Retired crime-fighter, Reneto Adams, believes the revocation of his United States visa is not likely to have any significant negative impact on the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF). No, not at all, Adams responded to a question posed by Loop News on whether the cancellation of his visa and his ultimate ban from the United States will negatively affect the police force from which he retired in 2008.
The opinion came as questions continue to circulate in various circles regarding the implications of the ban of both retired and current members of the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF) from the United States last Thursday.
His heart heaving with fear, Rohan Thomas has vivid recollections of bolting through bushes at lightning speed, each stride faster and longer as if chased by a ghost. It was his own ghost that he was fleeing to escape.
A survivor of the quadruple killing in Kraal, north-central Clarendon, Thomas is still wracked by the trauma linked to the bloodletting that unfolded on May 7, 2003, a flashpoint that regained international prominence last Thursday when the Trump administration slapped six current and former Jamaican policemen with travel and other sanctions.
Washington’s ban against Reneto Adams, Devon Orlando Bernard, Patrick Anthony Coke, Shayne St Aubyn Lyons, Leford Gordon, and Roderick Anthony Collier resurrected bitter memories for the residents of the rural district. They still claim that the Crime Management Unit, the feared police squad led by Adams, killed the Kraal quartet in cold blood even though they were acquitted in a high-profile case in December 2005.
Reneto Adams
Reneto DeCordova Adams, one of Jamaica’s most feared crime-fighters of all time, says Jamaicans should accept the not guilty verdict that was handed down by the Supreme Court in relation to the murder cases against him and other police personnel that arose out of the fatal shooting of four persons in Kraal district, Clarendon in 2003.
The US State Department appeared to have been referencing to the incident in Kraal district, where members of the Adams-led Crime Management Unit (CMU) were implicated in the controversial killings of two women and two men.
The deceased were identified as 45-year-old Angela Richards, 38-year-old Ferris Lewena Thompson, Matthew James, and a man known only as Renegade .
The timing of America’s public designation of retired senior police officer Reneto Adams, and five members of his long-disbanded Crime Management Unit (CMU), is a bit curious. And it would have carried far more weight if it had been done under a presidency other than Donald Trump’s in its waning days.
But no matter who the messenger is, this development ought to be a reminder of the primacy of human rights in a liberal democracy, a commitment which requires more than pious declarations of support by leaders. Human rights come with a sacred obligation of the State to their protection, especially from abuse or infringement by its actors. Given the specific development, it would be appropriate if the Holness administration reconsiders its change of mind about updating the law to give specific powers of arrest and prosecution to the Independent Commission of Investigations (INDECOM), the agency that investigates complaints against the security forces.
Jamaica’s national security establishment is now grappling with how to deal with four serving policemen who have been sanctioned by a “hypocritical” lame-duck Trump administration for alleged “gross violations in human rights”.
“I’m searching and trying to understand why now; why almost two decades later,” a senior official in the Holness administration said of the US imposing the entry block and other sanctions on the six men and their immediate families over the 2003 incident in Kraal, Clarendon, that left four civilians dead.
“Visas are cancelled all the time, but we’ve hardly ever seen something quite like this where the law is invoked. It must mean something. What? Should current officers in the JCF (Jamaica Constabulary Force) and the army be worried if they are linked to any other controversial shootings?”