Complaints not to, but about the PCA

THIS YEAR, for Ornella Greaves’s family, Christmas was cancelled.

Last Friday, her children woke to a house without her. Her husband Darren Joseph spent the day mourning his wife.

Ms Greaves died after being injured during a protest near the Beetham Highway six months ago. She was pregnant.

The only holiday gift that might have been a source of comfort to her family is justice. As we head into 2021, it is a gift they still await.

Beetham residents say police were responsible for Greaves’s death. Police Commissioner Gary Griffith, however, has sought to put distance between his officers and these events, which occurred in the uproar after police-involved killings that same month in Morvant.

Whether she was killed through police action, carelessness or some other cause, Ms Greaves’s family has a right to know. As does the nation.

The case seems a textbook example of the kind of situation for which the Police Complaints Authority (PCA) was designed.

But, today, exactly ten years after president George Maxwell Richards signed the proclamation bringing the PCA statute into full force, there are serious questions over the powers, performance and composition of this watchdog body.

According to a statement issued by the PCA on Saturday, the David West-led organisation will commemorate ten years by, among other things, launching a new visual brand identity.

It need not bother. Cosmetic changes will serve little purpose.

While the PCA has welcomed recent legislative reforms, saying it will benefit “from broader evidence-gathering capabilities,” it is not apparent that any of these changes will radically alter its delays, its ensnarement in party politics, and its reliance on other agencies – including the very police it must investigate.

Is it worth celebrating ten years of the PCA when it has not been able to convince any government to give it the powers it says it badly needs?

And what of its record on high-profile cases? Though a PCA inquiry into an assistant commissioner of police got the PCA into hot water with Mr Griffith this year, the official sailed off into the sunset (retirement, sick leave) making it seem this was simply a case of flogging a dead horse.

In June, the PCA announced a probe into Ms Greaves’s death as well as the Morvant killings. Since then, its record on accountability has been shaky, even after it forwarded confidential findings in relation to the latter to prosecutors.

Over the years, other big probes have led to no results whatsoever.

In 2017, two years after the fact, Mr West recommended charges in relation to the infamous “day of total policing.”

As with so much else involving the PCA, it was met not with justice but total inaction.