THERE was a time, recalls Peter Phillips, when the Jamaican police had the self-confidence to apprehend high-ranking politicians, and even Cabinet ministers, and haul them before the courts for breaches of the law.

But over time, he says, “the weight of political intrusion”, in a highly-politicised country, helped to rob the constabulary of that self-confidence.

“Their self-confidence … has got battered in many respects,” he remarks. “I think that responsible officials ought not to show disrespect and contempt for law enforcement agencies because in doing so they bring the whole structure of laws and the rule of law under threat.”

It is something that Phillips, the new national security minister, intends to reverse.

“It is absolutely essential that we make the effort to build up our law enforcement agencies and the self-confidence of those agencies so that they can act as the protectors of the society as a whole … and be the last line of defence (against criminals),” he says in an interview.

But Phillips says that this alone won’t solve the serious problem of crime and violence in Jamaica and he insists that the debate on the problem in the country focuses too narrowly on politicians and inner-city communities.

“I am not absolving the political parties,” he told the Sunday Observer. “But I am saying that the cancer has spread in all kinds of layers and levels and we need to be very much aware.

“It is not just poor people or people who are operating at street level. It involves people who are operating in lobbies as well and places where there are crystal and China. I myself have had to re-examine a lot of these issues coming into this particular chair.”

Neither does he believe that reversing the country’s crime problem will be a short-term matter and it will involve, he remains adamant, tough action to deal with trans-national criminal organisations and to ensure the security of the state.

In fact, he insists, a substantial reversal of the Jamaican mind-set.

Says he: “You have to also address the mentality or mindset which has come to view permissiveness as being desirable. The view has become all too common place that ‘since man a suffer, we have to (al)low it’.”

Phillips, an academic who has taught government at the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies, took over the national security portfolio in November after what was widely regarded as a successful tenure as minister of transport and works.

He has, for instance, been praised for having, after years of failed effort by others, re-organised Kingston’s ramshackle bus service into a decent, clean and efficient operation and completing, or bringing to near completion, several substantial public infrastructure projects.

Before that he also had a relatively successful stint at the health ministry where his achievements include the rebuilding of the Kingston Public Hospital (KPH) and doing much of the groundwork for the restructuring of the health system.

It is with this reputation, as a man who gets things done, that Phillips has come to the national security ministry, facing high expectations from the public, weary of the country’s high level of crime, especially murders and shooting. Last year, for instance, 1,138 persons were murdered in Jamaica, a 26 per cent increase on 2002 and a record for the country.

Another 148 people were killed by the police. Indeed, Jamaica is said to have one of the world’s highest murder rates and is near the top of the list of countries for its rate of police homicides.

The new minister replaces K D Knight, who held the job for a dozen years and was the longest serving member of the Cabinet in a single portfolio. By the time he was shifted, Knight, who took office when murders were approximately 450 year, had grown highly unpopular and faced regular calls for either his resignation or dismissal.

However, Phillips argues that his predecessor introduced far-reaching measures to remove political interference from the operations of the police force and confine the minister to the role of policy formulation. He also introduced programmes for the restructuring of the constabulary.

“I think that important gains have been made,” says Phillips. “But I don’t think that we are going to recover the levels of self-confidence in three to five years.”

Part of the problem, he acknowledges, has been a failure by government to upgrade and modernise the law enforcement infrastructure, including facilities for the penal system, the police, military and judiciary.

“We haven’t made those investments,” he says. “So that your capacity to enforce laws and deal with all the changes associated with urbanisation and demographic shifts have not kept pace with the needs in these sectors.”

Another contributor to Jamaica’s high levels of violence, Phillips argues, is the trans-national crime links, associated with the drug trade, which provides “resources and impetus to agents of disorder in the society”.

“There is no doubt whatever about it… when you have people organising to bring 40,000 rounds of ammunition and guns into the country,” says the national security minister. “And that is only part of what comes through. When you have people organising a shipment which involves US$30m street value, this is big business.”

It is this level of resources, according to Phillips, that helps to sustain critical gangs which provide protection for the drugs as the contraband moves through Jamaica or protection when they are being stored in various parts of the country.

Additionally, in the face of this level of criminality and its support by big bucks, Phillips notes, the security forces have conceded authority to “alternative centres of power and decision making” that have emerged in some communities.

He points, for example, to situations where the security forces can only go into some communities “heavily armed and in massed numbers” and when they attempt to go in those numbers, either the violence does not stop or they are rebuffed.

In such circumstances, he warns, Jamaica must be prepared for a long battle against narcotics-related crime, similar to the approach the United States has taken to fighting terrorism and crime.

Says Phillips: “One of the things that you have to do is to put in place a modern law enforcement effort that enables you to strangle this kind of industry and then ultimately choke off the sources of finance and supply. This enables you, at the end point of your medium-to-long-term strategy to dismantle the organised crime networks.”

The process, he adds, requires legislative changes to include law enforcement techniques used worldwide such as plea bargaining and the fingerprinting of persons arrested in relation to certain crimes.

“We have to get into the modern world with the use of time-tested and proven techniques of modern law enforcement, which other jurisdictions that are as respectful, or more respectful, of human rights than we are, have implemented,” Phillips says. “We have to recognise those priorities in relation to public interest, while, of course, protecting individual rights.”

The P J Patterson administration has had a rocky relationship with local and foreign human rights advocates over alleged human rights excesses in fighting crime. Phillips, in particular, has been criticised for suggesting that there is a need for new laws to address the local brand of terrorism and savagery attendant to crime.

