 military vehicle and totally scared, a young platoon commander.
It is not difficult to imagine Mr. Adams being completely at home with, working hard and being highly commended by, Latin American generalissimos of a generation or so ago. His is a peculiar twist on singer and polemicist Peter Tosh's well-articulated "No Justice, No Peace." For Mr. Adams, who says he has thought long and hard, and "read a lot about these things," war is a necessary precursor to any sort of sustainable peace. "History has shown," he argues, without being specific, "that before there is peace, there is a war." (He regrets, coincidentally, for reasons too complicated to get into here, his own youthful misguided "black power phase.")
We will never ever, once and for all, root out crime in Jamaica, Mr. Adams insists, until the Jamaican people accept what they're up against. Once they get to that place of full and resigned understanding, they cannot then but accept the inevitable solution. What we're up against is a ruthless bunch with whom there is "no room for dialogue," people against whom war, with its unrelenting logic of waste, death and destruction, is the only answer. He does not shrink from referring to his approach to dealing with crime in Jamaica as the "final solution." Having read history as widely as he says he has, Mr. Adams no doubt, is fully aware of the precedents in recent African and European history he wishes to follow.
COMMUNITY POLICING
Still, rather startlingly, Mr. Adams says he's a believer in community policing. His, though, is a rather convoluted and perhaps intentionally tautological version of the idea. Community policing means having safe communities, communities where residents can go about their business and move freely, only because practitioners of heavy metal policing like him have performed well their task. When I described to him models of community policing that are working, like Chicago's (implementation of which I'd been directly involved in), he said it'd be unworkable in Jamaica. Not with Jamaica's primarily uneducated inner-city communities. Besides, it's "soft policing" that, within the social fabric and ecological logistics of Kingston's ghettos, would be nothing but an open invitation for gunmen to pick off policemen.
Police chief Counsel, Ian Ramsay's gentle prodding of Mr. Adams' thoughts on society and social change revealed yet another disquieting dimension to the man. Perhaps what really drives Mr. Adams is a grand fundamentalist strategy, a strategy to not only rescue or "take back" the country, but also to return it to the pristine state he once knew. The Jamaica they grew up in (between I'd imagine the late 1940s through early 1960s). Mr. Ramsay and Mr. Adams bantered on, to the obvious annoyance of Commission Chair Julius Isaac), was where the local school teacher, parson and village barber were all accessible role models not youths with guns.
Communities then worked harmoniously and peacefully together, and with each other. The bare-footed boy from down the road, Mr. Adams offered, could feel free to walk onto the verandah of the house of his better-off neighbour and sit down and "reason with him," without rancour or unduly constructed class barrier between them. If only we could get back to those good old days.
It's a classic fundamentalist notion with disturbing implications. There was that perfect moment, a moment in history when a particular book, leader and social order were perfect. It's the people who have experimented with modernity and instilled corrupt values of materialism and worship of false gods like money and tall buildings who've got us in the mess we're in. We need as a nation to go back to basics, to get back to fundamentals.
Bernard Headley is a professor of sociology and criminology at the University of the West Indies, Mona.
