For a police superintendent about to be tried on charges of multiple murder, Renato Adams, now suspended from duty, seems remarkably untroubled. "These people want us to go after criminals on bended knee while they fire on us," he told The Independent last week. "and then receive a posthumous award - because we behaved in a very tolerant way. I don't think like that."On Monday, Supt Adams will go on trial in Kingston for his involvement in the Braeton killings of 2001, when seven youths were shot dead during a raid by officers of the so-called crime management unit (CMU) of the Jamaican police. For much of Jamaica, for whom Supt Adams has become a folk hero, it will be a trial of their very own Dirty Harry. During the past five years he has been, without question, the most notorious cop in the Caribbean.
The CMU was created in 2000 to tackle spiralling rates of crime in one of the most violent countries in the world. Supt Adams, who was in charge of the unit, decided that brutal murders required a brutal response. "By 2000 crime was rampant" he said. "There was murder in the streets, car robberies, hijacking of cars, rape, kidnapping, drugs and gangs led by criminal dons. I was surprised to be asked to head the CMU but I happily took it up. We hit the streets - roughly and firmly - but within the constitution, within the law and, most importantly, within the bounds of my own moral code".
That moral code permitted operations which have since been condemned by Amnesty International and led to the eventual disbanding of the CMU. Shoot-outs were common. Night-time raids invariably ended violently. In the town of Crawle, not far from Kingston, two men and two women were killed during a raid, although witnesses claimed they offered no threat to CMU officers. The Braeton killings were even more gruesome. Seventy-two rounds of police ammunition were fired and the bodies of the seven victims bore a total of 40 gunshot wounds. Some had up to four gunshot wounds in the head, and were also shot in the legs. One was so disfigured that the embalmer was unable to reconstruct his face for the traditional open coffin.