The minister, however, appears unapologetic about his views.

“I think human rights is a valid concern for any society … and the proliferation of human rights groups is the obverse side of the concern about crime,” he says.

He adds: “If the state does not exist as a viable entity then there is no guarantor or protector of the rights of anyone. The deterioration of public order is in fact bringing the whole fabric of rights into question. The more there is disorder then you find that on all kinds of levels, including state agencies, excesses become the norm.”

Turning around the pervasive law and order problem will demand confronting the general attitude of permissiveness, which Phillips insists, penalises mostly the poor and the powerless who don’t have the means to resist.

For example, vendors who resist structured systems for their operation, who, often are robbed of their goods and are at the mercy of a “rampant criminalism” that which sometimes includes agents of the state.

“It is just the rule of might over right,” Phillips says. “That is what disorder brings. And in that kind of circumstance no civilisation can be nurtured.”

In that regard, he says, Prime Minister P J Patterson intends to establish a public order sub-committee of the Cabinet to address the multi-faceted nature of the problem, which includes vendor relocation, squatting, and illegal taxi operation among other practices.

For Phillips, fixing public order encompasses the maintenance of clean/attractive public spaces, which, he says, helps to “shape the head space” and to give a “sense of pride and self-esteem” to citizens.

Of course, there has been a long-standing nexus here between political parties and persons who operate on the fringes of the law, resulting in the heaping of condemnation on political leaders.

Indeed, Phillips, a vice president of the People’s National Party (PNP), himself has been subject to some of that public odium, such as when he and the water minister, Karl Blythe, and finance minister, Omar Davies, were severely criticised last year for attending the funeral service of William (Willie Haggart) Moore, a political ‘don’ from Davies’ South St Andrew constituency. Moore and three of his colleagues were gunned down gangland style at a street corner in the community.

“The kinds of linkages about which people are berating the so-called dons are not restricted to dons,” Phillips argues. “There are companies that have persons working in their midst that they need to look at as well. This is because there is a penetration (by criminal elements) into all sections of the society. Therefore, everybody needs to make the decision to isolate criminal elements.”

Phillips also rejects the notion that corruption starts and ends in the police force, arguing that it concerns all levels of the society.

He cites the recent drug finds on the Port of Kingston and says that it is not only “low level people” who are involved. Those involved, he says, are employed in the private and public sectors.

Additionally, Phillips says, money laundering operations do not take place without “some corrupt participation” on the part of some of the significant people in the institutions that facilitate them.

At the same time, though, Phillips stresses that he will seek to strengthen procedures and structures to make it easier to remove corrupt members of the constabulary.

On whether Jamaica will have the capacity to attack the problem of criminality and corruption on all fronts at the same time, Phillips responds: “Other states — the Americans, the Canadians and the Europeans — have an interest in our security issues and, generally, our neighbours in the hemisphere all recognise that we are dealing with trans-national criminal networks.”

Political watchers say that Phillips’ performance in this ministry could be important to the political fortunes of the PNP and what is perceived as his own ambitions for the post-Patterson leadership of the PNP — issues which he attempts to downplay.

After nearly 13 years in office public perception is that the PNP could be facing defeat by the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) in elections that Patterson has to call by yearend.

Recent opinion polls have shown the JLP with a lead over the PNP, although in the latest survey that lead was shaved to five percentage points, from nine points three months earlier.

With the fear of crime and violence, outside of the economy, as a major concern of voters, perception of Phillips’ success in dealing with the problem of the portfolio, analysts say, could be very important in the outcome of the ballot.

Phillips claims, however, that despite his party trailing in the polls the “momentum has shifted” in favour of the PNP. It is just that it has not yet reflected in the opinion surveys.

“When the PNP does get into campaign mode, then the population will get a chance to see the clear advantages on the part of the PNP — the depth of the team and the unity,” he says. “The team within the PNP makes it the better choice. There is no political party in the history of the country that has managed to be at this point in a third term with as much political support as the PNP has.”

Phillips justifies JLP leader, Edward Seaga’s popularity lead over Patterson on the basis that Seaga has been out campaigning all of last year while Patterson was not.

Further, he says, the PNP and Patterson have operated much more with a “collegial leadership and image”, thus giving visibility to persons other than the party leader. The same, he claims, is not the case with the JLP.

Phillips side-steps questions about his own leadership ambitions, although it is widely known that he has been attempting to establish his base within the party for a challenge once Patterson leaves the stage.

His likely rival is the hugely popular Portia Simpson Miller, the tourism minister. For the first time in November, Phillips came out ahead of Simpson Miller as the minister who Jamaicans believe was the best performer. For years Simpson Miller, a grassroots politician, was a shoo-in for the most popular and best performer slots.

But Phillips tells the Sunday Observer: “I don’t think leadership is a question of ambition. Anybody who goes grasping after it in the search for vain glory does not understand what it is about; and will be disappointed about what it is.

“Leadership is essentially about sacrifice, duty and obligation, so it is not something that I wake up in the mornings and dream and search for. If called upon to do it I will try and do it to the best of my abilities.”

Would he be prepared to serve in a cabinet led Simpson Miller?

“I will be prepared to serve and make my contribution to the PNP as long as I think I can make a useful contribution,” he says. “I have never in politics engaged in any kind of long-term career planning. I never contemplated coming to national security. I am just a comrade in the PNP who is prepared to give service to the party and country in the best way I can…”