Jamaica’s former Commissioner of Police says a stockpile of illegal guns and other weapons landed in Kingston days prior to the Tivoli raids.
Former commissioner of police Owen Ellington testified that the police got intelligence that an aeroplane with illegal weapons landed at the airstrip in Vernamfield, Clarendon, days before the May 24, 2010 operation to apprehend Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke.
He testified that the cargo of guns landed on May 20. Ellington, who was being questioned by Peter Champagnie, said the guns did not belong to the police.
The former top cop said he was not immediately made aware of the report of the illegal shipment. He testified also that it had been reported by the police, who were by the Kingston Harbour, that 15 row boats with heavily armed men were heading toward Portmore in St Catherine.
The former commissioner also testified that gangs affiliated with Coke had planned to create disturbances across the island to stretch the resources of the police.
Former Prime Minister Bruce Golding on Thursday denied that he told US Charge d’affaires Isaiah Parnell that non-combatants were being “summarily” killed and women raped during the security forces’ operation to apprehend former don Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke.
Golding made the denial while being questioned by Lord Anthony Gifford, QC, during the Tivoli Gardens enquiry.
Gifford had questioned Golding about the content of an e-mail sent in May 2010 by Isaiah Parnell, the US charge d’affaires in Jamaica, to a colleague after meeting with Golding a day after the May 24 operation to apprehend Coke started.
Parnell had told his colleague that Golding had told him that women were being raped and non-combatants were being “summarily shot”, but that “our military assets could not confirm this”.
Asked if what Parnell said to his colleague, that Golding could not trust the reporting from the Jamaica Defence Force, and sent Bishop Herro Blair, then public defender and then head of the Red Cross Dr Jaslin Stewart into Tivoli was indeed his position, Golding said he sent the men into Tivoli Gardens because of conflicting reports, and he was in search of truth.
Below is another article originally ran by the Huffington Post that exposes more of the disgusting and hate-filled commentary shared among officers and other public officials within our grand ole’ justice system.
The ramped media coverage of police officers shooting to kill unarmed black men in various cities across America are extreme examples of police brutality taking place within the criminal judicial system.
I am certainly not saying police have an easy job.
Quite frankly I couldn’t do their job, however law enforcement officers are supposed to be sworn to protect the public from the “bad guys”.
With exposure of this kind of conduct by ‘our police’ I am not so sure who the real bad guys are anymore.The jury is still out on that one!
The release of racist and offensive emails by city officials in Ferguson, Missouri, touched off a firestorm of criticism across the country this week, with swift moral outrage and demands for immediate change.
It is the type of progressive change that was missing this time last year, when it was revealed that a similar series of emails were allegedly sent and received by white detectives at a Louisiana sheriff’s office.
Similarly to Ferguson, the racially charged emails depicted black men as animals, likened President Barrack Obama to a monkey and referred to African Americans as the “entitlement crowd.”
There was also an offensive joke referencing the rape of white women by black men.
“Two black guys are at a bar talking. One says to the other, ‘You ever notice after you have sex with a white woman that your eyes burn, your nose burns and you get all teary-eyed?’ The second black guy says, ‘Yeah all the time.’ The other says, ‘Why is that?’ The second guy says, ‘I think it’s the pepper spray.'”
Unlike Ferguson, there was no national outrage.
The Louisiana emails were exposed in May 2014 by Belinda Parker-Brown, president and CEO of Louisiana United International, a Slidell-based civil rights organization. According to Brown, the 13 email messages she obtained — nearly twice as many as those uncovered in Ferguson — were received and forwarded by two high-ranking St. Tammany Parish Sheriff’s Office employees.
Last Thursday, city officials in Ferguson released to The Washington Post seven racist emails that included jokes about Obama, African Americans and Muslims. The release of the messages came in the wake of a Justice Department investigation into the 2014 shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown by an officer with the Ferguson Police Department.
One of the Ferguson emails even references Louisiana:
“An African-American woman in New Orleans was admitted into the hospital for a pregnancy termination. Two weeks later, she received a check for $5,000. She phoned the hospital to ask who it was from. The hospital said, ‘Crimestoppers.'”
While the Ferguson and Louisiana emails are equally shocking, Parker-Brown told The Huffington Post she is not surprised by the ones that surfaced in her own community.
The Louisiana parish where the email exchanges allegedly took place is the same parish that former Ku Klux Klansman David Duke calls home.
David Duke outside the Patriot Book Store in New Orleans in 1978. Photo: Associated Press
It is also where Sheriff Rodney “Jack” Strain once said, “If you’re gonna walk the streets of St. Tammany Parish with dreadlocks and chee wee hairstyles, then you can expect to be getting a visit from a sheriff’s deputy.”
The Pen Hustle With Brandy Cavalli 
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