By *Guevara Leacock
On A View from the Outside this week, we turn our attention to police brutality with the view being that some members of the Royal St. Vincent and the Grenadines Police Force (RSVGPF) continue to brutally abuse and assault citizens of St. Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG) and it is time for the government to put back the legal framework that makes police brutality harder to commit and easier to punish. There is no justice without police accountability.
The Police and Criminal Evidence Act, known across the Commonwealth simply as PACE, was for years part of the legal framework of SVG. The United Kingdom introduced PACE in 1984 after several scandals involving police forces, including forced confessions, deaths in police custody, and a string of wrongful convictions that shook public confidence in the criminal justice system.
PACE set out codes of practice that the police had to follow when they stopped, searched, arrested, detained and questioned people. It told officers what they could do, and, just as importantly, what they could not. In our own jurisdiction, SVG, PACE did the same work. It governed how the RSVGPF conducted criminal investigations.
Early in the life of the Unity Labour Party (ULP) administration, the PACE framework was removed. It quietly disappeared. Something that sat at the very heart of the criminal justice system, regulating the conduct of the people who carry out the state’s power to detain and to use force, was simply removed with no replacement.
It is worth at this juncture to be clear about what the PACE codes actually do. They govern, for example, how long a person can be held before being charged. It sets rules for how interviews are conducted and recorded, so that a confession, for example, cannot be manufactured. It protects access to a lawyer, and it regulates the use of police searches so that they are not arbitrarily conducted.
None of this ties an officer’s hands in fighting crime. What it does is create a record, a procedure, and a line that cannot be crossed without consequence. When that framework is removed, the evidence trail that protects the public and, protects honest and good police officers is also removed.
Why should every Vincentian be concerned about this? The removal of PACE from the legal framework of SVG is an erosion of the rule of law. In other words, the police force becomes a law unto themselves.
A commentary published in the Searchlight newspaper on Feb. 4, 2011, by former presenter of A View From The Outside and barrister-at-law, Brereton Horne, put the concern plainly:
“When you talk about the rule of law, you are talking about laws that protect every citizen, and the confidence that no person (including police officers) is above the law.’”
Horne asked an important question: “Why would any government, in this case the ULP government, abolish a law designed to restrain the police, unless there were some underlying motive?” You can form your own view about what that motive was. The principle, however, matters most. Anyone who cares about human rights and civil liberties should be troubled when the rules that bind the police force are loosened rather than tightened.
Every Vincentian should remember another change to the laws in SVG made in 2011, when the law was amended to require the director of public prosecutions to approve any private criminal complaint before it could proceed. Taken together, these actions by the ULP government chip away at the ordinary citizen’s ability to hold power to account. There is a clear pattern, and we, on A View from the Outside, say that when the rules that restrain the police are removed at the same time as the routes for citizens to seek redress are narrowed, the balance between the individual and the state shifts in one direction. The state holds ultimate power over the citizen and that cannot be right.
Some lawyers and others in SVG will defend the removal of PACE. They would say that PACE was a transplant from England, ill-suited to local conditions, and that the existing criminal code, the common law and the Constitution still protect the accused. That argument deserves a hearing but the real test of a safeguard is what happens once it is gone, and the record of police brutality on ordinary Vincentians over the last two decades is not reassuring.
Consider the case of Jemark Jackson. In November 2008, three detectives beat a 15-year-old boy so badly that he spent a week in a coma. In February 2010, a court convicted a corporal of police and two constables of police of that assault. One might expect a conviction for beating a child to end the career of a police officer.
But alas, it did not. The three men were back on duty by April 2011. Years later, in 2014, the then commissioner of police publicly defended his predecessor’s decision, saying he would have done the same because the officers were, in his words, hardworking men who had simply erred. In the same interview, the then commissioner of police explained that other officers who had faced charges, including one accused of rape and two linked to missing station funds, had also been brought back into the police force.
We on A View from the Outside are of the view that the Jemark Jackson episode set the tone for what was to come. Journalist, lawyer and former Speaker of the House, Jomo Sanga Thomas, writing in 2023, described what he saw as a clear pattern of rogue police officers welcomed and encouraged rather than removed.
