Police Commissioner Chester Williams also made a guest appearance on Sunup today, and the hosts engaged him on a number of topics, including the bedeviling issue of police corruption.
Recently, you've been seeing serving police officers getting accused of major crimes like facilitating the illegal landing of drug planes. Today, the Commissioner was frank about the challenges that his command and the Police Ministry have been battling in trying to rid the department of rogue cops:
Chester Williams, Commissioner of Police
"Let me say that 99% of our officers are good police men and women. They come to work every day and they tried arduously to ensure that they keep our people safe. And you we have that 1% like any other organization that you have, that there will always be that few people who are going to be the problematic ones and we have been doing a lot to be able to identify these people and to try and weed them out, but as an attorney you'd know yourself that it is not so easy to get rid of somebody. It requires a legal process and often times it is that same legal process that we are unable to go through to the extent that we can justifiably dismiss these people and so we have to wait until we can catch them red-handed and have all the evidence and then we do what needs to be done to dispose of them, but the fact that over the past few months we have been catching these officers who are involved in these different illegal activities. It goes to show as a department we are doing what we can to identify and deal with our officers who step out of line."
"Now, it still require that we go through the court system and so those matters are before the court and so I don't want to talk about it too much and just give the court an opportunity to see what can be done, but separate and apart from the court hearing itself we also deal with them internally and so the whole matter of internal discipline is also being dealt with through our tribunal and what we did just last year I as an attorney I understand that there is always that need for people to get due process and for people to be entitled to legal representation and so prior to my tenure as commissioner, police officers were not allowed attorneys in tribunals. I have since change that and we now allow attorneys in tribunals for matters that would 1) may result in a dismissal, or 2) in a reduction in rank. But equally what I also did was that if it is that we have an attorney representing the defense then as the commissioner of police I can also obtain the services of an attorney to present the matter for us before a tribunal."
