Polack Post: Caribbean Keystone Cops And Prosecutors
By Peter Polack
Peter Polack
The old Hollywood benchmark movies on comical ineptitude by police found popular regard sufficient that Keystone has come to identify law enforcement bungling as Xerox is to copies.
Recently, the Commissioner of the Cayman Islands, his superiors, the Minister of Home Affairs, the Attorney General and the government essentially agreed to their culpability in an incompetent search warrant raid against a local attorney with a subsequent award against them of nearly $100,000 with more to come. The relevant Justice of the Peace received particular criticism for his failures in the search warrant review.
Let us hope all the responsible parties will resign or face a review that will never arrive on the common sense bus. There should be no minor official scapegoat when others are responsible in this case and overall.
A silent public agrees to all of this nonsense.
The responsible judge is unlikely to have given an innocent man 12 years imprisonment based on non existent evidence like some others. He is to be congratulated for being an island in the swamp.
The Commissioner need not be afraid of losing his position because those ultimately responsible for police and legal matters are sacred cows, beyond review, sanction, early retirement or termination. The hollow Public Service Management Act.
This was not a novel situation only in Cayman but throughout the Caribbean where incompetence at the highest levels of law enforcement and legal affairs provide a platform for regular prosecution failures and civil awards. Cayman has had several instances of search warrant failure in the past but that is not all.
The Caribbean has also been beset by defective search warrants, flawed execution of search warrants, schoolboy investigations, rookie prosecutions, judgments without evidence and other errors that command a complete review of the entire system, from top to bottom. Writ large the Jamaican government detention of a mentally ill man for fifty years resulting in a court award of J$120 million.
Round and round the mulberry bush.
The one saving grace is the judicial bulwark preventing even more carelessness against innocent or damaged persons being brought before the court or ill fated prosecutions and unwarranted sentences, being stopped on appeal or review. In the recent UK post office scandal it appears that a Hollywood movie intervened for the falsely accused.
In one local case, the prosecution was condemned for continuing a prosecution too long before the court ordered the prosecution and it’s government to pay legal costs. This has been a feature of inexperienced prosecutions that fail to regularly review cases which no longer have it in the public interest to prosecute or evidence to proceed.
In this, there is a similarity to a recent attempt to prosecute a former FBI director in the USA by a novice prosecutor, a failure to launch.
One interesting and potential remedy is found in the USA where on call prosecutors attend crime scenes or participate in early case or arrest management to preclude legal errors before they arise.
Perhaps the problem is the modern expectation that lowly paid law enforcement are required to wear the hats of lawyer, psychiatrist, oracle and even welfare counsellor without the accompanying pay. The extends to the working force world wide that are hired for one job that grows into an excessive duty list for which there is no qualification or salary.
The proposal for a much need independent legal counsel office for the police a decade ago fell on the hard and stony ground of bureaucracy or institutional silos or simple jealous protection of mini fiefdoms.
We need not look to the political leadership who spend much time developing their perks including chauffeurs for meetings when nearly all government operates from a single building in the Cayman Islands.
There will be more like this.
Forget the opposition or silent chorus with overlapping policies and vanilla criticism. Their most radical act of defiance has been abstaining from approving a swollen and nonsensical budget. The parliamentary seat warmers.
The people are not blind or deaf.
Notes
https://www.caymancompass.com/2025/11/24/judge-lambasts-police-over-search-warrant-failures
https://www.caymancompass.com/2012/07/09/cocaine-sentence-reduced-from-12-years-to-7-months
https://www.caymancompass.com/2012/07/09/cocaine-sentence-reduced-from-12-years-to-7-months
Peter Polack is a former criminal lawyer from the Cayman Islands for several decades. His books are The Last Hot Battle of the Cold War: South Africa vs. Cuba in the Angolan Civil War (2013), Jamaica, The Land of Film (2017) and Guerrilla Warfare: Kings of Revolution (2019). He was a contributor to Encyclopedia of Warfare (2013). His latest book is a compendium of Russian espionage activities with almost five hundred Soviet spies expelled from nearly 100 countries worldwide 1940-88.
His views are his own.
