“WE NEED MORE JOBS IN OUR COMMUNITIES”

That’s the ral­ly­ing cry we hear from Black Academia. Black Journalists. Black Civil Rights Leaders. Black Clergy. Black Commentators & Analysts.They all have the same ral­ly­ing cry.
It is true but mak­ing that state­ment is a cop-out. It is intel­lec­tu­al lazi­ness and in my esti­ma­tion an attempt to con­tin­ue a pat­tern of vic­tim-hood. A pat­tern which con­tin­ues the mis­con­cep­tion that the sav­ing of a peo­ple is tied to the largess of a Government or a myth­i­cal being.
Let’s assume for a minute that the Government or some­one else could find 20 – 30 mil­lion jobs and lit­er­al­ly drop those bot­tom end jobs into the black com­mu­ni­ty Why in Heavens name would the black com­mu­ni­ty be sat­is­fied with bot­tom end jobs? Why do I say bot­tom end jobs you ask? Well if you are not trained in spe­cif­ic areas what kind of jobs are you qual­i­fied for with all due respect?

We know no one will mirac­u­lous­ly find 20 – 30 mil­lion jobs to drop any­where much less in the black com­mu­ni­ty. First of all I take issue with the entire con­cept of a black com­mu­ni­ty. Where is that and if it does exist why would blacks sub­ject them­selves to com­mu­ni­ties where every ser­vice offered is substandard?
I have been hav­ing this con­ver­sa­tion with a friend of mine who is an old­er man than me he is pas­sion­ate about the issues which affect blacks and though we have argued this issue ad-nau­se­um he seem stuck like a lot of oth­er peo­ple on the word “THEY”.
“They Won’t do this. They won’t do that, They won’t give us this, They won’t allow us that.”
This is where my friend and I part com­pa­ny, as a high school stu­dent who was raised with­out a father or moth­er I lived with my great-aunt, or as we say in Jamaica (mi gran aun­tie). There was no “they” to pro­vide books and in most cas­es not even lunch mon­ey. There was no “they” to pro­vide uni­form so I had to fig­ure out how to pro­vide uni­forms for myself.
As a Agri-sci­ence stu­dent in the tenth grade my sci­ence teacher placed me in charge of the 10 – 11 th grade stu­dent body involved in Agri-sci­ence, I used what I learned in Agri-sci­ence to pro­duce Scotch-Bonnett Peppers and oth­er cash crops which yield high returns in the mar­kets to fund my high school edu­ca­tion as well as to put food on the table.

My point in all this is that Cows don’t eat grass then wait for the grass to regrow they keep moving.
Adapting a vic­tim­hood men­tal­i­ty is the great­est imped­i­ment to total lib­er­a­tion . No President or Policy will change the con­di­tions affect­ing Black-America until we change our indi­vid­ual behav­iors and attitudes.
Black-America is the only force which will change Black-America> Oh I know this is not a pop­u­lar thing to say because it relieves too many of our peo­ple of per­son­al respon­si­bil­i­ty. It takes away the hus­tle of those who live by sell­ing vic­tim­hood to the mass­es. Candidate Barack Obama spoke to that very issue in 2008 vet­er­an Civil rights Activist jesse Jackson took Umbrage to the then Senator Obama’s chal­lenge to Black-America.

In July 2008, Jesse Jackson start­ed chat­ting with a guest about then-can­di­date Barack Obama’s speech­es in black church­es. Jackson was not pleased with them and found Obama’s remarks con­de­scend­ing to black peo­ple. As pun­ish­ment, Jackson said he would like to “cut [Obama’s] nuts off. With all due respect to the Reverend Jackson and all of the oth­er war­riors of the strug­gle Obama was mere­ly chal­leng­ing them to move past the fights of the 60’s and build on the gains of those bat­tles won. Barack Obama;s Presidency is exact­ly what build­ing on those gains accomplishes.
Many African-Americans who have adopt­ed a pol­i­cy of self-deter­mi­na­tion and per­son­al respon­si­bil­i­ty and are reap­ing the rewards of their deci­sions tend to grav­i­tate toward the Political right. That was the mes­sage of the right even though the right has pre­cious lit­tle care or desire to see any­one but White men with power.

Silicone val­ley has already cre­at­ed pro­to­types which will remove even more jobs. Much more than is already lost to out­sourc­ing and the desire to take advan­tage of cheap labor. Experts say than in anoth­er decade our lives will be sig­nif­i­cant­ly trans­formed as a result of the Robot tech­nol­o­gy which for bet­ter or worse will lit­er­al­ly evis­cer­ate a huge chunk of the jobs from the work­force. Already we see cars which dri­ve them­selves and that is just the begin­ning. We are expe­ri­enc­ing tech­nol­o­gy which have Robots cre­at­ing baby robots.
On the issue of self dri­ving vehi­cles alone hun­dreds of thou­sands more jobs will be plucked from the work­force as there will be no need for chauf­feurs and truck dri­vers eventually.
We are being told most of the jobs in the food ser­vice indus­try( once seen as the holy-grail of low end jobs)will sim­ply dis­s­a­pear. This is in addi­tion to the mil­lions of Jobs which have already left America’s shores to Asia where the Business com­mu­ni­ty is able to pay expo­nen­tial­ly less for wages and no health ben­e­fits to Workers.

So as my friend insist that “THEY” are not doing enough I asked him how many unem­ployed Doctors. Lawyers. Nurses. Computer pro­gram­mers. Code-writ­ers . Plumbers . Electricians. Refrigeration tech­ni­cians. Brick-lay­ers or any oth­er skilled pro­fes­sion­als he knew.
He said he did not exact­ly know any but argued there may be some.
I gave him that, but he under­stood the point I was making.
Even though he under­stood that what I meant is that for our own sur­vival we will have to make the change we want to see. Our women will have to make bet­ter deci­sions who they pro­duce babies with. Yes it starts there. It is an incon­ve­nient truth but it does us no good when we pre­tend it has noth­ing to do with present day sit­u­a­tion in our communites.
It does no good to fight the odds when you don’t need to . Of course a sin­gle moth­er can raise her child and do a darn good job of it out of neces­si­ty, but why do it if it isn’t a necessity?

Why fight the odds when all the data shows the dis­ad­van­tages chil­dren raised in sin­gle fam­i­ly house­holds face?
Absolutely there are a whole host of issues which neces­si­tate indi­vid­u­als rais­ing their chil­dren alone. I am not speak­ing to those situations.
The soon­er we dis­en­gage from the tena­cious death-grip of lib­er­al vic­tim­hood the soon­er we begin the ardu­ous task of recon­struct­ing our fam­i­ly units and putting our futures back together.
The empow­er­ment of Black peo­ple in America will not come from the NAACP . Neither will it come from the Urban League or the pletho­ra of oth­er groups and Organizations which mil­i­tate on behalf of the Black Community use­ful though they are.
It will not come from any mas­sive infu­sion of Government involve­ment be it with social pro­grams or giveaways.
The uplift­ment and the fix for Black America lies in each and every indi­vid­ual home of Black America, with each and every per­son tak­ing respon­si­bil­i­ty for their own lives. When we do that we will begin to make bet­ter deci­sions on pro­cre­ation which is at the root of the problem.

People can hate you all they want but if you are edu­cat­ed and unit­ed they dare not touch you for fear of the con­se­quences to them­selves. If we build com­mu­ni­ties of edu­cat­ed black peo­ple who under­stand the val­ue of mon­ey who know how to raise our chil­dren peo­ple stand up and take notice. If we begin to learn to con­trol our own des­tinies by learn­ing how to start new busi­ness­es we con­trol ours and our chil­dren’s futures. When we start under­stand­ing the val­ue of sup­port­ing black busi­ness we begin to keep our mon­ey cir­cu­lat­ing with­in our own com­mu­ni­ties. When we under­stand the val­ue of build­ing insti­tu­tions with­in our com­mu­ni­ties which empow­ers us rather than mis­in­form and teach­es us to be vic­tims, we begin to see changes in the way oth­ers react and respond to us. It is a los­ing bat­tle to fight in the streets with Police, we can nev­er change the par­a­digm by march­ing . We effect change in the courts and state leg­is­la­tures where the laws are passed, not fight with cops in front of precinct hous­es.. The great changes which occurred that changed the par­a­digm in the 60’s emanat­ed from the bat­tles won in the Courts by Thurgood Marshall.
Lets fix our indi­vid­ual cir­cum­stances and change our think­ing and we will begin to see even those who despise us try to make friends with us .

Today the American Flag went up in Havana Cuba for the first time after in came down under tense cir­cum­stances in 1961. At the time Cuban President Fidel Castro called the American Embassy a nest of spies. In the ensu­ing 54 years much has hap­pened includ­ing the failed inva­sion of the island by dis­si­dents which became known as the Bay of Pigs.

In the mean­time America has nor­mal­ized rela­tions with Russia and oth­er satel­lites of the old Soviet Empire. Relations between the United States and China has also nor­mal­ized result­ing in mas­sive bilat­er­al coöper­a­tion between the two pow­ers. Even Vietnam now enjoys nor­mal rela­tions with the United States.
President Obama fol­low­ing up on his promise to be a trans­for­ma­tion­al President made good by open­ing dia­logue with the Cuban Government .
The Cuban Embargo has been in effect through­out the Cold war. The Cold war end­ed in the 80’s under the Republican dar­ling Ronald Reagan, dur­ing that time America engaged in wars in far-flung and diverse places as Grenada, Afghanistan as well as Iraq and deal­ing with con­flicts involv­ing Isis and Al Queda. The Cuban Government has with­stood the Embargo despite Cuban President Fidel Castro’s ill-health and broth­er Raul assum­ing active lead­er­ship of the Government.

Despite the Embargo the Cuban Revolution has flour­ished in med­i­cine and edu­ca­tion, in build­ing con­struc­tion and research. Clearly this Revolution is going nowhere. As such the American President Barack Hussien Obama cor­rect­ly decid­ed to nor­mal­ize rela­tions with the Cuban Government instead of wait­ing for a new breed of young com­mu­nists to pick up the man­tle. If the Embargo did not top­ple the Cuban rev­o­lu­tion in 54 years why would any­one think it will in anoth­er 54.
Stupid is doing the same thing over and over again and expect­ing a dif­fer­ent result.
That is the rea­son I whole­heart­ed­ly sup­port the Secretary of State John Kerry for going ahead with the for­mal­i­ties with­out invit­ing cer­tain mem­bers of the Cuban dis­si­dent community.

