Laura Tanna, Contributor
Deputy Commissioner of Police Mark Shields - RUDOLPH BROWN/CHIEF PHOTOGRAPHER
MARK SHIELDS' demeanour is highly profes-sional. Bright, affable, a fluent, but careful speaker who has a passion for police work, Shields is far more qualified for the treacherous job as deputy commissioner in the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF), Crime Portfolio, than some might realise. In our interview of March 28, when asked whether there was resentment over his salary, recently published in the media, he replied, "No, none at all.
"It's common sense that if you come to work in Jamaica for NCB, for the Post Office, for Cable and Wireless, for the police, or for any other company, you will expect people will be paid what they would be paid at home. Because we all have financial commitments in our own country. To come here and do a difficult and dangerous job, or a complex job in another field, and then to take a significant pay cut, would be illogical. Totally illogical. I can tell you I've received absolutely no resentment. The only people who've ever raised an issue about salary has been the press."
SENSE OF SERVICE
Shields himself entered the police force at age 17. When asked what he would say to a young Jamaican about a career in the force here, he answered: "If a person joins the police, whether it's in Argentina, or Jamaica or England, they do it because they have a sense that they want to serve their community. They want to do a job that they feel worthwhile doing. I would be the first to admit that in Jamaica it is even more difficult and dangerous, particularly because the police pay is grossly inadequate. It's almost obscene when you look at what a Constable is taking home every month to try to support himself or herself and family." In fact, a constable's pay ranges from $7,675.42 to $8,684.03 per week truly inadequate compensation when asking another human being to put his or her life on the line to protect the rest of us.
Intent on discussing the work of the team which he supports here, I press Shields first to describe his qualifications and past experience before moving into a discussion of how crime can be conquered in Jamaica.
FAMILY
Born in London in August 1958, Shields grew up there and in Kent, with one brother, now also a policeman. Their mother was a nurse, their father a senior civil servant in the Ministry of Defence during the Cold War. "I think he was involved somehow in procuring various parts for nuclear missiles, so it was all very secret, but that was the gist of it."
Mark clashed with his father's personality and left home, age 17, to join the City of London Police Force. "I saw the police in terms of wanting to work with the community, to do something that I considered to be worthwhile." He gained promotion quickly. "I've got this sixth sense that I can see when something is going on. So my arrest rate has been extremely high throughout my career. After my initial training (two years), I went straight into basically being a detective of one sort or another," He recalled.
"I worked on a number of specialist units, such as the Regional Crime Squad - which doesn't exist anymore; we now have a National Crime Squad - where we were going after the most difficult and dangerous criminals within our region - people involved in contract killings, stealing lorry loads, involved in armed robbery, drug trafficking - so I was exposed to that sort of policing in my mid-20s.
"When I was 28 or 29 I was promoted to inspector, and moved into a completely different sphere of policing. I was made head of Special Branch in the City of London. The emphasis then was on Irish Republican terrorism. At that time there was still a threat from China and Russia - espionage.
The Police did a lot of work for the security service, so I was involved in intelligence, counter-intelligence and terrorism.
I was also involved in the protection of VIPs when they came into the City of London, and worked with people like Mrs. Thatcher and other members of the Cabinet and the Royal family. "Then I managed to get a scholarship through the police and went to the University of Essex for three years." When asked, he said he gained a bachelors of arts degree in government and politics, a field for which
Essex is noted as one of the top U.K. universities. Returning to active duty immediately after one of the worst terrorist attacks in London, he recalls:
"We'd just had a huge truck bomb at Bishop's Gate, in the heart of the City of London. It was the second such bomb and the scene looked like something out of Hiroshima. It completely destroyed businesses in a radius of about a quarter of a mile. It was a HUGE, HUGE bomb and a delegation of senior business people went to the City of London's Lord Mayor and to Government and said: "If you cannot guarantee that you'll protect us from another terrorist attack, we will move to Frankfurt.
