PSV conductor Jason Ricardo Omar Taylor who was “grossly disrespectful” to a lawman as he executed his duties has been told to stay out of police business.
And for obstructing Acting Inspector of Police Roland Cobbler, the 32-year-old, of Baywoods, St James now has two weeks – on or before December 22 – to pay a $1,000 fine to the District ‘A’ Magistrates’ Court or spend the alternative of one month at HMP Dodds.
Taylor must also return before Magistrate Alison Burke on Friday, December 11 to apologise to the officer.
Around 7:30 a.m. the Inspector was speaking to the driver of the minibus on which Taylor is the conductor about loud music being played. While doing so Taylor was overheard saying “You always coming round minibus men with foolishness every morning.”
The officer, who was in uniform, spoke to him and went back to speaking to the driver but Taylor continued, according to Sergeant Edwin Pinder, to be “noisy, disrespectful and disruptive”.
However, Taylor, who is known to the court, told Magistrate Burke that he was not speaking to the officer. He claimed he was having a conversation with a woman who was in the van. “I tell her the police officer doing foolishness, the same time he heard. I was talking to the woman.”
The magistrate was not amused.
“Whenever police officers are executing their duties you keep your mouth shut, you do not get involved in that. He has a job to do, he knows what he is doing. You think he is only to stand up there and do what, let everybody do as they like?
“You can’t be interfering in police business, the police are there to make sure there is order out there, order in the courts, order on the streets.
“It is gross disrespect and it is unlawful that is why you are here. The police must be able to do their job and not put in a position where they might be harmed, because when you go talking and distracting him, the police can’t be vigilant . . . his attention has now moved away from what he is supposed to do and he has put himself at risk of being harmed or a civilian might end up being harmed as well.”
The magistrate told the conductor to desist from the practice because he too might be in need of help from the police and would like that when they respond they do their job.
“Everybody wants to be a spectacle; everybody wants to go on social media and look like they are talking bad and disrespectful to the police. I don’t know where that new phase is coming from but it got to stop,” Burke stated.