It is exact­ly the cor­rect move in light of their intran­si­gent and almost mono­lith­ic and idi­ot­ic views on how to pro­ceed on this issue. Most of those dis­si­dents are loy­al to the Republican Party and are stu­pid­ly crit­i­cal of any­thing but the regres­sive­ly back­ward pol­i­cy of puffery and iso­la­tion rather than a pol­i­cy of engage­ment and coöper­a­tion. That is why peo­ple like Cuban American Senator Marco Rubio should be ignored for his idi­ot­ic dem­a­goguery when he stat­ed ‚According to excerpts of his speech released in advance will say that he believes Obama’s push for a nuclear deal with Iran and his out­reach to the Cuban gov­ern­ment in Havana “rep­re­sent the con­ver­gence of near­ly every flawed strate­gic, moral, and eco­nom­ic notion” of his for­eign pol­i­cy. He will say the two deals demon­strate that the admin­is­tra­tion “has placed pol­i­tics before pol­i­cy, adver­saries before allies, and lega­cy before lead­er­ship.” Rubio is to say that as pres­i­dent, he’d tell the rul­ing Castro broth­ers that the diplo­mat­ic over­tures would be erased unless they car­ry out “mean­ing­ful polit­i­cal and human rights reforms.” And he will say he’d restore Cuba to the state spon­sor of ter­ror list and pro­vide sup­port to Cuba’s pro-democ­ra­cy move​ment​.Read more here: Rubio to mark US flag rais­ing in Cuba by rip­ping Obama for­eign pol­i­cy Read more here: http://​www​.mcclatchy​dc​.com/​n​e​w​s​/​p​o​l​i​t​i​c​s​-​g​o​v​e​r​n​m​e​n​t​/​e​l​e​c​t​i​o​n​/​a​r​t​i​c​l​e​3​1​0​6​4​5​2​9​.​h​t​m​l​#​s​t​o​r​y​l​i​n​k​=​cpy.

This is not the first time we have heard this type of divi­sive rhetoric from this lit­tle tool of the Tea par­ty fringe. No one should take this upstart too seri­ous­ly. This guy whose moth­er and father came to America and worked so he could go to col­lege is now one of the most retard­ed obstruc­tion­ist on Immigration.
In his hur­ry to speak Rubio did not both­er to engage his brain before he shot off at the mouth claim­ing that the pres­i­dent had giv­en a birth­day pres­i­dent to Castro and reward­ed a coun­try which is a state spon­sor of terror.
That lie was so absurd yet the lit­tle son of immi­grants who hates immi­grants either did not know the Government of which he is a part and which he wants to head had removed that des­ig­na­tion from Cuba.
That des­ig­na­tion was a com­plete farce to begin with as Cuba only sup­port­ed groups like the ANC in it’s strug­gle against the racist apartheid Government which exist­ed there. Marco Rubio and his fam­i­ly climbed up the lad­der and this runt is doing every­thing in his pow­er to kick that lad­der away so it won’t be there for oth­er hard work­ing fam­i­lies. Rubio is a fraud and a char­la­tan of the worst kind.

It is now up to the do-noth­ing Republican con­gress to lift the Embargo which only it can do. Lifting of the Cuban Embargo means trade between the two nations based on mutu­al respect. It also means over 11 mil­lion peo­ple to whom to sell American Goods. This is a new day for Cuba and America if America can extri­cate itself from poten­tial lead­ers like the Cuban-American upstart Marco Rubio.
One more feath­er in the hat of a tru­ly great American President , Barack Obama.

Woman Constable Crystal Thomas was laid to rest in an emo­tion­al cer­e­mo­ny in Spanish Town almost a week ago . The Funeral ser­vice was attend­ed by Minister Of National Security Peter Bunting and Opposition Spokesman on National Security Derrick Smith. Also in atten­dance was min­is­ter with respon­si­bil­i­ty for the pub­lic sec­tor, Horace Dalley.

When events like these hap­pen in our life­time they jog our social con­sciences and we are out­raged. When the pain inflict­ed on our com­mu­ni­ties is this shock­ing we grieve in una­nim­i­ty with our neigh­bors. I nev­er met Crystal Thomas yet I could not hold back the tears. Neither the nation­s’s Prime Minister nor the Leader of the Opposition had the time to stand with the fam­i­ly of Crystal Thomas. I will get back to that.
Crystal was not the only Police Officer to lose her life with­in a cou­ple of days of each other.

Twenty-two years old Constable Curtis Lewis was ran over and killed by a motor­cy­clist who did not think he should have to lis­ten to the offi­cer’s law­ful com­mand to stop . Constable Lewis’ leg was sev­ered from his body. The young offi­cer died in Hospital. This most despi­ca­ble act of crim­i­nal dis­obe­di­ence, das­tard­ly and utter­ly unthink­able though it was. It was not wor­thy, nei­ther did it elic­it a sin­gle response from the Nation’s Prime Minister. To date we don’t exact­ly know what the charges are for the rid­er of the Motorcycle. Chances are if the case does get to Court one of the nations almighty judges will find a tech­ni­cal­i­ty on which to release him back into the society.

Constable Lynden Barrett was gunned down on Wellington Street in West Kingston his death was not impor­tant enough to elic­it a response from the Nation’s Prime MinisterThe Police for it’s incom­pe­tent part released the names of three men whom they say are respon­si­ble for Constable Barret’s death. The three are Gratiano Green, oth­er­wise called ‘Beh Beh’, of Regent Street and Tulip Lane in Denham Town, Kingston 14; Nicholas Drummond, oth­er­wise called ‘Ticki Dollar’, of Christopher Road, Kingston 14; and Horatio

Livine, oth­er­wise called ‘Ratio’, of Dread Lane, Denham Town, Kingston 14.
To date there is no infor­ma­tion regard­ing whether these three alleged mur­der­ers have been appre­hend­ed or elim­i­nat­ed for the killing of Constable Barrtett. When Police Officers are killed their killers must be appre­hend­ed with­in hours . Apprehension must be the ulti­mate inten­tion of those who go after them but make no mis­take about it there should be no hes­i­ta­tion in exter­mi­nat­ing them if they decide to put up a fight.

Thirty two year-old Corporal Tyrone Thompson died alleged­ly as a result of sui­cide in Manchester. We don’t know whether the Investigations deci­sive­ly and con­clu­sive­ly decid­ed his death was sui­cide as was ini­tial­ly report­ed . His death was not impor­tant enough to war­rant or elic­it a sin­gle response from the Prime Minister.
Neither the indi­vid­ual death of each offi­cer nor their col­lec­tive passing

with­ing the short span of time was momen­tous enough to elic­it a response from the Nations Prime Minister.

Portia Simpson Miller was laud­ed in Time Magazine, hailed as one of the world’s most influ­en­tial per­sons a cou­ple of years ago. At the time I was incred­i­bly indif­fer­ent to that hon­or being bestowed on her. I thought it was un-earned and a mock­ery to hard work­ing women who are real­ly doing impact­ful work toward the ben­e­fit of all mankind. I was also mind­ful of the pol­i­tics of that des­ig­na­tion based on her response in the debate lead­ing up to her elec­tion to revis­it the bug­gery laws.
If the Prime Minister was indeed influ­en­tial as des­ig­nat­ed by Time Magazine, would­n’t this be the time for Portia Simpson Miller to step up to the plate and speak out about the killing of the Island Police officers?
There was gen­er­al­ly a con­sen­sus on the part of police offi­cers dur­ing my time that we may suf­fer harm in the line of duty. Many offi­cers have been killed, many have been shot in the line of duty and many more have been injured

and killed even in their own homes. What we nev­er quite embraced men­tal­ly was the killing of female police offi­cers. I know the cyn­ics will quick­ly dis­miss that argu­ing that all police offi­cers know the risks beforehand.
This Article is not for those cynics.

Many years ago anoth­er female offi­cer was mur­dered, I was a serv­ing mem­ber then. Constable Johnston was killed on her way to work. Criminals board­ed the Bus on which she was a pas­sen­ger they robbed the pas­sen­gers of what­ev­er valu­ables they had. Constable Johnston was car­ry­ing a bag with her uni­form in it. On the basis of that Uniform Constable Johnston was mer­ci­less­ly sex­u­al­ly assault­ed and mur­dered. Her killing enraged the Nation. I will go to my grave sat­is­fied that I was among those who found the demon­ic pieces of garbage who vio­lat­ed her.
Well over two decades lat­er con­sta­ble Crystal Thomas trav­el­ling on a public

pas­sen­ger bus met some­what the same fate as con­sta­ble Johnston.

When Ex-police offi­cers and Police offi­cers lash out at these killings we lash out because noth­ing has changed in the way our offi­cers are treat­ed. When the Federation Chairman lash­es out the last thing we need is to hear the views of the Editorial board of the Observer.
We don’t want to hear the views of the edi­to­r­i­al board of the Gleaner.
We do not give a shit about the views of crim­i­nals sup­port­ing Terrence Willaims of (inde­com).
And we damn sure do not care about the ver­bal char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of the police hat­ing vil­lage lawyers telling us when to speak or what we need to say.
On That basis we stand with the Police Federation and we here and now push back against the Elitist scums in the soci­ety who take it onto them­selves to tell police offi­cers how they should lit­i­gate or grieve. How dare the pre­ten­tious a**holes tell police offi­cer how they should grieve? How dare they tell the

Federation Chairman what he can say and should not say?Who autho­rize Police hat­ing Terrence Williams and Hamish Campbell to speak to this issue.

