A former officer with the Royal Bahamas Police Force claims he has been a victim of police brutality.
Thirty-six-year-old Nathaniel Strachan told The Guardian he and his family were held hostage early on Saturday morning by individuals claiming to be police officers. He said that during his five-and-a-half-year stay on the force, he knew of numerous cases where officers would deliberately beat and harass citizens “for no reason,” but never expected one day it would happen to him. “I left the force for the same foolishness they doing to people now,” he said. “They wanted me to join in with them but I told them I wasn’t going to take advantage of anybody and they hated me for it and did all they could to keep me down so I resigned. Now it’s backfiring.”
Mr Strachan’s mother, 56-year-old Rosemary Strachan said around 7 a.m. on Saturday she was awaken by loud bangs and knocks on the front door by people surrounding her Boyd Subdivision home claiming to be police officers. When she refused to open the door because the individuals would not show a search warrant nor police badges, she claimed that they “tore the door wide open” and ran through the house searching all the rooms.
The frail-looking Mrs Strachan said she began to shake as the men surrounded her asking her to show them where the guns and drugs were. She said she told them they would not find any of those things in her house. They then pushed her down she said, and asked for Nathaniel, who has to walk with a cane because of neck and back injuries from a previous job.
“They yuck up my son, handcuff him and beat him,” the woman shakily said. “Couple of them carried him to his room and locked the door and I couldn’t tell what was happening. My son is injured and I was nervous for him.
I couldn’t believe what they brought my house to that morning.” Mr Strachan said since he left the force in 1995, he has constantly been a victim of police brutality.
He believes that this latest incident happened because he refused to withdraw his complaints on previous alleged brutality cases. He added that “plain-clothes officers” held him, along with his mother and about six other family members hostage in their house for about two hours, claiming that they were searching for guns and drugs. Nathaniel’s brother, Steven Strachan, 25, said he believes the incident happened because of “envious neighbours.”
The Strachans said that they were unable to lodge their complaints over the weekend but said they will pursue the case.
Senior police officials said that they were unaware of the incident adding that no complaints had been made up to press time.
By: IANTHIA SMITH, The Nassau Guardian
