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Barbados Top Cop sent packing following wiretapping charges

Sep 24, 2013 News

While Home Affairs Minister Clement Rohee speaks about further usage of wiretapping, Barbados Commissioner of Police, Darwin Dottin, is halfway out of a job as allegations swirl of police snooping on private phone calls.
Since June, Barbados’ Police Service Commission (PSC), the island’s governing body for police, sent the Commissioner on pre-retirement leave in what it described as ‘public interest’. He then challenged the decision in court, but a judge in an interim ruling last week said that she cannot order his re-instatement.
Dottin’s pre-retirement leave is up. He was forced to hand over keys to his office, and he hangs by a thread to his former job because Justice Margaret Reifer also ruled that the PSC must not appoint a new police boss while the court challenge continues.
Since 2010 a suspended policeman had alleged wiretapping of phones of senior officials in Barbados as high as assistants to Prime Ministers. The PSC commissioned an investigation and received a report which was lodged with the Supreme Court, with names of persons who were the phone bugging targets.
The full contents of the reports are yet to be publicly revealed, but accusing fingers have been pointed at sections of the police force, who are said to have broken the Telecommunications Act, under direction from higher up.
“The information provides irrefutable evidence of illegal phone tapping,” PSC has stated of the report, noting that it was illegal because persons spied on were not known for illegal activity.
The Guyana Government in 2008 government rushed a Bill through parliament to facilitate phone tapping, despite vociferous objections from the Opposition. Officials have since said it is being used in pursuit of criminals.
In echoes of the contention by Guyana’s Opposition that wiretapping will be used to meet political ends, the Barbados PSC declared the wiretapping of two years back and beyond might have been used for narrow political purposes.
The difference between Guyana and Barbados, in the circumstances, appears to be the willingness of whistleblowers to come forward on that Caribbean island and testify before a legally constituted body, while there continues to be mere rumours here.
One police officer testified during the PSC enquiry that he was involved in the wiretapping and alleged that phones of security liaisons of former Prime Minister Owen Arthur and current Prime Minister Freundel Stuart had been tapped, along with those of magistrates, senior police officers and members of the PSC itself.
Now the PSC’s effective dismissal of Dottin in June appears to stem from this violation of the right to privacy of Barbadian citizens.

 

 

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