The coun­try is going to hell in a hand-bas­ket. The mild­ly lit­er­ate Head of state hides behind oth­ers yet the pur­vey­ors of anar­chy and polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness dare tell police offi­cers what they may say and dare ques­tion their right to say it.
Who the hell are these peo­ple who believe Jamaica belongs to them. What sac­ri­fice have they made for country ?
Here’s a word to Terrence Williams you go ahead and per­se­cute the Police and we will turn up the heat on you . There is an old Jamaican proverb “di higer di mon­key clime di more him expose”. It is abun­dant­ly clear that Williams wants to be in the lime-light we are going to make sure that as he choos­es so be it. Keep the light on the police and we damn sure will keep the light on you.
To the edi­to­r­i­al boards of the two dishrags which pass as gen­uine news­pa­pers, hide behind edi­to­ri­als we say this to you many of you soon will need to seek employ­ment else­where. Hardly any­one reads your news­pa­pers any­more and guess what your opin­ions don’t mat­ter anyway.
We sup­port Police Federation Chairman Raymond Wilson’s right to speak out at Crystal’s funer­al. I did not hear any com­plaints from Crystal’s mom in fact the con­gre­gants of that church, hum­ble folks, loved his speech. No one tells us what to say or when to say it.

Fifty years after the US vot­ing Rights Act was passed and signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson, the United States Supreme Court struck down a key part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 —That includ­ed the map that deter­mines which states must get fed­er­al per­mis­sion before they change their vot­ing laws. That part of the law was struck down after Court chal­lenges which cul­mi­nat­ed at the nation’s high­est court. Congress had renewed it four times, and the 2006 renew­al won a huge major­i­ty in the House and passed the Senate 98 – 0. That renew­al extend­ed the law through 2031.

I bring this bit of infor­ma­tion to the fore because I want to make a sim­ple point that laws should be done so that we can go back and fix them if they are deemed to be detri­men­tal or need updat­ing. The Americans have a his­to­ry of putting a time stamp on their laws which allow them to void the headache of doing a full repeal of a law which may not be work­ing so well. In many cas­es a law may not be work­ing well but oppo­nents and pro­po­nents alike are so well dug in that it is impos­si­ble to get any­thing done about that piece of legislation.
That is why it is vital­ly impor­tant to have an out clause which allows law mak­ers to have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to revis­it laws and make them rel­e­vant to the times. Insofar as the US Supreme Court is con­cerned on the Voting Rights Act the Court decid­ed that the Law has worked well and the restric­tions ought to be removed from those states so con­strained, because sit­u­a­tions have changed as it relates to vot­ing in those states. Whether one agrees with that rul­ing is open for legit­i­mate debate.

This brings us to Former Scotland Yard Ex Detective Chief Superintendent Hamish Campbell who is now an assis­tant Commissioner of (inde­com) the Agency with over­sight respon­si­bil­i­ty of the JDF. JCF. and Corrections Department.
This Publication pays a lot of atten­tion to the oper­a­tions of (inde­com) and more-so it’s com­mis­sion­er his rhetoric and behav­ior as head of that Agency. We miss the boat how­ev­er if we miss the under­tones and argu­ments made by Hamish Campbell who is nei­ther the Commissioner nor a Jamaican citizen.
The British pub­li­ca­tion the Dailymail actu­al­ly cred­its Hamish Campbell and gives him con­trol of (inde­com) as if Terrence Williams does not exist.
See Story here: Caribbean island gun police kill one civil­ian EVERY day:
I have lis­tened to Campbell’s tone and con­tent since his arrival and I tried to be fair to him. Despite being a for­mer Police offi­cer of the JCF I have been a pro­po­nent of bring­ing in peo­ple to assist our police in the areas of train­ing and to help with exper­tise in areas where we are lack­ing. As such I am not opposed to for­eign­ers com­ing to Jamaica to help. What I do not want is a belief on their part that they under­stand Jamaican cul­ture and need to make us civilize.

Mark Shields and oth­ers have come to Jamaica sup­pos­ed­ly to help with our inves­tiga­tive capa­bil­i­ties, that did not work out so well for the Jamaican peo­ple . There is not much that may be attrib­uted to Shields and oth­ers. Conversely they have ben­e­fit­ed great­ly from their stay inJamaica.
When you are invit­ed into anoth­er Country you do the job you are asked to do and stay out of the pol­i­tics of the job. Listening to Hamish Campbell I am get­ting more than a lit­tle offend­ed at his Colonialist tone. Jamaica is an inde­pen­dent Nation, I under­stand Campbell may see the oppor­tu­ni­ty to be Lord Master being on the Island and deal­ing with the ador­ing natives includ­ing those who occu­py Jamaica House , but I would like to remind him not every Jamaican is an ador­ing native hap­py fi si mas­sa.[sic]

Said Hamish Campbell, “In the UK and else­where, an inde­pen­dent body is just that, it sets out to inves­ti­gate on behalf of the pub­lic mat­ters of death, bru­tal­i­ty, all sorts of things and does­n’t allow the police ser­vice to inter­fere with the laws which have been settled,”
Here’s the prob­lem with what Campbell said, he is nei­ther in the UK or any­where else and most impor­tant­ly the law is not set­tled unless we say it’s set­tled. As Jamaicans we reserve the right to agi­tate and fight until a par­tic­u­lar law is set­tled fair­ly. Might I add fair­ly is not what mas­sa sent Campbell down to the colony to tell us is fair, fair is what we say is fair.
The (inde­com) Act is a Jamaican alba­tross to Police and cit­i­zens alike since it’s incep­tion police shoot­ings have gone down yes but those reduc­tions are not attrib­ut­able to (inde­com). They are direct­ly as a result of police pulling back , because they do not want to be per­se­cut­ed. Additionally mur­ders and oth­er seri­ous crimes have soared as a result of the ten­ta­tive nature of police and their reluc­tance to place them­selves in jeopardy.
In 2014 Campbell was incred­i­bly vocif­er­ous in detail­ing for all who would lis­ten just how sig­nif­i­cant­ly inci­dents of police shoot­ings had dropped since he arrived.
The (Dailymail) also detailed that ‘Around 1,100 peo­ple were mur­dered in Jamaica (pop­u­la­tion 3 mil­lion) in 2013. According to Hamish Campbell in London pop­u­la­tion 8 – 9 mil­lion only 100 mur­ders were committed.

Everyone who comes to Jamaica and are greet­ed by our ador­ing and kind peo­ple, after a brief time begin to feel like they know Jamaica or that they are indeed Jamaicans. Last night I watched a young British guy who went to Jamaica once, he had the Jamaica flag tat­tooed on his right bicep. He was play­ing Reggae music and toast­ing … well of course he though he sound­ed like us and you know what that’s great. That is the way our coun­try cause peo­ple to feel. Once you go you know.Right ?
Not exact­ly !!!
That lit­tle adage does­n’t apply to mag­a­zine writ­ers and oth­er jour­nal­ists who trav­el to Jamaica spend a few weeks or months with the peo­ple then head back to their coun­tries and write about sit­u­a­tions with tremen­dous con­vic­tion as if they know Jamaica. Neither have Hamish Campbell begun to scratch the sur­face of what real­ly hap­pen in Jamaica’s inner city com­mu­ni­ties and tight-knit communities.
Don’t assume that because you vis­it Jamaica and the peo­ple are kind and ador­ing that you under­stand the com­plex nature of our nation’s sub-culture.

Said Hamish Campbell:  “There is a wide­spread belief that the police are killing peo­ple who can’t oth­er­wise get to the courts.,’ he said. ‘The courts have huge back­logs. Trials are years and years behind. Some cas­es are dis­missed by the courts, because the police evi­dence is sim­ply not up to scratch. ‘It is dif­fi­cult find­ing peo­ple who are brave enough to sit on juries. Generally speak­ing, the police say they ‘all the peo­ple we shoot are crim­i­nals, they have guns, we have an encounter with them and they are killed’,’ said Mr Campbell. ‘But the obses­sive dead­ly force does not match up with the wit­ness tes­ti­mo­ny in many of the cas­es.’ ‘A long-term cul­ture has devel­oped (in the police) that these judi­cial killings will cleanse the ranks of crim­i­nals. It is a com­plete­ly unac­cept­able and inap­pro­pri­ate approach to take.”
Insulting . Naïve. Misinformed . Outlandish. Propaganda. Hearsay .
Right off the bat this guy was off base, obses­sive dead­ly force? How did Hamish Campbell arrive at that con­clu­sion? was he at the scene of every shoot­ing? Was he at the scene of a sin­gle shoot­ing ? The answer is no ! So let’s see how he arrived at the con­clu­sion he arrived at real soon after he was sent down by the Monarch to edu­cate the savages[sic] “There is a wide­spread belief that the police are killing peo­ple who can’t oth­er­wise get to the courts.,”..
Oh sil­ly me, so in Campbell’s world of inves­ti­ga­tions a wide-spread belief(heresay) is evi­den­tary fact. No men­tion of the dan­gers the Police face. No men­tion of the vis­cous nature of Jamaican thugs which his Government is all too hap­py to deport back to the Island for the Jamaican Police to deal with.
“It is dif­fi­cult for peo­ple to sit on juries” I won­der why Campbell believe these Jamaicans are afraid to sit on juries?Wonder if he both­ered to ask why there is such a huge back­log in the courts sys­tem? No I’m sure he has­n’t because his focus is to prove that police are just killing peo­ple for no reason.
The fact that many of the peo­ple arrest­ed and charged for mur­der some­times already have sev­er­al oth­er mur­der charges on court dock­ets but were grant­ed bail; on these mur­der charges over and over and over by the lib­er­al left-wing courts upon which they sim­ply kill wit­ness­es who would have tes­ti­fied against them.

Campbell was not shy about div­ing into the pol­i­tics blam­ing the police while not assign­ing blame where it belongs.
Where have I seen that atti­tude before? Oh yeah that is the atti­tude of cops who spend their time in offices , are pro­mot­ed and then find it pru­dent to lec­ture real cops. In a real democ­ra­cy Legislatures would not have grant­ed bail to peo­ple fac­ing mur­der charges. Secondly the loop-hole which allows mur­der­ers to kill wit­ness­es or have them killed in order to make their cas­es go away would have been plugged.
In a Democracy that’s what real Legislatures do. Do not blame Police for the hor­ri­ble break-down of the Criminal Justice system.
Lay the blame where it belongs at the feet of the Politicians. Campbell seem to believe that as Jamaicans we are obliv­i­ous or unin­formed about the way British Police treat crim­i­nals in British cities. We are also not unin­formed on their rela­tion­ships with eth­nic minori­ties in England.
What Jamaican cer­tain­ly do not need is a lec­ture from our for­mer Colonial masters.
Well some of us don’t.

