The Tribune

WHAT started in the sixties as a deliberate effort to suppress press freedom, over time morphed into an accepted tradition — the police gave scant information to the press. It was that generation of officers who did not invite public cooperation. They believed that a community slept better at night if it did not know what was going on.

Some of the older members of the force — many of them now dead — knew how valuable The Tribune had been in the past in helping them solve some of their cases, and individually they quietly tried to maintain the flow of information. Today we recall two big cases in particular, one that took place in the late Sir Etienne’s day, which involved extortion, and the other in our day that dealt with kidnapping.

But on the whole crime was hush-hush. It could be happening all around you, but you didn’t necessarily know about it.

The one lone voice, who was literally crying in the wilderness, was the voice of now retired assistant commissioner of police, Paul Thompson. He did not believe that the police could do their best work unless the public was fully on board. And to be fully on board, the public had to be informed. He did not believe in all the secrecy that surrounded the force at that time.

And then one night, Mr Thompson’s position was fully vindicated. It happened one Saturday night in the late sixties.

At that time The Tribune was an evening publication. Traditionally we worked late. But on Saturday nights we were particularly late because we always drove out west to the home of one of our brothers to pick up one of his young sons who always spent the weekend with us. When we eventually arrived at our home in the east and opened the front door, chaotic destruction met our eyes. Thieves had been there. They had leisurely parked their van at our front door, smashed the seaside windows from where, unless there was a passing boat, there would have been no witnesses, and took their time cleaning out our possessions. They had emptied every drawer in the house and strewn its contents all over the floor. So on our arrival, with a terrified youngster in arms, and tired from a hard week, we faced a home that had been destroyed by vandals.

However, the most upsetting part of all was to have a senior police officer inform us that break-ins in our area had been a nightly occurrence for weeks. Yet they had warned nobody. Here we were in the news business and we had no inkling that while we slept peacefully at night the homes of our neighbours on all sides were being destroyed. No wonder many Eastern road residents were nervous, and one, years later, spooked by all the terror, took the law into his own hands and got into trouble. It is only if you yourself had lived under the same conditions that you could sympathise with him — he could not depend on the police and so, in a rash moment, he settled the matter his way.

As the police tramped through our home making matters worse by spraying their black dust on everything to get fingerprints, one kept advising us not to print anything about our experience. “We don’t want to get people nervous!” he said. By that time we were so annoyed that we could have tossed him into the ocean. If we had known, and if the neighbours had known, none of us would have been in the predicament that we found ourselves in that night. All thanks to police secrecy.

We informed that officer that this was now our story and we intended to tell it in all its gruesome detail. He belonged to the old school of police secrecy. We belonged to the Paul Thompson school that believed that the more the public knew the nearer the police would be to tracking the crooks.

On Monday our story made headlines. By 5pm the same day it was in the hands of a resident on Skyline Drive. In the article we advised residents that if they saw a car that was strange in their area to call the police immediately. As the resident held The Tribune in one hand, out of curiosity he looked out of his window. Below he saw a parked station wagon. Furniture was being moved from a neighbouring house to the station wagon. He was not certain whether it was a legitimate moving operation, or whether it was the culprits the police were searching for. He took no chances. He phoned the police. There was immediate response and within a day of our break-in the offenders were behind bars. It was a gang of thieves that had made a clean sweep of the East and had now moved West. They felt very secure because the police had not informed the community and so no one was suspicious of a movers’ van in their area.

While the world, through US television, was being informed last week that the “Teardrop Rapist” who had attacked dozens of women in Los Angeles since 1996, had struck again, rapists in Nassau were on the prowl under the cover of secrecy.

It seems significant after the story of rapes, burglaries and armed robberies in the east and west broke in the press, and the police put out wanted bulletins, in less than 24 hours three men were in custody helping police in their investigations.

This should be sufficient proof that only police and public working together can solve crime and that it is the duty of the police to keep the public informed so that they can themselves provide their own protection.