Glenroy Sinclair, Assignment Coordinator

Policemen bear the coffin containing the body of their slain colleague, Inspector Lascelles Walsh, at the Church of the Open Bible, St. Andrew, on Saturday May 21, 2005. - Junior Dowie/Staff Photographer

May 2005 will be embedded in the mind of retiring Police Commissioner Lucius Thomas for the rest of his life. It was the saddest moment of his 38 years in the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF).

"I cried and sometimes wept on several occasions when members of the police force were murdered. My worst moment was in May, two years ago, when gunmen killed three of my men in less than 24 hours. I was devastated, torn apart," Commissioner Thomas recounts in an exit interview with The Sunday Gleaner.

Officers gunned down

The officers gunned down in that incident were popular traffic cop, Inspector Lacelles Walsh, Corporal Hewitt Chandler, who was attached to the Protective Service Division, and District Constable Canute Brown, who was assigned to the Cross Roads Police Station, Kingston.

Inspector Walsh was killed in his uniform, at the intersection of Port Royal and Church streets, downtown Kingston; Constable Brown was sitting on the corridor of the Cross Roads Police Station when gunmen, travelling in two cars, attacked the station. Corporal Chandler was murdered at the intersection of West Kings House and Waterloo roads in St. Andrew by gunmen.

"It is not easy attending so many of these funerals. Sometimes it is really difficult, waking up at 2:00 a.m., taking telephone calls and only to be told that a another policeman has been killed," Thomas relates.

Among his greatest challenges during his tenure as police commissioner were inadequate resources and ineffective sanctions to discipline members of the police force who were involved in alleged corruption.

"For example, for about two years, we investigated a group of policemen, who, our intelligence had suggested, were involved in corruption. We completed the investigation and recommended that the Police Service Commission retire the policemen in the public's interest," Thomas discloses.