Andrew Holness Is A Lightweight And An Abysmal Failure On Crime, Like The PNP Leaders Before Him…

There is a large num­ber of mer­ci­less killers walk­ing around on the streets of Jamaica. For all intents and pur­pos­es, they are no longer wor­ried about the police.
Technically speak­ing, this Administration has all but neutered the police. In one of the most shame­ful and dis­re­spect­ful dis­plays ever, as it relates to a Governing body and one of its Agencies, this admin­is­tra­tion all but made it clear it did not like the police.
I sin­cere­ly doubt whether that lev­el of dis­re­spect could fly any­where in the world except Jamaica with­out a shut­down of the coun­try and a mas­sive exo­dus from the ser­vice.
Unfortunately, before the Prime Minister and his cabal decid­ed to be out­right dis­dain­ful of the police through their words and deeds (a‑la, glo­ri­fied secu­ri­ty guards), they knew full well that the police would do noth­ing, no mat­ter the dis­re­spect met­ed out to them.

The nation’s police ser­vice is the insti­tu­tion which has the respon­si­bil­i­ty to enforce the laws. The Military is for war. The idea that mem­bers of the Military are dis­ci­plined and there­fore bet­ter suit­ed to do polic­ing is the epit­o­me’ of igno­rance.
And so it fol­lows there­fore that the very ratio­nale for the Militarization of the pub­lic ser­vice is an endeav­or built on a far­ci­cal premise.
The notion that some­how, Jamaica’s mil­i­tary is more dis­ci­plined than the cops plain­ly choos­es to ignore a few real­ly impor­tant facts.
(1) Soldiers (pre­vi­ous­ly) had far few­er inter­ac­tions with mem­bers of the pub­lic as police offi­cers do.
(2) Disciplinary issues between the mem­bers of the Military are han­dled inter­nal­ly.
(3) There are (4) four times as many cops as there are sol­diers, so com­plaints against the police are going to be expo­nen­tial­ly high­er based on those num­bers alone.
(4) Most sol­diers live(d) in under­served com­mu­ni­ties with the crim­i­nals, and are not seen as a threat to their activ­i­ties.
(5) Many sol­diers are active­ly engaged in the crim­i­nal con­duct that civil­ian crim­i­nals are engaged in.
(6) Police offi­cers pre­vi­ous­ly were reluc­tant to arrest mem­bers of the JDF even when they were caught break­ing the laws.
(7) Even when caught, they were gen­er­al­ly turned over to the JDF and things are kept under wraps.
(8) Jamaica is a law­less coun­try deemed to be 84% cor­rupt, cops are not ever going to be pop­u­lar in a coun­try with that degree of cor­rup­tion.
(9) Taken whol­ly, with oth­er char­ac­ter­is­tics, it is under­stand­able that they would have more street creds than the cops.

But the issue is not real­ly about street cred, who is more respect­ed or even who is feared. This is about how the Holness Administration has sum­mar­i­ly decid­ed to mil­i­ta­rize the Island’s pub­lic ser­vices and open­ly humil­i­at­ing and dis­re­spect­ing career police offi­cers.
This has drawn strong con­dem­na­tion from cer­tain sec­tions of the polit­i­cal oppo­si­tion. One overzeal­ous per­son likened the Prime Minister to Adolph Hitler, a char­ac­ter­i­za­tion I am sure she regrets, but prob­a­bly lacks the char­ac­ter and humil­i­ty to with­draw, and issue a full-throat­ed apol­o­gy.
Some peo­ple are harsh­ly crit­i­cal of my views on this sub­ject of the Prime, even though my views on the Jamaican Prime Minister are far less caus­tic than those of Crystal Tomlinson of the PNPYO.
Not all of the crit­i­cisms of me as it relates to the Prime Minister come from par­ti­san Laborites. So it would be fool­ish of me to sim­ply brush aside those con­cerns and crit­i­cisms with­out address­ing them head-on.
The Pm is doing a pret­ty good job on the econ­o­my, not so good on the cor­rup­tion front.
That does not mean that he him­self is involved in malfea­sance. Nevertheless, he promised in his inau­gu­ra­tion speech, that there would be zero tol­er­ance for cor­rup­tion in his admin­is­tra­tion. His promis­es have not kept pace with real­i­ty.
As some­one who sup­port­ed his can­di­da­cy, no one is more dis­ap­point­ed at the approach Andrew Holness brought to the Prime Minister’s office on the issue of crime.
Holness’ tone and tenor toward the police and the rule of law have been dis­mis­sive and down­right dis­re­spect­ful. His world-view could only have been shaped at the nation’s largest Institution of high­er learn­ing, a smol­der­ing caul­dron of social­ist antipa­thy toward Conservative val­ues and the rule of law.
So even though Andrew Holness now heads the par­ty of the late greats, Sir Alexander Bustamante’, Sir Donald Burns Sangster, the Honorable Hugh Lawson Shearer, and even Edward Phillip George Seaga, He is a [car­bon cut-out of Bruce Golding], rather than a con­tin­u­a­tion of the Labor Party greats on the rule of law.
Andrew Holness has some ideas of the Labor Party’s past Conservative val­ues, the last of which was evi­dent under Edward Seaga, but he lacks the fun­da­men­tal under­stand­ing of what it takes to ful­ly acti­vate those val­ues for the bet­ter­ment of the coun­try and a last­ing peri­od of pros­per­i­ty for the Jamaican people.