The Police Federation is angry at the Portia Simpson Miller Administration for what it sees as a bla­tant dis­re­gard on the part of Government in address­ing it’s request that bus­es be pro­vid­ed to trans­port off-duty offi­cers home after they fin­ish their tours of duty. The Government is neg­li­gent on a host of issues that’s for sure but I do not see this request as a prac­ti­cal solu­tion to the prob­lem. In a scathing speech a few days ago at the funer­al ser­vice of slain woman con­sta­ble Crystal Thomas, Federation Chairman Raymond Wilson blast­ed the Government for it’s fail­ure to accede to the Federation’s request for transportation.

If the Government accedes to the request of police offi­cers , it opens itself to acced­ing to sim­i­lar requests from all oth­er cat­e­go­ry of pub­lic sec­tor work­ers , includ­ing Nurses, Doctors and all oth­er cat­e­gories of pub­lic sec­tor work­ers who have to trav­el at nights. It is imprac­ti­cal for Government to pro­vide bus­es to facil­i­tate those requests which are sure to come were it to grant the request of the Police.
Additionally the Government oper­ates a pub­lic bus com­pa­ny which makes that prospect counter intuitive.
It is sad and indeed a seri­ous indict­ment on the state of the coun­try’s when the pub­lic trans­port sys­tem is not safe for com­muters regard­less of their status.

No trans­porta­tion sys­tem in the world is total­ly safe . Criminals are always pry­ing for soft spots across the globe crim­i­nals prey on pub­lic trans­porta­tion sys­tems where they believe their will be less law enforce­ment pres­ence. The flu­id nature of trans­porta­tion sys­tems also helps crim­i­nals in their escape plans after they have com­mit­ted crimes.
The chal­lenge for the coun­try in this regard is three-fold. (1) Improve the abil­i­ty of the police to pre­vent crimes. (2) Improve the abil­i­ty of the police to catch offend­ers after they com­mit crimes and (3) Improve the crim­i­nal Justice sys­tem so that crim­i­nals can spend longer time in prison for the crimes they commit.

ALTERNATIVE.
In my esti­ma­tion I believe that the fed­er­a­tion can do a bet­ter job on it’s own. Members pay fees to the Federation, if nec­es­sary seek per­mis­sion from mem­bers of the rank-and file toward secur­ing a lit­tle big­ger con­tri­bu­tion to the Federation ‑fund which would pro­vide low inter­est loans to mem­bers desirous of pur­chas­ing their own cars. This fund would grow over time allow­ing the Federation to do more for it’s membership.
ADDITIONALLY
Additionally the Federation could take a sim­i­lar pro­pos­al to Government ask­ing for it’s help in start­ing that fund as part of the nego­ti­a­tions for bet­ter wage a work­ing con­di­tions. A com­mit­ment of say M$30- M$50 from Government cou­pled with what­ev­er the Federation can scrape togeth­er would go a long way toward alle­vi­at­ing that problem.
If man­aged prop­er­ly that would negate the need for the Federation to make some demands of Government as the fund would grow and increase in value.
A plan of that nature would absolute­ly be pop­u­lar with the rank and file. Naturally not every­one who apply would be able to receive a loan ini­tial­ly so it should be done sole­ly on the basis of the amount of loans the fund can afford per year.

Doable?
I thing so , where there is a will there is a way . It requires a lit­tle imag­i­na­tion and inge­nu­ity. Obviously the Police will have to do more for them­selves if the Administration has no mon­ey or more sin­is­ter,.. refus­es to help.

In yet anoth­er attempt to per­se­cute Jamaican Police offi­cers or as Police Federation Chairman Raymond Wilson char­ac­ter­ized it (give Police bas­ket to car­ry water) the Elitist class in Jamaica con­tin­ue it’s assault on the Nation’s Police offi­cers by attack­ing the Office of Director of Public Prosecution (DPP) and Director Paula Llewelyn.
The DPP was forced to push back against crit­i­cisms that her office is soft on Police offi­cers who are alleged to run afoul of the laws.
SEE STORY HERE:DPP: I’m No Avenging Angel

Long before the (indecom)Act came into being and became a blud­geon­ing tool for the elites and their cronies against the Police, Jamaica’s elites and the Political class were attack­ing Paula Llewelyn that she was soft on Police Officers.
Having been a police offi­cer many years ago I knew Paula Llewelyn and she was no pat­sy for police offi­cers. In fact many offi­cers were dis­dain­ful of her.
For many years the elites in Jamaica argued that the police were stu­pid , unin­tel­li­gent idiots who could not get any oth­er job. It should also be not­ed that Jamaica is not a Nation of laws so Politicians, the well con­nect­ed and monied class are vir­tu­al­ly above the laws.

However some things have changed in the JCF over the years. through attri­tion and retire­ments many old­er offi­cers are now out of the depart­ment. Additionally, the acute short­age of jobs in the pri­vate sec­tor forced some who would oth­er­wise have snooti­ly turned up their noses at being a police offi­cer to sign up out of eco­nom­ic necessity.
So the old argu­ments don’t hold much sway any­more. Mind you it nev­er had legit­i­ma­cy. The very peo­ple who turned up their noses at Police when they speak “Patios” the Nation’s dialect, now roman­ti­cize the dialect with some active­ly push­ing for it to become a lan­guage. Of course the coun­try’s dialect can only be legit­i­mate if it is val­i­dat­ed by those who tread the god­less halls of the Intellectual ghetto(UWI).[sic].

So what was the untouch­ables to do if police offi­cers are earn­ing under-grad­u­ate and grad­u­ate degrees? Remember in Jamaica most of the seri­ous crimes are being com­mit­ted by peo­ple at the very top of the soci­ety. A com­pe­tent Police Force is a threat to those inter­ests. Police Officers like Laing, Bigga Ford and oth­ers had chal­lenged the pow­er struc­ture in the Courts. There was a gen­er­al under­stand­ing that there are some with­in the depart­ment were not going to roll over for them any longer so a solu­tion was needed.
The for­mer Commissioner had a Masters , and the present Commissioner is a PhD. Both men were poor boys from the rur­al parish­es who came up through the ranks. Almost all of the top tiered offi­cers have degrees. Young Constable Crystal Thomas who was mer­ci­less­ly slaugh­tered a few weeks ago had in fact earned her first degree.
They had to find a way to keep the Police in check. (inde­com) was born. Yup The Police need­ed effec­tive over­sight , no rea­son­able per­son no mat­ter how sup­port­ive they are of the JCF could seri­ous­ly sug­gest that the police did not help to cre­ate (inde­com).
Police mis­con­duct cre­at­ed the need for (inde­com) .
The Elites dis­dain for the police cre­at­ed the uncon­stu­tion­al mon­stros­i­ty we now know as (inde­com), and placed the blood-suck­ing Dracula present­ly at it’s head in place.

Paula Llewelyn pushed back at crit­ics who say she is soft on police say­ing ” I’m No Avenging Angel”. Llewelyn rec­og­nizes what’s at stake here and is vehe­ment in her push-back. The fact that she made that state­ment is proof pos­i­tive that she gets what we have been say­ing for years in this medi­um. This is not about Prosecution of crim­i­nal con­duct. What they want is per­se­cu­tion and shack­ling of police so they may do as they please.

According to sta­tis­tics released yes­ter­day, the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) hand­ed down 56 rul­ings over the three-month peri­od. In 17 of those rul­ings, the DPP rec­om­mend­ed no crim­i­nal or depart­men­tal charges for the police per­son­nel involved and sug­gest­ed only “depart­men­tal action” in eight cas­es. Criminal action was rec­om­mend­ed in 15 of the rul­ings, while 12 cas­es were referred to the Coroner’s Court. It was a sim­i­lar sto­ry for the cor­rup­tion-relat­ed cas­es reviewed by the DPP last year. The sta­tis­tics show that of the 39 rul­ings hand­ed down, 13 rec­om­mend­ed no crim­i­nal charges for police per­son­nel who were inves­ti­gat­ed, and sev­en sug­gest­ed “depart­men­tal action.” Criminal charges were rec­om­mend­ed in 19 cas­es. The rul­ings were hand­ed down in cas­es referred by the Bureau of Special Investigations, the Criminal Investigations Branch, the Inspectorate of the Constabulary, the Independent Commission of Investigations, and the Centre for the Investigation of Sexual Offences and Child Abuse.

Many who join the cho­rus of con­dem­na­tion of all police shoot­ings in Jamaica un-wit­ting­ly do so lump­ing every shoot­ing togeth­er which is what the ene­my of the police wants them to do. Each inci­dent of police shoot­ing is a sin­gle act which must be con­sid­ered sin­gu­lar­ly. The police can­not be in the busi­ness of using quo­tas in deter­min­ing whether or not to use lethal force when they face mor­tal danger.
DPP Paula Llewelyn : “It is not our func­tion to be an aveng­ing angel in the soci­ety and to have some sort of meter where we say at the end of every quar­ter we have a quo­ta that we have to meet when it comes to one set of peo­ple as opposed to the other,”.

If the DPP can­not use a quo­ta meter in deter­min­ing how many Police offi­cers face crim­i­nal charges, how can the police use a quo­ta meter in deter­min­ing whether to use lethal force in defense of their lives when they face some of the world’s most ruth­less killers?
Jamaican law allows the DPP to charge a police offi­cer with a crime to quell pub­lic out­cry , even if there is no evi­dence in sup­port of a crime or enough to convict.
Police in oth­er coun­tries now tell crim­i­nals they should not believe they are in Jamaica where they will not be dealt with. They are told Police will meet force with force.
Jamaica is a laugh­ing stock . A par­adise for crim­i­nals because of ivory tow­er dwellers uptown.
Almost all cas­es of police shoot­ings in Jamaica elic­it alle­ga­tions of wrong doing. Is there any won­der that the num­ber of cas­es com­ing out of the Office of the DPP is high?
The Jamaican pop­u­la­tion is being exploit­ed, most offi­cers are from the poor­er class of peo­ple with no pow­er. Becoming a police offi­cer is a pow­er­ful posi­tion to hold. Many in Jamaica’s upper caste is resent­ful of the police sole­ly on that basis.
The con­tin­ued assault on the police is sim­ply about that.….…

Raymond Wilson Chairman of the Police Federation came out with a blis­ter­ing push-back against the foun­da­tion sup­port struc­ture which facil­i­tates crime in Jamaica. In a blis­ter­ing broad­side against Politicians who sup­port gar­ri­son pol­i­tics , so called rights groups which insti­gate and aid and com­fort criminals,to (inde­com), Wilson spared no punch­es. Speaking at the funer­al ser­vice for slain police offi­cer Crystal Thomas at the Ebenezer Fellowship Church of God Seventh-day in Spanish Town, St Catherine Wilson final­ly let loose. Wilson said that for too long admin­is­tra­tors have been giv­ing police “bas­ket to car­ry water” and it should now stop as he called for the sup­port of the wider society.

