Personal rights being violated

Saturday night the 28 of January just before 12am, I was summoned to El Caboose, my late night kitchen at McField Square by a member of staff who had reported that large numbers of police were stationed outside and inside my property.

I attended shortly after and found that my usual Saturday night customers had disappeared and two uniform police officers sitting very comfortably in my chairs. I asked a constable who is known to me as the brother of one of my George Town representatives, if there had been or was a problem. The constable said there was no problem and that everything was OK and then continued to toy with his telephone. I then wanted to know why these two officers were loafing in chairs and they had purchased no food and politely Mr. Solomon informed me that this was a situation of proactive policing.

Proactive policing I support; but I do not accept that bullying by our police service is any different than bullying by our gangs and their members. Or how does the Commissioner of Police define these actions against my business? A business I am working hard to build and am dependent upon for financial survival. Are these actions directives of the National Security Council, which now has as members politicians and their appointees? Or are these actions solely the result of the Commissioner’s concerns for peace, order and the safety of individuals?

Madam Editor, I would really like to know why the police are destroying my attempts at feeding my family! And perhaps your paper can assist me in finding out just how my business can be invade and destroyed by the police when I have not been charged for any crime nor have any person made a complaint against me or my business that I have been made aware of. The police biased focus on EL Caboose would not be so obvious if there were not similar places allowed to operate after customers were driven away from my place to those places.

Madam Editor, the right to free lawful gathering and expression should be a universal right and whether in Tehran or Cayman, people’s behaviour should not be dictated by laws made and maintained by legislators who win their elections by pandering to a one sided morally constructed understanding of what is right and wrong. The foundation of the laws of modern capitalist democracies are framed not according to what the majority believes to be good but according to what appears to be rational and fair. We were forced by the United Kingdom to remove capital punishment and laws against homosexuality from our statue books because these laws denied rights to certain individuals; yet we have a British Commissioner of Police who is using his police powers to deny rights to persons in the Cayman Islands that he could not deny his own people back home. Why? Because he knows he would be challenged in the courts by attorneys interested as much in justice as in money.

From my vantage point, policing in Grand Cayman has become each day more and more like the social control policies of 17th and 18th century West Indian plantation societies. It appears as if our police are to establish what in Caribbean sociology is referred to as a total institution; a place where compliance is achieved by force rather that consensus and cooperation. And that this development should be taken place at a time when a code of international human rights is about to take effect in this colony must raise some questions as to the possible cost our country will one day pay for the use of aggressive mercenary forces in our community.

Frank McField