Simply put, when it comes to deal­ing with crime, Andrew Holness is a light­weight and an abysmal fail­ure like the PNP Prime Ministers before who walked the very same cor­ri­dors the late (Wilmott Perkins labeled the Intellectual ghet­to).
” We will all soon be dead, unless some­one final­ly ensures that those who kill buck upon some­thing that says no more” a local School Principal laments the death of one of his stu­dents, killed and dumped in bush­es like a piece of garbage.
Instead of fight­ing the mur­der­ers in Jamaica Holness has decid­ed he wants to fight the police.
He start­ed off by spread­ing the nar­ra­tive that if we want to fix crime we must first fix the police.
Then they empow­er antag­o­nist INDECOM’s boss the hyper-par­ti­san Terrence Williams to per­se­cute. This start­ed a both-ends leak in the JCF. (1) they can no longer meet recruit­ment tar­gets, and (2) peo­ple are rac­ing to the exits to find green­er pas­tures in the CARICOM region and beyond.
There is not much they can do to force peo­ple into the JCF but they have darn sure tried to stop them from leav­ing by cre­at­ing new uncon­sti­tu­tion­al poli­cies which crim­i­nal­ize cops who leave with­out giv­ing (6) months advance notice that they intend to leave.
Not only are the bet­ter peo­ple not will­ing to stick around for the non­sense, but they are also now attract­ing can­di­dates who are crim­i­nals.
So the idea of fix­ing the force becomes an abstrac­tion and so they can blame the crime epi­dem­ic on the police. Checkmate .… right?

None of this was nec­es­sary, what was required was a respect­ful approach, begin­ning with pay­ing the offi­cers a liv­ing wage. Creating reten­tive strate­gies which incen­tivize edu­ca­tion, val­or, ser­vice, hon­est and pro­duc­tiv­i­ty.
By cre­at­ing a mer­it-based sys­tem which rewards good work and the right atti­tude you begin the process of weed­ing out the dead­wood. Right away you plug the attri­tion dike on the back end, while on the front end hav­ing to hold the gate from assault as the best qual­i­fied, most suit­able can­di­dates would be beat­ing down the doors to enter.
The approach tak­en by this admin­is­tra­tion has increased the chal­lenges to the police, cre­at­ed more law­less­ness and ulti­mate­ly increased crime.
No amount of SOE’s and ZOSO’s can cure this for the gov­ern­ment.
This wrong-head­ed approach influ­enced by Jamaicans for Justice (JFJ) and the long line of anti-police hate groups roam­ing around on the Island, [some paid with tax­pay­ers funds] will con­tin­ue to increase mur­ders and oth­er vio­lent crimes.
The crim­i­nal under­world is watch­ing and they are lov­ing what is hap­pen­ing, the police no longer present a cred­i­ble threat to their oper­a­tions.
The Government may just come out and say it sup­ports the crim­i­nals because whether it knows it or not it does.

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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.