Wilson said he asked Dalley, dur­ing a nego­ti­a­tion, if he was wait­ing for a police offi­cer to be mur­dered while using the pub­lic trans­porta­tion sys­tem before a bus is made avail­able to take them home after work. He said the min­is­ter’s response was that no mon­ey was avail­able to ful­fill that request. “That is what the val­ue of the life of a police offi­cer is,” Wilson told mourn­ers in his no-holds-barred address.
What gave crim­i­nals “more right to life” than a police offi­cer or “law-abid­ing cit­i­zens of this country”?

Of course as is to be expect­ed it did not take long for the pseu­do-colo­nial­ists caste-seg­re­ga­tion­ists to come out against Raymond Wilson. Today the Editorial page of the Observer exco­ri­at­ed Wilson , label­ing him disin­gen­u­ous and Irresponsible. In it’s dia­tribe the writer pon­tif­i­cat­ed quote :Sergeant Wilson, obvi­ous­ly play­ing on the emo­tions of the con­gre­ga­tion, asked what gave crim­i­nals “more right to life” than a police offi­cer or “law-abid­ing cit­i­zens of this country”.
Of course these cow­ard­ly mouth­piece of the crim­i­nal class are able to do much dam­age from their lofty perch­es while they hide behind the papered walls of anonymi­ty. They are cow­ard­ly func­tionar­ies and per­pe­tra­tors of may­hem who nev­er have to face bul­lets and knives but who have the lux­u­ry of shap­ing opin­ions. I can­not wait for the may­hem to reach the doorsteps of these mod­ern day Pharisees.

On every occa­sion that mem­bers of the JCF stand up for them­selves these Vultures emerge and get to work feed­ing on the car­cass of the police issue. They are bot­tom feed­ers who pre­tend they have Jamaica’s inter­est at heart but they don’t and the peo­ple must be edu­cat­ed about that. The com­plic­it crim­i­nal sup­port­ing media is not object­ing sub­stan­tive­ly to the con­tent of Wilson’s speech , what they object to is his right as a local boy from Saint Mary to say what he said.
There is a cer­tain class which is destroy­ing our coun­try and it’s time the wrath of the peo­ple be turned against those people.

Raymond Wilson spoke elo­quent­ly about them but there are others.
♦ The Norman Manley Law School.
♦ The Bar Association of Jamaica.
♦ (inde­com).
♦ Jamaicans for Justice(JFJ).
♦ Families Against State Terroris (FAST).
♦ The Independent Jamaica Council on Human Rights.
♦ The Peace Management Initiative. (PMI).
These are just a few of the crim­i­nal sup­port­ing groups which are active­ly engaged in lob­by­ing for leg­is­la­tion against seri­ous law-enforce­ment on the Island. These are just a few of the groups arrayed against Police.
The police need allies, the Police do not risk their lives against Jamaica’s ruth­less mur­der­ers for them­selves they do so for the peo­ple who are against criminals.

Many of these Pharisees have dual cit­i­zen­ship most have visas. The major­i­ty of poor law abid­ing peo­ple can­not afford to run. Those who come to Jamaica and offer help to muz­zle the police have their coun­tries to go back to and guess what they are absolute­ly pow­er­less in their coun­tries in shap­ing pol­i­cy or affect­ing the way police do their job.
I under­stand that the hero of the Elites Terrence Williams will be address­ing the com­ments of Raymond Wilson at anoth­er func­tion he will be attend­ing today , this time in Mandeville Manchester.
It must be nice to have a job where not much else is done for the mon­ey beyond per­se­cut­ing hard work­ing peo­ple and attend­ing social func­tions . We can­not wait to get that speech , we are already antic­i­pat­ing the sar­casm and con­de­scen­sion which is sure to come and we will be address­ing that as well.

One of the non­sense being sold the Jamaican peo­ple is that if police offi­cers are doing their jobs the cor­rect way they have noth­ing to fear.
There is also the nar­ra­tive that inci­dents of police shoot­ings have gone down because of (inde­com’s) vigilance.
Both are bull-shit argu­ments which are not sup­port­ed by facts and I will now address both.
♦ Every com­plaint made against a par­tic­u­lar police offi­cer real or mali­cious­ly con­trived is inves­ti­gat­ed by (inde­com) .Not just shoot­ings or killings.
♦ That Officer is then sub­ject­ed to an inves­ti­ga­tion which includes but is not con­fined to going to the offices of (inde­com) to give state­ments to their oper­a­tives in sup­port of his/​her innocence.
♦ As per the (inde­com) Act offi­cers refuse to com­ply with those dic­tates at the risk of crim­i­nal prosecution.
♦ Under Jamaica’s Constitution no Jamaican may be forced to give a state­ment which may be used against them as such the (inde­com) Act is unconstutional.
♦ Jamaican police offi­cers are the only peo­ple in the coun­try who may be forced con­trary to the con­sti­tu­tion to give state­ments against their will.
♦ Police offi­cers are left out in the cold to fend for them­selves usu­al­ly result­ing in tremen­dous finan­cial hard­ships usu­al­ly end­ing in finan­cial ruin for officers.
♦ By (inde­com’s) own admis­sion the vast major­i­ty of cas­es it inves­ti­gates against police offi­cers result in no case being brought against the officer.
♦ Officers careers are destroyed because of these witch hunts.
♦ Criminals report abuse against offi­cers to get rid of effec­tive police offi­cers who pose a threat to their operations.
♦ Let me see those of you who make those asi­nine com­ments about hav­ing noth­ing to fear deal with the real prospect of prison hang­ing over your head every day you go to work because a cer­tain crim­i­nal Don wants you gone and have the pow­er to force peo­ple to lie against you.
♦ And hav­ing a Government Agency facil­i­tate that persecution.

Many years ago I was engaged in an inves­ti­ga­tion which tar­get­ed a par­tic­u­lar fam­i­ly in Cassava-Piece just below the Constant Spring Police Station where I was sta­tioned. The fam­i­ly was a know fam­i­ly of crim­i­nals which was engaged in cocaine dis­tri­b­u­tion, theft of auto­mo­biles, high-end motor-cycles and oth­er crim­i­nal activities.
I went to the house look­ing for the two sons who were engaged in the crim­i­nal enter­prise with their moth­er. She told me her sons were not at home. I asked her to inform her sons they were the sub­ject of an inves­ti­ga­tion I was con­duct­ing and as such it would be in their inter­est to con­tact me at the Station as soon as possible.
That par­tic­u­lar case involved but was not con­fined to the theft of a motorcycle.

I also told her in no uncer­tain terms that I knew they stole the motor­cy­cle and it would be in their best inter­est if they placed the motor­cy­cle out in the open where I would find it before I found them .
We then left her yard.….…
The motor­cy­cle end­ed up in New Kingston on Knutsford Boulevard in the same con­di­tion it was stolen
We fin­ished our tour and went home.
The next Morning My Sub Officer in charge of crime informed me that the Superintendent in charge need­ed to speak to me. I though it odd I but went along with my so/​ic crime to his offi­cer. He was on the phone chat­ting away as if I was trans­par­ent, so I bit my tongue and stood there for a cou­ple of min­utes . I turned and start­ed walk­ing out which prompt­ed him to hasti­ly hang up the phone and mer­ci­less­ly lit into me. He accused me of fir­ing mul­ti­ple shots at the wom­an’s house and raft of oth­er accu­sa­tions. I was nev­er one who par­tic­u­lar­ly liked, nor admired these old­er cops. In my esti­ma­tion most I thought were unpre­pared and ill-equipped for the posi­tions they held, usu­al­ly attained due to long ser­vice or polit­i­cal affil­i­a­tion or both.
His brazen igno­rance intrigued me.. So I indulged him by stand­ing there, seem­ing­ly sub­dued ‚(play­ing pos­sum) giv­ing him more con­fi­dence to berate me.
♦It nev­er occurred to him that if a weapon was fired a sim­ple foren­sic test would con­firm it.
♦ It nev­er occurred to him that if shots were fired at all it would have elicit­ed a response from oth­er police offi­cers on patrol and Police con­trol would have had a record of it par­tic­u­lar­ly in the mid­dle of the day.
♦It nev­er occurred to him that he was a gullible clue­less pawn of a fam­i­ly whose busi­ness was crime.
♦ It nev­er occurred to him that a sim­ple com­mon crim­i­nal woman had out­smart­ed him tak­ing advan­tage of what she knew would have been his weak­ness of throw­ing a junior offi­cer under the bus at a momen­t’s notice to assuage any­one regard­less of the circumstances.

After he was fin­ished yelling I pulled my weapon from it’s hol­ster released the mag­a­zine and extract­ed the round I had up the breech, I then removed the spare mag­a­zine I car­ried from it’s case and threw them on his desk. I told him a sim­ple foren­sic test will tell the story.
The remain­der of what I said to him will remain between him, my So/​ic crime Jerry Wallace and myself . I walked out fol­lowed by Jerry Wallace who placed his hands on his head and said “Jeezas crise nev­er inna mi life, mi nev­va hear one cor­po­ral dress dung one super­in­ten­dent so”.
Later that day the Superintendent came to my office and apol­o­gized to me.
There was no (inde­com) at that time. Had there been (inde­com) those lies would have been told to them. I would have been sub­ject­ed to deal­ing with them . Of course I would be exon­er­at­ed but inves­ti­gat­ed yes.
That is just a sin­gle day in the life of an effi­cient cop.
That is just what crim­i­nals do on a dai­ly basis.
The woman and her sons under­stood that con­cept the super­in­ten­dent did not. Nothing she did nor what the Superintendent said pre­vent­ed or stopped my work . Both her sons were arrest­ed by me and placed before a court of law. Both were sen­tenced to prison time.

