Many women police recruits find height bar too tall to clear

Spanish Town resident Annaleise Steen was hoping to make her father proud by getting recruited into the police force, but although she has the academic qualifications, her height has crushed that dream.

The 20-year-old was among scores of applicants, mostly women, who were turned away when they showed up at Spanish Town High School in St Catherine on Saturday for a Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF) recruitment drive.

The police force is in a race against time to bolster its numbers by 50 per cent - from 12,000-plus to 18,000 by 2024 - to salve concerns about an epidemic of murders that, up to May 19, had reached 514, one per cent higher than the toll in 2020.

At 5 feet 4 inches, Steen was just one inch shorter than the required height for female recruits. In 2018, she was turned down because she did not have the academic qualifications.

That disappointment pushed her to go back to school and get qualified. But as she exited the school compound on Saturday, she did so with the intention to write Commissioner of Police Antony Anderson to appeal for a height waver.

“My father is very proud of me and I thought I would make him a little prouder by sitting the exam, but I was told that I am too short,” she told The Gleaner.

Steen said she has a passion to serve and she is attracted to the force because it allows her to be physically active.

Her father had wanted to join the force but he was too old. As Steen left her sometimes volatile community of Rivoli Saturday morning, he encouraged her to do her best.

Queen’s School graduate Camille Gayle had travelled from Mavis Bank in St Andrew to attend the recruitment drive, but she, too, left disappointed as she did not meet the height requirement.

The 21-year-old university student has eight passes at the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate and six at the Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examination.

Gayle lost her job as a data-entry clerk last year April, a month after the first COVID-19 case was reported in Jamaica.

“I was desperate, sad, depressed. I had nothing to do with my life, so I was just sitting at home wondering what I am going to do,” she said.

Having lost her job during the global crisis, Gayle was partly drawn to policing because it is an essential service. For her, job security is important.

“Everyone is physically challenged differently, everyone is built differently. I don’t think height requirement should hinder someone from serving their country and from providing quality service to their country,” she said.

Chief recruiting officer for the JCF, Deputy Superintendent Dian Bartley, said that although men are sometimes outnumbered at recruitment drives, women are often disproportionately at greater risk of rejection because they do not meet the height requirement. Women, however, tend to be more academically qualified than the men.

“We understand the challenges that that brings sometimes and it can be a little bit discouraging and it may even seem discriminatory, because a lot of the times, it’s the women who fall outside of the height requirement,” the deputy superintendent said.

Bartley said that persons who have been turned down are encouraged to write to the commissioner of police requesting a height waiver.

The height policy, she said, is currently under review.

Bartley, who has been to several parishes in the last two weeks with her team to lead the JCF’s recruitment effort, said she is encouraged by both the scale and quality of the turnout.

A number of the applicants have many more than the four CXC subjects required to be considered for the force.

One person on Saturday, for example, had a Bachelor of Laws, while several others had pre-university and university qualifications.

“We need the men and women on the ground to support the people of Jamaica and to serve them,” Bartley said.

On the outside of the school was Judith Currie, a mother of five who had accompanied her 17-year-old daughter to the location. Her daughter, who will turn 18 in July, has nine CSEC passes and is a graduate of The Queen’s School.

“I tell her that she must pray and put God in front,” said the mother as she accepted a call from her daughter’s father, Albert Hunter, who wanted an update on his daughter's progress.

“It is a great career opportunity for her. She is young and vibrant and brilliant,” said Hunter, who is a security guard.

nadine.wilson@gleanerjm.com

The primary impact of covid really is to reduce the recruitment rate last year, because we had hoped to have the 2020-2021 budget, as the year we get our training level to 1,500 per year which would have given us a replacement of 1,000, that was put back by a year.

We had to adjust the training facilities because of the social distancing and (restriction in) gathering because of covid. We had just acquired them. that was the main impact, otherwise the work of modernising continues in terms of the various changes in management and additional use of technology in the entire process in the force.