Opposition Spokesperson on National Security Peter Bunting has suggestedthe arrest of a St Ann man who lambasted Prime Minister Andrew Holness in a viral video is new evidence that archaic laws on the island need to be abolished.

Bunting, speaking at a Consensus Monitoring & Oversight Committee (CMOC) meeting on crime on Thursday (July 29), stated that laws that are on the books dating back to 1943 need to be changed, to prevent such incidents.

He was responding to the arrest of Shaquille O’Neal Higgins, who had blasted Holness in a video that was widely circulated, for tightening the COVID-19 restrictions under the Disaster Risk Management Act (DRMA) to stem the current spike of the virus across the island.

Two other videos were released thereafter, in which Higgins was in the custody of the police. One video showed the police ordering Higgins to get dressed and the other showed him at a police station apologising to Holness on the instruction of a police officer.

“The Town And Country Act of 1943 is the basis on which we are operating six decades of post-Independence. That cannot make any sense at all and, to the extent it is applied, it seems to be applied in an arbitrary and propitious manner.

“We certainly need to look at bringing on some of these things, to say if we in the long term are going to build trust between the JCF and the citizenry, some of these laws that are no longer relevant, need to be reexamined,” Bunting said.

Bunting opined that Higgins’ human rights might have been violated with the videotaping and releasing of his arrest.

“This raises a whole set of red flags around human rights and the dignity of the individual and the treatment of such by the JCF, and I think it was disappointing to the extent there were issues around the legality of this social media post,” he said.

“I certainly think the response of the JCF has not helped to build their trust and credibility. First of all the whole basis on which someone could be arrested is based on colonial-era laws, which much of the relevance of them today, I think is in question,” Bunting said.

Facing public outcry over the arrest, which appeared to have been a direct reaction to the vulgar criticism of the prime minister, the JCF had claimed Higgins was in fact taken into custody as a suspect in a larceny case, and that his declaring his home address in the video is what alerted police to his location.

However, the JCF did not explain why Higgins was subsequently videotaped being instructed by police to apologise to the prime minister for his remarks.

Higgins was later released without charge and has threatened to file a lawsuit against the police while Police Commissioner Antony Anderson has initiated an investigation into the circumstances around his arrest.

The police commissioner has also issued a reminder to police personnel an apology of the kind elicited from Higgins should never be guided by law enforcement and any videotaping or other such delivery of the apology should be without the involvement of the police.