Those who argue that low­er inci­dents of police shoot­ings are attrib­ut­able to (inde­com’s) vig­i­lance is blow­ing smoke up your ass­es. They have zero data in sup­port of that claim. What I will tell you is that the low­er inci­dents of police shoot­ings are exact­ly attrib­ut­able to the dra­mat­ic less­en­ing of police engagement.
The Country’s astro­nom­i­cal­ly high homi­cide rate and oth­er seri­ous crimes is tes­ta­ment to that fact.
Like every­thing else the Political left in Jamaica has come up with since inde­pen­dence they are wrong on this. Wrong On (inde­com) . Wrong of the econ­o­my , wrong on pover­ty, and yes they are wrong on crime.
The mis­guid­ed wannabe-be big-shots (pen­ny mil­lion­aires) who coin pub­lic pol­i­cy and secu­ri­ty strate­gies do so with zero under­stand­ing of polic­ing or the con­se­quences of it’s absence on the population.
These are the shit-heads who are mak­ing deci­sions for the Jamaican peo­ple . As Wilson said the Police are the scape-goats who are giv­en bas­ket to car­ry water.

Three retired police offi­cers have lent their voic­es to the crime scourge in Jamaica, speak­ing to reporters three of the nation’s pre­em­i­nent for­mer law-enforce­ment offi­cers spoke on what they thought was miss­ing from the debate sur­round­ing the sub­ject of vio­lent crime and what the police can do in the process.

The retired offi­cers have point­ed to a lack of lead­er­ship, a fail­ure to con­nect with the peo­ple they serve and an absence of com­mit­ment by some mem­bers of the Force as the rea­sons the police are now strug­gling to tame the crime monster.
There are times when peo­ple offer up opin­ions on how cer­tain prob­lems are to be addressed and yet they have no train­ing ‚expe­ri­ence, or exper­tise in that sub­ject mat­ter. Jamaica has no short­age of those peo­ple who read­i­ly offer up grandiose sug­ges­tion with­out a resume on the giv­en subject.
Not so with these three, who have between them over a hun­dred years of polic­ing experience.
According to the Gleaner which spoke to all three men all of the for­mer offi­cers rec­og­nize the need for a con­nec­tion to the com­mu­ni­ty. One of the prob­lems in our coun­try is the propen­si­ty among a cer­tain sec­tor of the soci­ety to dimin­ish the role and impor­tance of the police in soci­ety. For the vast major­i­ty of ordi­nary Jamaicans how­ev­er the police con­tin­ue to be an invalu­able force for good and a bul­wark of pro­tec­tion between them­selves and those who would do them harm.
On that basis the major­i­ty of Jamaicans are still search­ing for a police force which treats them fair­ly but goes after crim­i­nals with a venom.
In my opin­ion it is those Jamaicans toward whom we must address our atten­tion, dis­re­gard­ing the use­less chat­ter of the vil­lage lawyers and detrac­tors who are gen­er­al­ly sat­is­fied to be cyn­ics and crit­ics from behind com­put­er key­boards with­out doing any­thing to help.

“The man them too detached from the streets. They need to get into the com­mu­ni­ty, get more involved with the peo­ple. I am not see­ing where they are doing that as much as before,” said Campbell, who spent his 40-year career at the Flying Squad and in volatile divi­sions includ­ing St Andrew South, Kingston Western and St Andrew North. “Police today need to see their job as a busi­ness and the peo­ple as their clients. You can’t oper­ate with­out your clients,” said Campbell. “Some divi­sion­al com­man­ders I know of will go into office and don’t come out ’cause them don’t know the streets. You must go out on the streets with the men you lead so you can build their con­fi­dence. They need to see you with them,” said Campbell.

“If you are talk­ing about the West Indies crick­et team of the ’70s and the ’80s, and the West Indies crick­et team now, it’s two dif­fer­ent eras. To com­pare which bats­man is bet­ter than which bats­man now, I can’t do that,” said Benjamin. “There is too much depen­dence on the tech­no­log­i­cal part of it (polic­ing) today. I don’t have a prob­lem with tech­nol­o­gy but for the tech­no­log­i­cal part of it to work you must depend on the human aspect of it as well. You must ensure that the human con­nec­tion is there too,” said Benjamin.

Retired Superintendent Hugh Bish, who served for more than 30 years, is not con­vinced. He believes that cops in past decades were more atten­tive to res­i­dents of the com­mu­ni­ties they served than the police are today.

“Back in my time, we respond­ed to every call. Sometimes we find some­thing and some­times we don’t. I don’t want to say that it is not hap­pen­ing now because that would be spec­u­la­tion, but these tac­tics usu­al­ly work for us,” said Bish, who oper­at­ed as a homi­cide inves­ti­ga­tor in some of the gang­lands of Clarendon, Kingston, St Andrew, Portland; and at the Mobile Reserve, among oth­er units. “You have to work with the peo­ple. If a man see some­body hid­ing some­thing and call you as the police and when you come all you find is a stick, it does­n’t mat­ter,” said Bish. “What has hap­pened is that man is a hun­dred times more will­ing to call you next time, and chances are you will go there and find more than a stick.”

No one strat­e­gy is a panacea to cur­ing Jamaica’s crime Problem, the opin­ions offered by these for­mer street cops are not sil­ver bul­lets. Crime did not end dur­ing the time they were offi­cers. I can per­son­al­ly attest to the effec­tive­ness of two of these for­mer offi­cers , Calvin Benjamin was a senior cop dur­ing my tenure and so was Parra Campbell.
I nev­er worked togeth­er with Benjamin from the same sta­tion or divi­sion but as a front-line cop in Jamaica game rec­og­nize game. Parra Campbell ? Totally dif­fer­ent mat­ter Campbell a much senior cop to me was the epit­o­me of a cop’s cop, the kind of per­son you want watch­ing your back in a fire­fight. These guys know what the hell they are talk­ing about.
The last active shoot­ing I was a part of before leav­ing the force involved the effec­tive­ness of Parra Campbell . We spot­ted a man want­ed for the mur­der of his own uncle, I quick­ly jumped from the car and grabbed him upon which he attempt­ed to pull a weapon from his waist, this left me no choice but to engage him at the lev­el he chose to be engaged , so I pushed him away from me as he came up with the weapon Parra neu­tral­ized that threat. That’s how we dealt with peo­ple who killed peo­ple and want­ed to kill us in the process.
Crime was not non-exis­tent dur­ing the tenure of these men but Jamaica was cer­tain­ly a much bet­ter place in which to live and do busi­ness. As front-line crime fight­ers we knew that we saw the very same peo­ple at the sites and scenes of shoot­ing and tur­moil when­ev­er those instances arose. It was a tough small bunch of actu­al crime fight­ers which kept a lid on things , and guess what the crim­i­nal under­world knew it and they knew bet­ter than to be bold and brave.

During our time I had peo­ple in the under­world giv­ing crit­i­cal infor­ma­tion to me each and every one of us who kept the streets had our own infor­mants who pro­vid­ed us crit­i­cal infor­ma­tion. I recall my time sta­tioned at Constant Spring there was a par­tic­u­lar crim­i­nal from Easter Kingston who want­ed to move from his base in east Kingston to set up shop in the Grant’s Pen Area. His idea as far as my infor­mant was con­cerned was that he had to kill me. The prob­lem with his plan accord­ing to the same source was that he was death­ly afraid to come any­where near me.
In an age when the issue of police has tak­en cen­ter stage with every­one offer­ing up their ver­sions of polic­ing it is impor­tant to note that we were suc­cess­ful , mea­sur­ably so because we cre­at­ed an aura of invin­ci­bil­i­ty around us.
It had noth­ing to do with the abil­i­ty to pull a weapon quick­ly . It had noth­ing to do with shoot­ing any­one. It cen­tered on what Bish spoke about. We fol­lowed ever lead, every report was inves­ti­gat­ed . Criminals knew we knew them , what they were up to and we darn sure knew where they lived. Most impor­tant­ly we knew where their women lived . As I have said before it is impor­tant to under­stand that Jamaican crim­i­nals love mon­ey, they love guns and they absolute­ly love women. Know where their women live and check-mate.

The strength and effec­tive­ness of the police depart­ment of yes­ter­year had noth­ing to do with num­bers and every­thing to do with ded­i­ca­tion and com­mit­ment of a select minor­i­ty with­in the depart­ment who would not be dic­tat­ed to by crim­i­nal ele­ments . The vast major­i­ty of the oth­er offi­cers ben­e­fit­ed from the work of those select few. Most impor­tant­ly even those with the most caus­tic hatred of police ben­e­fit­ted from the sac­ri­fice of those offi­cers. The cumu­la­tive val­ue of that kind of polic­ing is lost on the gen­er­al pop­u­la­tion and to some degree is immeasurable.
Effective Policing has noth­ing to do with hav­ing a few com­put­ers. It also has noth­ing to do with hav­ing a whole slew of for­ward-sound­ing names which cre­ates the impres­sion of com­plex­i­ty and or effec­tive­ness when the peo­ple who run these spe­cial­ized units can­not find their ass­es out of a paper bag.
Of course all of this seem to be an alien con­cept to the present Commissioner. I recent­ly read an Article some­place where one vil­lage lawyer said the days of (dirty-harry)style polic­ing has nev­er worked and will not work today either. Of course the (dirty har­ry) fig­ure is in ref­er­ence to the myth­i­cal gun-slinger depict­ed in old Hollywood films.
It’s easy to blovi­ate about what worked or did not work when one has no idea how bad it would have been had there not been the dirty har­ry style polic­ing for years. It was only the tough mind­ed nature of police why the shit had not hit the fan before. The head of (inde­com) and the sil­ly lit­tle rats who run behind him reminds me of the Hans Christian Andersen tale (the pied piper).
They believe police shoot­ings are down as a con­se­quence of (inde­com) .
The fact is that inci­dents of police shoot­ings have noth­ing to do with (inde­com) and every­thing to do with the lack of police engagement.
The high mur­der rate is tes­ta­ment to that fact. Criminals are embold­ened to act with­out fear of con­se­quence. What Cop wants to risk persecution ..?

