An Admission That Crime Is Out Of Their Control, Now What?

There is absolute­ly no one in our coun­try that has not been touched one way or anoth­er by vio­lent crime.
That speaks vol­umes about the emo­tion­al toll it takes on indi­vid­u­als and the nation as a col­lec­tive. This is par­tic­u­lar­ly trau­mat­ic to those who are not con­tribut­ing to the wave of law­less­ness that has tak­en over our streets and our schools.
As I sat to write this arti­cle, I am also hum­bled that I was hon­ored by the beau­ti­ful daugh­ter and moth­er of my life­long friend Elvis Richards, or ( Dozi), who offered me the oppor­tu­ni­ty to say a few words in trib­ute to his life.

Elvis, a lov­ing kind (Rastaman), became a vic­tim of the rabid crim­i­nal­i­ty that has now char­ac­ter­ized our coun­try.
Elvis loved his coun­try, so much so that he would ask me (suh wen yu a cum bak cum liv Inna di place bredrin)?

Here was a man work­ing to take care of his fam­i­ly, tak­en away by rabid degen­er­ates, and for what.….. a few thou­sand dol­lars in his pock­et? His life was tak­en from him, leav­ing his fam­i­ly to grieve, includ­ing his minor child, left to grow up with­out her lov­ing dad.
This sto­ry is of hun­dreds of fam­i­lies each year who do not have lav­ish police pro­tec­tion or cas­tles in the hills. Across the length and breadth of the tiny Island and all across the dias­po­ra, the con­se­quences of these killings res­onate and impact the psy­che of those left behind.
The dai­ly killings have now been baked into the cul­ture; they no longer evoke alarm, nei­ther do they gar­ner grass­roots resis­tance against them.
Rather than lis­ten to what works from peo­ple who have actu­al­ly worked at this, the nation’s lead­ers embarked on cos­met­ic ini­tia­tives designed to pla­cate the nation, designed to give a false sense of com­fort, that just around the cor­ner a respite awaits, with­out doing the hard work to guar­an­tee it.
Because of this admin­is­tra­tion’s mis­guid­ed stance on crime, we have seen a rapid and sus­tained rise in vio­lent crimes, but that is not all, the police are lit­er­al­ly unable to enforce the nation’s road traf­fic Act, as they are being attacked even as they try to write tick­ets to the law­less motorist who plies the road­ways as taxi-oper­a­tors. In the schools, the stu­dents now fight their teach­ers.
No laborites, I don’t want to hear your shit that the PNP is to blame; your par­ty is in pow­er now; save it.
This is big­ger than nar­row par­ti­san politics.

And now we hear the top-most leader admit that the lev­el of vio­lent crimes across the coun­try is out­side of the coun­try’s abil­i­ty to deal with.
The coun­try is at the mer­cy of the killers.
On tak­ing office, this Prime Minister decid­ed that he want­ed a pol­i­cy of hug­ging up and cod­dling the most vio­lent crim­i­nals in the coun­try.
No, he did not actu­al­ly say he want­ed to hug them, but his attacks on polic­ing prac­tices and pro­ce­dures, some­thing he knows noth­ing about, all but told the crim­i­nals they had a friend in Jamaica house. They already knew they had one in INDECOM.
When the prime min­is­ter was embark­ing on this path, I wrote sev­er­al arti­cles warn­ing that he was open­ing up a pan­do­ra box, that the nation would not be able to con­tain what comes out of it.
Talk about police kick­ing in doors to peo­ple’s hous­es, talk about not on my watch will they, (the police), con­tin­ue to shoot peo­ple, was Holness’s call­ing card, as he embraced the anti-police activist Terrence Williams.
In the streets, the mur­der­ers were laugh­ing; they knew they had a friend in this guy.

Instead of hir­ing a police com­mis­sion­er who knew about polic­ing, Holness hired his friend Antony Anderson, an army man, and made him com­mis­sion­er of police. Not that a com­mis­sion­er who came up with­in the ranks is a panacea to what’s going on, but at least he would be able to speak to the nation defin­i­tive­ly on the issue.
Instead of insti­tut­ing train­ing for the police that gives them the edge they need to fight the crim­i­nals, he insist­ed on human rights train­ing, not just for the police but for the mil­i­tary, and placed them in some­thing cre­at­ed and named Zones Of Special Operations or (ZOSOS’s).

Officers start­ed leav­ing in droves rather than try to moti­vate and incen­tivize them to stay; Holness dou­bled down on dra­con­ian mea­sures designed not just to make it dif­fi­cult for dis­grun­tled offi­cers to leave but crim­i­nal­ize them with stiff prison time if they fail to give advanced warn­ings that they intend to resign.
Not only are these mea­sures uncon­sti­tu­tion­al, but they also did not stop the attri­tion. And so Holness was forced to send stu­dent con­sta­bles to man his ZOSOS & SOEs for a frac­tion of what they should be paid and for pro­tract­ed peri­ods of time over which they should be exposed with­out the appro­pri­ate train­ing.
The police are in an exis­ten­tial fight with zero back­ings from the gov­ern­ment. The failed Commissioner of Police Antony Anderson has no solu­tion to the killings; he does not know what to do, he was nev­er a cop.
At the same time, his lev­el of fail­ure has been far worse than any com­mis­sion­er of police who has come up through the ranks.
The silence is deaf­en­ing; there is no demand to fire the com­mis­sion­er com­ing from the usu­al quar­ters. What we hear now (crick­ets) is deaf­en­ing silence because Anderson is their boy.
Set of fuck­ing sanc­ti­mo­nious hyp­ocrites.
It is only the gov­ern­men­t’s stat­ed com­mit­ment that will send a mes­sage to the crim­i­nals that the coun­try’s lead­er­ship is solid­ly behind the secu­ri­ty forces.
Now it is abun­dant­ly clear that ZOSO’s & SOE’s will not stop the killings; they have thrown up their hands in despair.
They dug them­selves a hole of pre­tense from which they can­not remove them­selves.
There is only one solu­tion to deal­ing with these ver­min, and that is to exter­mi­nate them.
The pre­ferred route to remov­ing them from soci­ety is to arrest them and have them face the courts. But in Jamaica, even the damn judges seem to be in bed with the mur­der­ers.
That leaves just one solu­tion, but the pop­u­la­tion has its head too far up its own ass that it is stuck talk­ing about the human rights of mur­der­ers while no one talks about the human rights of those who have their lives tak­en from them.
A few cars and the like are not a com­mit­ment to law enforce­ment.
This Administration has stead­fast­ly refused to step back from its com­mit­ment to obstruct the efforts of law enforce­ment; as a con­se­quence, the nation must con­tin­ue to weep and bury its dead.
Until the peo­ple decide to rise and do some­thing about it themselves.

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Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, black achiev­er hon­oree, and cre­ator of the blog mike​beck​les​.com.