Archive for July, 2009

Hole cuts hairdresser short

(CNS): A longstanding dispute between a landlord and commercial tenant has put a local business woman literally on edge after the landlord, under the cover of darkness, dug a huge hole in front of her business premises on Mary Street in George Town. Monalisa Morganberry-Kudritzki was shocked to discover the gaping and dangerous hole in front of her hairdressing salon when she arrived to start work on Monday, 8 June.  

After ringing round to find out if the cavity was down to utility works, she soon discovered it was the work of her landlord who has been trying to remove her from the premises since 2005.

Morganberry-Kudritzki explained to Cayman News Service that she is returning to court again  on Wednesday, 22 July, for the next chapter in what has been a drawn out legal dispute with her landlord over anumber of issues. She says, however, that she has always played by the book and has been paying her full rent to her lawyer while the disagreement was being resolved. Despite this, her landlord seems to have taken things to another level with the most recent action, which the Planning Department says is a danger, not just to the tenant and her clients, but the public at large.

Planning have asked the owner to fill in the dangerous hole, which was around five feet deep and right in front of the premises, but a spokesperson from the department told CNS that, as this has not happened, an enforcement notice has now been issued.

The dispute goes back to April 2005 when Morganberry-Kudritzki agreed to lease the unit for her specialist hair restoration and grafting business – catering largely to clients that have medically related hair problems.

After agreeing the terms and giving the landlord one month’s deposit and one month’s rent in advance for the shop, she set about buying the equipment she needed to re-establish and fit out the Hairden, as her original shop had been destroyed in Hurricane Ivan. However, even before the landlord completed the post Ivan repairs to the new unit, Morganberry-Kudritzki discovered that the property had been partitioned, taking off around 1/3 of the floor space she had originally agreed to lease from the owner.

Having asked for an appropriate reduction to the rent, which was refused, she engaged an attorney and has since been paying the full rent to him until the disagreement was resolved in the courts.

With no legal resolution apparently yet in sight, Morganberry-Kudritzki says the landlord has been trying to remove her from the premises and has very nearly succeeded with this latest hole digging escapade.

“I was so devastated when I saw it,” she said. “It is very difficult, almost impossible for me to conduct my business affairs as people can’t get into the shop and it is very dangerous.”

Morganberry-Kudritzki has now had to build a wooden deck in order to gain access at all, but she says that the situation is far from ideal. (Ironically, Planning now also have to give permission for the deck which runs around the edge of the hole.)

Having invested so much in the salon since taking out the lease she has been reluctant to move out, but she says the situation now is so dire she will be forced to move, which means the landlord has effectively succeed in evicting Morganberry-Kudritzki, the long intended goal she suspects, through illegal means.

Planning agreed that the situation was of concern and that the department’s inability to prevent people from doing this sort thing in the first place was a real problem and that it was not fair that the landlord was driving a tenant from her rented premises by breaching planning laws.

Morganberry-Kudritzki said she hoped that something would finally happen when the case returns to the court tomorrow as she feels that despite doing everything she can according to the law, the landlord is by no means playing fair and the ongoing dispute has become far too upsetting to handle.

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Baines addresses infighting, failures and low morale

(CNS): Commenting on Monday’s conviction of William Martinez-McLaughlin in the murder of Brian Rankine-Carter, Police Commissioner David Baines noted the criticisms in handling the evidence levelled at the RCIPS but blamed organisational failings within the service rather than individual officers. “I would be a poor leader if I sought to hang operational failings on individual heads,” Baines said. Speaking at his first community meeting, held on Cayman Brac Monday night (20 July), he also addressed internal factions within the RCIPS and low morale, and said his first job was to stabilize the force and stop the hemorrhaging of officers.

“Up until two years ago, this service was viewed the best in the Caribbean – but it has lost traction, it’s lost motivational leadership, and it’s lost some of its confidence,” Baines said. One glimmer of hope was that, like places he had worked in UK and across Europe, “I find fantastic people willing to put themselves in harms way and serve their community.”