COMMISSIONER CARL WILLIAMS TAKE.…

Police Commissioner Carl Williams is not con­vinced that a lack of com­mu­ni­ty engage­ment by the police is at the heart of the prob­lem accord­ing to the report.
“I don’t know; I have not got­ten that impres­sion any at all. We have a new sys­tem in place now that is help­ing us to engage the com­mu­ni­ties in a much more inti­mate way. In fact, polic­ing as it is prac­ticed now (com­mu­ni­ty engage­ment) is almost a philosophy,” ‘.
 Assistant Commissioner Gary Welsh head of the Security Branch, under­scored the com­mis­sion­er’s posi­tion as he point­ed to a dis­tinc­tion between com­mu­ni­ty rela­tions, which he said was being prac­tised decades ago, and com­mu­ni­ty policing.

“We have a great appre­ci­a­tion for the work and worth of those who served before us. They cre­at­ed a great foun­da­tion. In yes­ter­year, I’m talk­ing 10 – 15 years ago, we had what was called a com­mu­ni­ty rela­tions focus, which was the police cre­at­ing a rela­tion­ship with the cit­i­zens for the ben­e­fit of the police,” said Welsh. “Today, we have tran­si­tioned from com­mu­ni­ty rela­tions to com­mu­ni­ty-based polic­ing. The focus now is to have both sides ben­e­fit­ing. It’s a part­ner­ship. “You have to under­stand the sub­tle dif­fer­ence. Community rela­tion is ask­ing ‘what can the police get out of the com­mu­ni­ty’. Now we are say­ing let us cre­ate this part­ner­ship, where it is more than see­ing what we can get, but also about tack­ling some of the oth­er social issues,” said Welsh, who has served some 20 years in the Force.

If this mum­bo-jum­bo was­n’t so seri­ous it would actu­al­ly be laugh­able. What a load of excre­ment. Both Williams and Welsh are edu­cat­ed men who ought to under­stand when to shut their trap and when to actu­al­ly speak.
What the f**k kind of strat­e­gy does the JCF has in place which out­paces what was in place before? The JCF by it’s own num­bers claim they are lock­ing up 30% of mur­der­ers. By their own num­bers they are con­vict­ing only about 7% of that 30% and even when they do gain a con­vic­tion some are over­turned on appeal. Which means on the face of it 70% of all killers nev­er gets apprehended >.

If as for­mer cop Parra Campbell stat­ed, the JCF treat­ed the peo­ple like cus­tomers and the JCF a busi­ness , would the agency be sat­is­fied that right off the bat it’s fail­ure rate was 70% ? That’s just homi­cide . Be remind­ed that those homi­cides which are cleared up are domes­tic killings where a man kills his woman , vice ver­sa, or a fam­i­ly mem­ber kills anoth­er. Which means there are no real inves­tiga­tive work being done. Even in the case of domes­tic mur­ders the Agency can bare­ly man­age an embar­rass­ing 7% con­vic­tion rate.
Do me a favor Commissioners Campbell and Welsh get the f**k off your high hors­es and stop with the bull-shit. It may serve you to rec­og­nize that the emper­or has no damn clothes , instead of pre­tend­ing to see that which just isn’t there. Instead of delud­ing your­selves , I sug­gest you elic­it the help of these senior cops on how to deal with crime and stop with the bull-shit.

New York’s Senior Senator and Senate Minority Leader in wait­ing Charles Schumer has decid­ed he will not sup­port the deal nego­ti­at­ed between the (P5) Permanent five and (1)One. Schumer the largest Jewish voice in the Congress pre­tend­ed to be delib­er­at­ing on the sub­ject of whether to sup­port the President’s Iran deal or not.
In fact it appeared to cyn­ics like myself that Schumer was mere­ly wait­ing for the Republican Presidential debates to pro­vide him cov­er so he could do what he knew he was going to do from the start.
That deci­sion was to throw President Obama and the the rest of the World under the Bus in favor of his Jewish Ethnicity.
What we now know is that being a Jew trumps every­thing , includ­ing being respon­si­ble to one’s own country.

Said Schumer :“The very real risk that Iran will not mod­er­ate and will, instead, use the agree­ment to pur­sue its nefar­i­ous goals is too great,” Schumer said in oppos­ing the pact. He said he based his deci­sion on the nuclear and non-nuclear ele­ments of the accord and on the ques­tion, “Are we bet­ter off with the agree­ment or with­out it?”

In a stun­ning dis­play of cow­ardice and betray­al Schumer chose to be a sooth­say­er on the basis of his Jewish eth­nic­i­ty rather than stand with President Obama the pres­i­dent of his own Party and the rest of the world.
Schumer chose instead to stand with the war­mon­ger­ing Benjamin Netanyahu .
There was no delib­er­a­tion on this for Schumer, he knew what he was going to do from the start. Schumer’s actions high­lights what many peo­ple in the United States and cer­tain­ly across the World already knew, that is the death grip in which the Zionist Apartheid state of Israel has on the American Congress.
Benjamin Netanyahu cer­tain­ly is not wor­ried about being dis­re­spect­ful to President Obama , he knows where the loy­al­ties of the American Congress lies.
In fact Netanyahu have nev­er been par­tic­u­lar­ly care­ful how he deals with American Presidents after meet­ing with him in 1996 President Bill Clinton report­ed­ly remarked pri­vate­ly “who the fuck does he think he is” ? Who is the fuck­ing super­pow­er here?

Many includ­ing Jews in Israel and the United States already feel Netanyahu has already pushed too far. However Netanyahu is not wor­ried about los­ing clout with the America Congress. In fact there are sev­er­al instances where he has gloat­ed about the hold Israel has on the American Congress.
Charles Schumer mere­ly did what most crit­i­cal thinkers expect­ed him to do,.

Montego Bay’s Mayor Glendon Harris alleges that robot taxis owned by police per­son­nel are pro­mot­ing ram­pant law­less­ness down­town busi­ness dis­trict of the Second City. Harris made the alle­ga­tions last week at a Montego Bay Chamber of Commerce and Industry (MBCCI) stake­hold­ers meet­ing in Montego Bay. Harris hit out against mem­bers of the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF) who he accused of turn­ing a blind eye to traf­fic vio­la­tions, among myr­i­ad oth­er offences com­mit­ted in the city’s busi­ness cen­ter, accord­ing to the Jamaica Observer.
Mayor Harris went on quote : “If you go to the inter­sec­tion of Creek Street, St James Street, and this come in like a cho­rus now, you will find no less than 13 white plate cars… so I can say run­ning ‘robot’, from there to Clock and Mount Salem and we can’t get the police to deal with them,” Harris said.“My under­stand­ing is that these cars, by and large, are owned by police offi­cers. It is said that they are owned by police offi­cers. It needs the police to stamp on that once and for all,” he added.

Hmm ..
This is a cry I seem to hear these days, peo­ple com­plain­ing that the Police are turn­ing a blind eye to offences being com­mit­ted in their very presence.
What I also recall is that many of these same peo­ple were front and cen­ter in con­dem­na­tion of Police offi­cers who took their jobs seri­ous­ly and aggres­sive­ly went after all offences. To the best of my rec­ol­lec­tion then the nar­ra­tive was that the police are pres­sur­ing poor peo­ple., Many active­ly instruct­ed offend­ers to phys­i­cal­ly assault police offi­cers. Not sat­is­fied they passed a law which crim­i­nal­ized police for doing their jobs. So lets get this straight you can­not have it both ways, these police offi­cers take action based on what they see. Since it is impos­si­ble to see for oth­ers, maybe these young offi­cers sim­ply haven’t seen these offence.

I remem­ber a time when young Police offi­cers walked those beats and made sure peo­ple had the right to live in peace. I

know a lit­tle about that I was one of those offi­cers. Jamaicans did not want that they com­plained about the police harass­ing poor peo­ple who are just try­ing to make a living.
In Kingston as well on King street. Orange street. Heywood street. North Parade. South Parade.East Parade. West Parade the prob­lem posed by mini-bus­es posed a seri­ous safe­ty prob­lem. Back then as young offi­cers we took a no non­sense approach to their deci­sion not to obey the traf­fic laws. The fact that the courts only fined offend­ers a mar­gin­al feel made enforce­ment a non issue as a deterrent .
In Montego Bay. Negril. and Ochio Rios the same was true, The Chamber of Commerce aligned itself with those who crave anar­chy and accused the police of apply­ing too much pres­sure to those who harass and intim­i­date Visitors to our Island. Again the claim was that the Police are pres­sur­ing poor peo­ple who only want to make a liv­ing. Well the con­se­quence of that is that Tourists were repelled and repulsed by being harangued so the all inclu­sive pack­ages became the choice of vis­i­tors. In addi­tion the seri­ous­ness of our crime sit­u­a­tion result­ed in a US State Department warn­ing to Americans wish­ing to trav­el to Jamaica.
That did not work out so well for the poor peo­ple who only want­ed to make a liv­ing now did it?

Harris con­tin­ued: “If peo­ple are allowed to do any­thing that they want to do, then that is why we end up with the mur­der rate as it is. You have to stop the small things. You are at a traf­fic light in Montego Bay; stop, and vehi­cle just pass you and the police are there, police vehi­cle is there and some­body just broke the stop light and gone and noth­ing is done.
This makes me laugh real­ly they still do not get it I am con­vinced. The Police are doing the bare min­i­mum and they still do not get it.  “Enforcement must be the order of the day in order for us to get back some law and order and civil­i­ty inside this city and inside this coun­try.” Said Harris.
You think?
Since we are on the lit­tle sub­ject of fix­ing small prob­lems I would just like to point out to the good­ly Mayor one tiny lit­tle trans­gres­sion he over­looked . This blun­der which defines the Mayor and his abil­i­ty to lead . That is the issue of the des­e­cra­tion of the Jamaican flag by polit­i­cal hacks who thought it was expe­di­ent or fun­ny to remove the green from the Jamaican flag when the Mayor was being installed as chief exec­u­tive of the city of Montego Bay.
Mister Mayor you could have demand­ed that the mon­stros­i­ty be tak­en down(in the event your argu­ment is you did not know it would be there as is). You could have decid­ed to be sworn in at anoth­er time, or in anoth­er venue. You did not.
When you point fin­gers and make grandiose state­ments be care­ful how you do that par­tic­u­lar­ly when you live in a glass house.
Go tell that to your Government Mayor Harris. tell that to the bunch of know it all’s who are shap­ing pub­lic pol­i­cy with­out an degree of ratio­nale at all . Tell that to the Elites who occu­py ivory tow­ers and relieve their con­sciences by pre­tend­ing to care about what hap­pens down-town while they would not be caught dead down there.
Tell that to those who dri­ve around in deeply tint­ed vehi­cles with the win­dows wound all the way up so they do not have to deal with win­dow-wip­ing squeegee-guys, or the beg­gars at the traf­fic lights.
They then go back to their gat­ed com­mu­ni­ties and man­sions on the hill and pon­tif­i­cate about how much they care for the poor.