"When you consider that the financial services industry for the U.K. is a huge part of our economy, the City of London had to do something about it. We developed what we call "The Ring of Steel". We monitored, through CCTV [closed circuit television], through access points into the City of London, every single motorcar. We are able to record digitally every registration plate on every car, which is instantly checked to see if it was lost or stolen, or of police interest. We also have a graphic image of the driver and of the front passenger of every person who came into the City as well. That system is ten years old, but now far more sophisticated.
"We've also looked at the cameras of every bank, building society and other private institutions in the City of London. We've documented what those systems are and have access to those systems. Some would say: 'Oh, but that's an infringement of civil liberties.' But look what happened on the 7th of July last year when the Al-Qaeda terrorist attacks happened on the tube in London, the second wave of attacks. Two terrorists panicked, ran out of the tube station and the images we were able to get, we put on TV within hours. People were ringing up and identifying those terrorists. What would we prefer? A system where we can't do that? Or a system where we can? I think Jamaica's got a lot to learn from that experience!
"I worked as Project Manager for the Ring of Steel, coordinating the installation of all these cameras, getting the right technology and everything else. Did that for a year, then went to Frankfurt where I was the drugs and organised crime liaison officer. My responsibility was for intelligence and conducting covert operations in Germany and Eastern Europe, going to places like Belarus, Ukraine and Poland. It was quite interesting. I also had responsibility for Switzerland, places like Geneva, Bern, Zurich. That was more money-laundering.
"At that time I was married and took my wife and children with me. We lived as a normal family in Germany, had a nice house there, in a beautiful town just north of Frankfurt, a wonderful place to live. I had to learn German in six months, which was hard. It's normally on a Friday evening and you're trying to remember the German for: 'We have to arrange a controlled delivery for twenty-five kilos of cocaine that's concealed in a truck, or whatever, which is going from here to here.' Or I'm speaking to a German colleague about running an undercover operation. It was all quite technical.
"I was never involved in front-line undercover operations but coordinated many undercover operations. I ran sources of intelligence that gave us lots of good intelligence about Russian organised crime, money laundering, all sorts of things, running heroin through Eastern Europe and into the UK. I went into some of the deepest, darkest places in Eastern Europe to visit people in prisons who'd been arrested, who had this connection with the U.K. So it was good fun.
"I had the possibility to stay for another two years but my interest was in getting promoted and developing myself further so I came back to the UK, and worked in the County Force for a couple of years to get some basic policing experience again. Then I was promoted. But it was a huge culture shock, a completely different policing environment. People always think when you work abroad that you're having the most wonderful time on some cocktail circuit, when in fact you work just as hard as you do anywhere else. The decision was that I should develop myself by getting a bit more 'command experience.' Rather than argue, I said 'Fine,' and worked as Division Crime Manager, in Clacton-on-Sea in Essex on the North Sea, very cold, quite bleak, full of slot machines, kiss-me-quick hacks, and candy floss. You know, that sort of place. The area itself was interesting. Lots of elderly people; lots of young people committing crime; lots of drugs. Problems like that.
"Then I went back to London, to the Metropolitan Police, to Scotland Yard, back on the international scene in terms of running operations around kidnaps, drug trafficking. I went to Colombia, China, all over the place. I was involved in everything from the attempted kidnapping of Victoria Beckham and her children when David Beckham was at Manchester United, to blackmail cases, involving a German national who put bomb devices in supermarkets across Germany and was blackmailing Deutsche Bank in London to pay money over. If they didn't pay, then he's going to let these devices go off. We had to negotiate on the phone and managed to trace where he was and, at the eleventh hour, arrested him. We discovered where the devices were in Germany and managed to get most of them, or close the stores. Though a couple of them went off, we thwarted the attack, and nobody was killed or seriously injured. That was an interesting investigation and we were very lucky."
Turning to his work in Jamaica, Shields says: "I think I'm sometimes put up as the great colonial white expert who's come here with this panacea of knowledge about policing. I've always tried to say, and I passionately believe, that is not the case. What I can do is bring something else to the table to compliment the work that's already being done here."
Next: [How crime in Jamaica can be solved.]
