I welcomed a Beaconite’s comments on encountering two police motorcyclists slowing down the traffic on De Castro Street (the item, titled “Lord of the Roads,” appeared in the Reporter’s Notebook section on May 25). While in uniform, the officers represented the entire Royal Virgin Islands Police Force. Your reporter’s disappointment at their behaviour was reflected in her suggestion that instead of being rude to her they could have explained their actions as “good community policing.” They chose to let down their colleagues instead.
The public is being urged to assist the police in tackling crime and antisocial behaviour more effectively, from encouraging young scooter-riders to behave more responsibly to coming forward with information that might lead to the conviction of murderers. However, such demonstrations of misbehaviour by individual officers can lead from disappointment to disillusionment and even distrust of them all. The police are public servants, not our masters.
I attended primary school in Eastwood, a sprawling English village. Bobbies wearing their distinctive spiked helmets must have regularly cycled past me, but were such familiar sights that I cannot recall seeing one. I was brought up to trust the police, as epitomised in the old music-hall song that states, “If you want to know the time, ask a policeman.”
I passed our local police station at Bell House Corner every Saturday morning and afternoon going to town and back by bus, but never entered it. A bell used to direct and reassure travellers passing through neighbouring woods infested with wild animals and villains. Brian, my best friend, lived some distance from our house across some fields, but the only danger I encountered in crossing them after dark was being butted by a billy goat.
One day, Brian and I stayed on for a film starring our favourite comedian. After it finished, we found we had missed the last bus home, so we confidently went to the police station for help. An unsmiling officer took down our details and sat us on hard benches in a passageway, with laughter coming from the neighbouring office. We were not offered a drink, a smile or any news of what was happening. We felt like criminals.
Our parents collected us in taxis after an unending hour or two. They had been worried sick about our whereabouts until a police motorcyclist had knocked on their doors. My parents had neither a telephone nor a car at that time, but Brian’s father, a horticulturalist, had called for the taxis, which no doubt charged top rates at that hour.
We promised our parents we would ask their permission if ever again we wanted to be out in the evening, but agreed between ourselves that in the unlikely event of us being stuck for transport we would try hitch-hiking home rather than go to the police. We had become completely disillusioned with those in town.
Cybercrime
Your editorial on the same opinion page, “VI should get serious about cyber security,” came none too soon. It specifically followed up your front-page story about the recent worldwide spread of ransomware, but hackers may have been operating in the territory for years. Shortly after the Computer Misuse and Cybercrime Act 2014 was passed, Google warned my wife of suspicious activity on her PC.
Two Criminal Investigation Department officers said to be cybercrime specialists visited us in response to our report. They were sympathetic but just told us to call them again if it re-occurred. My wife then had the hassle of changing her e-mail address, and she still gets an error message every morning about her old one.
A year later, Google stopped apparently the same hacker(s) getting into my e-mail, and I was excited that Google also gave me their IP and the district in Tortola within which it operated. However, LIME’s customer service agent (in Jamaica?) was emphatic that they could not locate hackers from an IP. I had to insist that my query was recorded.
When I rang the RVIPF to speak to their “cybercrime specialists,” I was transferred to someone in our local police station who used to work for LIME. He advised me to take a printout of Google’s e-mail to LIME’s office, where someone could tell me who had tried to hack my account. After a long wait in line, LIME’s IT specialist merely asked me if I had changed my password as I should be safe if so. He rather reluctantly agreed to investigate Google’s e-mail.
Nobody at LIME knew anything about the e-mail when I tried to follow up later, and its office has since been reorganised into one geared more to taking money for equipment, top-ups and bill payments than providing customer services. Are they and the police really energised to investigate cyber crime yet?
The knife
Another report in the same issue, headed “HMP inmate charged for prison stabbing,” reminded me of another incident which has tested my confidence in the police. There had been a similar report of a stabbing not long before I picked up a plastic bag concealed at the side of the road containing a large kitchen knife, apparently brand-new, while clearing trash from Balsam Ghut Road (see my commentary “Adopt-a-road proposed for the VI” in the April 17, 2014 edition). It was the first potentially offensive weapon I’ve found before or since, although there might have been a perfectly acceptable reason for it being there.
I was careful how I handled the bag and took it to the local police station, thinking it might at least be accepted as lost property. The staff on duty appeared nonplussed as to how to treat the issue, then turned to a senior officer who had just arrived. I was appalled to hear him laugh and ask me if I intended to stab someone with it. Knowing how lost property is supposed to be handled, I asked if he wanted my name and address. After he said it would not be necessary, I retreated to my car and told my wife why I’d been so long and my disquiet at my treatment.
As Robert Burns wrote in the poem “To a Louse, “O would some power the giftie gie us to see ourselves as others see us” (O would some power the gift to give us to see ourselves as others see us).
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