Last week's report of the Clarendon police seeking to find the owners of firearms left at stations in the parish - some apparently for as long as half a century - might have been, in other circumstances, hilariously funny.

We could conjure up visions of wizened and toothless old men, alerted by the police's newspaper advertisement, turning up to claim cobweb-encased muskets. Except that there is nothing funny or good about the discovery, except, perhaps, the fact that these weapons are not in the hands of criminals.

This development underlines just how poor is the system of accountability in the constabulary and raises the question of what is to be done about it. Change, though, demands first an acceptance in the constabulary that something is wrong with its management; fundamentally so.

Few things concentrate the minds of Jamaicans as guns and their impact on the society. Of the more than 1,000 homicides here already this year, and of the over 1,600 committed annually, about 80 per cent are caused by gunshot wounds. Many other Jamaicans are injured each year with guns.

Fear and terror

To put it mildly, guns are objects of fear and terror for the vast majority of Jamaicans and a matter, supposedly, of significant focus for law-enforcement officials. We would, therefore, expect the police to be absolutely in control of information about the guns in their inventory. In the first place, that is just what is expected for professional organisations.

But for the police, there are two other important reasons, both of which are related. It is often argued that the rate of criminal violence is as high as it is because criminals can act with impunity, escaping arrest and conviction. Part of the blame is on the assumed ineffectiveness of the police, a claim likely to be fuelled by this case of guns not accounted for.

It is not unreasonable to ask whether any of the guns discovered in the Clarendon armoury were used in crimes and should have been evidence in court cases, but were forgotten by the police. If the answer is yes, the consequence is obvious.

Public trust

Then there is the matter of public trust. It is a common complaint that it is the habit of the police to plant guns at crime scenes in an effort to incriminate mostly poor, inner-city suspects. Such weapons, it is said, often come from guns that may have been recovered from other crime scenes or otherwise illegally acquired by police officers. Access to such weapons, clearly, is that much easier, if there is a surfeit of guns, the origin of which is not known.

What is surprising about the Clarendon revelations is the apparent lack of a centralised system of accounting for firearms, no matter where a gun is held or by whom it is left, as well as the seeming absence of an inspectorate for firearms. So, in Clarendon, paper tags with the names and addresses of the guns have become worn and faded and the information, apparently, is held nowhere else.

It would seem to us that every gun that comes into the possession of the police, for whatever reason, should find its way into a central database and all its movements similarly tracked. That can't be beyond the police.