He was writing about another incident, the assault of 15-year-old Damali Phillips by a station sergeant during a police youth club trip, an assault captured on video and circulated on social media. Thomas noted that the officer was not suspended but continued to wear his uniform and work with young people while the police high command said it was investigating.
What has been the outcome of that alleged assault, we ask?
The list does not stop there. In 2021, lawyer Kay Bacchus-Baptiste announced she would sue the state after two sisters from Glen, Asheka Antoine and Shomorn Haynes, accused police officers of beating them in their own home. Bacchus-Baptiste told reporters at the time that it was the third complaint of police brutality to reach her in three days.
In 2025, a tattoo artist, Tristan Williams, who alleged that police beat him in Ottley Hall, found himself charged with trespass and resisting arrest. In May 2026, a video showed officers repeatedly beating a handcuffed man in the middle of Kingstown, near Coreas and the Central Market, while one of them appeared to draw a firearm. This very week, on Tuesday, June 24, lawyer Carlos James served notice of intended legal action against the state on behalf of Kenton Harris, a man James describes as mentally vulnerable, who he says was assaulted on three separate occasions in police custody and escort and suffered a fractured arm.
In considering these matters, we must be fair to the police. Most police officers in SVG serve honestly and at real personal risk. The police force itself, responding to the May 2026 video, did not defend the conduct. Its statement said plainly that brutality, unlawful force and intimidation have no place in the organisation. They claimed that no police officer would be protected by rank or friendship and that public confidence had been damaged and had to be remedied by accountability.
Carlos James drew the same distinction, saying there are very good police officers and that his complaint was about grave injustice, not the police force as a whole.
In September 2023, Magistrate John Ballah, himself a former assistant superintendent of police, said he would not condone brutality and would dismiss cases tainted by “police excesses”. These are not the words of a criminal justice system comfortable with police brutality. They are the words of people inside the system who know something is wrong.
However, there is an uncomfortable irony which emerged this week on Tuesday. Carlos James, the lawyer now serving notice against the state, is himself a member of the Unity Labour Party and served as a minister in a government that, in its second term in early 2006, removed the use of PACE in criminal procedure in SVG.
The party, the government that removed the statutory code regulating police conduct now produces, from its own ranks, a lawyer holding the state to account for the conduct of its police force. The safeguards a government dismantles while in office are often the ones its own people, and sometimes its own members, later need. This is not to say, however, that my learned friend Mr. James agrees with the removal of PACE. Clearly he doesn’t. Oh the irony.
In fairness, we, on A View from the Outside, cannot objectively prove that the rise in and continuation of police brutality complaints in SVG was caused by the removal of PACE. Crime, policing and public trust shift for many reasons, and the complaints are contested. What we can say is this: removing the rulebook did not make the problem better, and a long line of incidents, convictions and lawsuits suggests removing it did nothing to help.
So what now? There is a new government, and with it an opportunity. The New Democratic Party administration should restore PACE, or enact a modern equivalent legislation suited to our own circumstances. The honourable attorney general does not have to start from a blank page. Across the region, including in Trinidad and Tobago, there are established models for regulating police conduct and for independent oversight of complaints against officers.
Trinidad operates an independent authority to investigate complaints against the police, separate from the police themselves. A Vincentian statute could combine clear codes of practice for stop, search, arrest and detention with an independent complaints mechanism, so that a Vincentian who is beaten or otherwise brutalised by the police does not have to rely on the goodwill of the very institution that employs the police officer.
Good police officers benefit most from clear rules because clear rules protect them from false accusations, just as they protect the public from brutality and abuse. A police force bound by transparent standards is a more trusted police force, and a more trusted force is a more effective one.
The removal of PACE was a quiet act. Restoring proper regulation of police conduct should be a deliberate one. The measure of this new government will not be how loudly it condemns brutality after each video appears, but whether it puts back the legal framework that makes police brutality harder to commit and easier to punish.
*Guevara Leacock is a barrister at law of Lincoln’s Inn in England and an attorney at law in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. He has a keen interest in history and politics and is a social commentator.
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