“You don’t need me to tell you that the RCIPS has not enjoyed the best of publicity over the past two years. In fact we have become the story,” Baines said, noting that the suspension of his predecessor and a role series of temporary leaders “had not been particularly helpful” in developing strategies and bringing leadership and direction and commitment to serving the community.

The low morale was not surprising given that the RCIPS has become used to internalizing its problems, Baines said. “What it has lost sight of is what we’re here for, which is to be an outward facing, public relating and accessible police service to respond to the needs of our community. Instead of that you will have read in the media or seen on the news that there’s been different factions within the force that have been falling out with one another and … yet further alienating factions within the service itself.”

He said there were currently around 40 vacancies which represents 10% of the force across all areas of policing but predominantly neighborhood policing. The commissioner said he had spoken to Cabinet and the Portfolio of Internal Affairs about a commitment to get operational police officers “not just to respond to emergencies but to become the consistent, accessible, visible face in each of our communities – and I don’t mean just flashing by in a car.” He wants officers to be out on foot or on bicycle so that they start to develop the trust that the RCIPS has lost as an organization.

Baines said he had met with police staff and reminded them of what joins them rather than what separates them — “We wear the same uniform and we took the same oath” — and to stop falling out internally. “Do we know what’s causing distress in the communities? That’s what we should be addressing,” he said, adding, “It’s almost as if policing has become secondary to internal fighting.”

He said he needed to get on the twin track of stabilizing the force and build both identifiable neighbourhood policing an specialist units that are necessary to deal with most serious of crime.

Referring to the “horrendous murder of Mr Rankine” he said a whole host of issues surrounding policing failures had surfaced during the trial, not least the critical handling of exhibits. “It’s all right to ask what we are going to do about the failure of officers in those issues, but actually, organisationally, I think we failed those officers because we put them in impossible circumstances with the demands that we ask them to do with too few.”

Using the scenes of crime officers as an example, he said there were five officers but there should be four more. “We put them in impossible situations, going from job to job to job, and so they make mistakes,” the commissioner said, noting that one single event can be critical to the reputation of the force.

Moving on to the issue of public trust, or the lack of it, he said that right or wrong, there was the belief that if you call the police people will get to hear that you are an informant. He said he had not found an example of this but that was less important than the fact that people believed it.

Internally he had made it really clear that the public deserves their information to be secure and anyone who chooses to operate otherwise had no place in the service, and if it came to his attention, that officer would be dismissed. Otherwise, they would never get anyone to come forward to give the police their trust and the best information and get the most dangerous criminals off the street, he said.

In some of worst areas in Grand Cayman, such as hwere the murder of Omar Samuels took place in McField Lane in George Town, he said that there were six gunshots fired and 200 people in the area – and no one saw anything. “There is a lot of fear in that area and traditionally people don’t talk to police,” he said, and explained that where communities were so ingrained in their sense of fear then they had to look to other options.

In areas “where crime happens but people don’t talk”, he said alternative security could be supplied by, for example, better lighting and CCTV, so that when something bad happens they don’t have to rely on eye witnesses and could use technology to fill evidence gaps. “There may be issues with money but over the last five years there have been at least a dozen incidences where people have been shot, murdered and machetied and yet we still don’t have people coming forward.”

After the meeting, Baines told CNS that Operations Tempura and Cealt had been distractions to the primary role of the RCIPS, and what was needed was a refocusing of the officers on their primary duty of serving the community and upholding the law.

In the absence of leadership divisions within the RCIPS had developed and this had sometimes played out in the media. “If there is no means to address people’s grievances internally these will manifest in the media,” he said. “If we provide a venue to deal with grievances and address these concerns, I would not expect the continued use of the media to wash our dirty linen.”

The commissioner continued, “I have explained to my staff that provided I do my part to provide professional support to address staff issues I will take a dim view of those who seek to further their self interest over the interest of the force by publishing in the local media.”

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