When the CCN is caught by the Citizen!

For years now the Jamaica Constabulary Force has had a credibility issue when it comes to two things - the use of excessive force and the handling of controversy surrounding the actions of SOME of its members.  These issues and the untrained activities of JCF members, coupled with the lack of a media savvy approach led to the establishment of the Police Information Centre, PIC, which operated for much of the 1980s and 1990s.

The PIC collated reports from its stations and branches and disseminated to media entities at intervals throughout each day.  When T.K. Whyte was able to put his stamp on the activities of the PIC, media even got some well researched pieces, some follow up material and some analysis.  However, in the main the routine stories failed to do more than being routine.   

As the Force failed to shake this negative image, and as it grappled with the need to tackle the information age and media expansion, the Constabulary Communications Network, CCN, replaced the PIC.  Of course, in this brief summary, much of the details of the background and philosophical underpinnings of the change from PIC to CCN would have been skipped over. 

One key feature of the PIC however, was the almost standard “fill in the blank approach” to releasing information from the police.  In fact members of the public would make fun of the reports detailing “a police party observing someone behaving in a suspicious manner leading to a police party approaching the person, who opened fire on them which led to the return of the fire whereupon the attackers fled and later someone was found suffering from gunshot wounds or whose body was found with the man clutching a pistol”. 

The CCN has retained much of the same “fill in the blank” reputation the PIC had.  However, as technology has evolved, the CCN also added to that by establishing CCN Liaison Officers in parishes, who made audio and television releases in a rehearsed but more media savvy manner.

The content did not change much!

So let us we fast-forward to last week’s incident in Buckfield, Ocho Rios, St. Ann in which the police were apparently caught on tape in an unprofessional shooting death of a civilian.  The substance and approach of the CCN reporting does not appear to be much different, but as the PIC changed to respond to the technological, media savvy landscape, so too have the citizens now changed challenging the unchanged police reporting approached but being more effective by using technology to challenge them.