Above: Police Commissioner Owen Ellington

By the Caribbean Journal staff

The Jamaica Constabulary Force will soon require all persons being recruited as police to undergo a polygraph examination, Police Commissioner Owen Ellington said.

Currently, senior JCF officers and those being vetted for sensitive assignments undergo polygraph, or lie detector, assignments. The new policy would apply to all recruits.

“Our dream is that, eventually, perhaps very soon, we will be able to not just apply the polygraph exercise to senior ranking officers and those being looked at for sensitive assignments, but certainly to apply it to every member being recruited in the JCF,” he said.

He said the goal was to ensure that those who serve in the JCF are “of the highest integrity and professionalism.”

“I’m sure that those of my colleagues who have had the opportunity of going through the integrity screening process, including the polygraph, have come out of it feeling better about themselves, much better about the organization and much more confident that, as an institution, we have the capacity, not just to help people build integrity, but also to help them in preserving their integrity,” he said.