Godfrey Dyer, the for­mer pres­i­dent of the MBCCI. chimed in ..

“The peo­ple who you put there must serve. I have seen it also, things hap­pen­ing and a police­man walk­ing by and he does­n’t see it. They are not per­form­ing. They need super­vi­sion. It does­n’t make sense you send half a dozen police­man down town and you don’t have super­vi­sors check­ing on them to see what they are doing. They are just left there for the num­ber of hours that they are left there. They are not per­form­ing they should be a lot more effective,”

News flash, Supervisors can­not force younger offi­cers to make arrests. Though more mid­dle man­age­ment of younger offi­cers may be in order, no one can force any­one to make arrests​.You can­not force offi­cers to make arrest or be tough on offend­ers sim­ply because it suits your pur­pose now. The shit is now hit­ting the fan and it’s now about panicking.
Said Dyer: “The peo­ple who you put there must serve…Ah that supe­ri­or bull­shit , who did Dyer put out there? The real­i­ty is these shit-heads real­ly believe police offi­cers are their lit­tle bitch­es out there to serve their fidu­cia­ry and oth­er inter­ests. They do not care about the inter­est of the offi­cers who are out there stand­ing between them­selves and the anar­chists. You get police to crack down by sup­port­ing them and pay­ing them , you don’t get to demand anything.
Where was the cham­ber of com­merce when the police were fight­ing their wage battles?
Where were the cham­ber of com­merce when the Police were fight­ing an ill-advised and ill-con­fig­ured (inde­com) Act which empow­ers crim­i­nals more than it removes bad cops?

These sup­posed lead­ers need a healthy dose of intro­spec­tion , you can­not have it both ways, get your lazy judg­men­tal ass­es behind the Police , sup­port them and watch crime go away.
Then of course there are the courts where the lib­er­al judges sim­ply dis­pose of cas­es as they see fit , this place is fast becom­ing a failed state.
Too many know it all in this lit­tle Island.
Happy Independence day JAMAICA…

Recently Damion Crawford spoke out again about the (inde­com act). …It was­n’t the first time Crawford came under attack for dar­ing to crit­i­cize the rich peo­ple’s pro­tec­tion from police vigilance.

THIS IS THE JAMAICA GLEANER’S CHARACTERIZATION OF MINISTER CRAWFORD’S STATEMENTS.
The paper pre­tend­ed to pass the sto­ry off as a reg­u­lar news sto­ry yet end­ed up inject­ing it’s own bias­es into the sto­ry and com­ments made by Damion Crawford. Despite not pre­sent­ing the sto­ry on it’s Editorial page.

This time he is accus­ing the enti­ty of only being inter­est­ed in pub­lic rela­tions while fail­ing to ful­fill its objec­tives. INDECOM was set up in 2010 to inves­ti­gate actions by mem­bers of the secu­ri­ty forces that result in death or injury to per­sons or the abuse of the rights of per­sons. However, in a series of social media out­bursts in recent weeks, Crawford has attacked the agency and the author­i­ties for alleged­ly only being inter­est­ed in pub­lic rela­tions. In a post on Twitter today, the East Rural St Andrew MP said INDECOM has been in the news fre­quent­ly but not in rela­tion to the con­vic­tion of bad cops. He says either there are only a few bad cops in Jamaica or INDECOM is incom­pe­tent, adding that per­for­mance is being sac­ri­ficed for pub­lic rela­tions. In a post last week Tuesday, Crawford, the Junior Minister in the Tourism and Entertainment Ministry, said the renew­al of Terrence Williams’ con­tract as head of INDECOM proves to him, that pub­lic rela­tions is more impor­tant than per­for­mance. Last Monday, Williams was sworn in for a sec­ond five-year term as com­mis­sion­er of the over­sight body.

In 2013, Crawford called for the clo­sure of INDECOM claim­ing that the enti­ty had failed to meet its objec­tives. Legislators are dis­cussing whether to estab­lish an over­sight body for INDECOM, with some crit­ics say­ing the inves­tiga­tive body has been ham­per­ing police efforts to catch crim­i­nals. INDECOM has claimed a major role for the approx­i­mate­ly 50 per­cent fall in police-relat­ed killings in 2014 when com­pared to 2013. Read more here. .Damion Crawford Continues Anti-INDECOM Campaign

Response by one Charlene H Foote

Damion Crawford needs to adopt the adage, ‘be quick to lis­ten and slow to speak’, because for some­one who is sup­posed to be a mem­ber of the artic­u­late minor­i­ty, his anti-INDECOM state­ments are asi­nine — and that is putting it mild­ly. Taken in parts, his fuzzy log­ic can be torn apart as eas­i­ly and quick­ly as he blast­ed his mis­guid­ed views all over the microblog­ging site, Twitter. I invite Mr Crawford to write a paper, or even an arti­cle of no few­er than 1,000 words, to con­vince us why INDECOM should be closed or why he believes the estab­lish­ment of the organ­i­sa­tion was a pub­lic rela­tions stunt. Only when he is forced to actu­al­ly do some research will he see that he will come up short on actu­al facts to sup­port his posi­tion. Mr Crawford infers that INDECOM has not ful­filled its man­date because he is hear­ing more noise than con­vic­tions. This is laugh­able! For all the time he spends on social media tweet­ing and post­ing on FB, did­n’t he see:

1. The con­vic­tion of eight police per­son­nel for breach­es of the INDECOM Act?

2. Or the con­vic­tion of DSP Albert Diah for fail­ing to com­ply with a law­ful require­ment on the com­mis­sion with­out law­ful jus­ti­fi­ca­tion or excuse, con­trary to Section 33 (b) (ii) and obstruct­ing the com­mis­sion in the exer­cise of its func­tions, con­trary to Section 33 (b)(i)?

He cer­tain­ly did not see the news about the con­vic­tion of Detective Sherwood Simpson for wound­ing with intent and ille­gal pos­ses­sion of a firearm. By my count, that is 10 police per­son­nel in three mat­ters com­plet­ed in a court sys­tem that, if it was mov­ing any slow­er, it would be going back­wards. INDECOM report­ed that it has had more than 85 mat­ters in the court.

MOST ASININE STATEMENT

Mr Crawford also com­ment­ed that either there are few bad cops or INDECOM is incom­pe­tent. In my many years of fol­low­ing the work of INDECOM, I have nev­er heard any claims by the com­mis­sion, or any­one else for that mat­ter, that all police per­son­nel are bad. Among the many asi­nine com­ments Mr Crawford has made, this one may be a win­ner for being THE most asi­nine state­ment I have ever heard from some­one who is sup­pos­ed­ly a mem­ber of the artic­u­late minor­i­ty. Contrary to pop­u­lar belief, ‘Dirty Harry’ polic­ing is not a sus­tain­able mod­el to man­age Jamaica’s crime sit­u­a­tion; it has nev­er worked, and it nev­er will. But all this rhetoric is not about that. I am will­ing to bet that we would not have to deal with his anti-INDECOM cam­paign had the con­cept of INDECOM been craft­ed by, and estab­lished under, the People’s National Party admin­is­tra­tion. A lit­tle advice for Mr Crawford from Abraham Lincoln and me: Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.

CHARLENE H. FOOTE
The fore­gone is a Letter of the day which appeared in the Jamaica Daily Gleaner in response to a Junior Minister of Tourism Damion Crawford con­tin­ued com­ments regard­ing the (inde­com) Act.
As an un-apolo­getic crit­ic of the law I am par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ed in bring­ing Minister Crawford’s point of view to the fore on this mat­ter. I hold no brief for mis­ter Crawford whom I believe is quite capa­ble of defend­ing him­self from ver­bal assaults. I must how­ev­er acknowl­edge the views of Damion Crawford in light of the colos­sal blun­der which is the (ide­com) as it is present­ly constituted.
I will deal with the Writer Charlene H Foote’s attack on Damion Crawford sole­ly on the mer­its of her igno­rance and mis­guid­ed argu­ments with­out engag­ing in the per­son­al attacks she lev­eled at Crawford.
1. The con­vic­tion of eight police per­son­nel for breach­es of the INDECOM Act?
♦There would have been no breach of the (inde­com) Act if there was no (inde­com) Act. To sug­gest that chal­leng­ing a law which was unset­tled and still is is the epit­o­me of ASNINE.
2. Or the con­vic­tion of DSP Albert Diah for fail­ing to com­ply with a law­ful require­ment on the com­mis­sion with­out law­ful jus­ti­fi­ca­tion or excuse, con­trary to Section 33 (b) (ii) and obstruct­ing the com­mis­sion in the exer­cise of its func­tions, con­trary to Section 33 (b)(i)?
♦ Again not abid­ing by a law the full con­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty is yet to be deter­mined as it regards com­pli­ance is no proof of crim­i­nal wrong doing. To sug­gest that offi­cers who chal­lenge the legit­i­ma­cy of a law is guilty of crim­i­nal con­duct is the heights of nonsense.
He cer­tain­ly did not see the news about the con­vic­tion of Detective Sherwood Simpson for wound­ing with intent and ille­gal pos­ses­sion of a firearm. By my count, that is 10 police per­son­nel in three mat­ters com­plet­ed in a court sys­tem that, if it was mov­ing any slow­er, it would be going back­wards. INDECOM report­ed that it has had more than 85 mat­ters in the court.
♦ I am going to haz­ard a guess that the writer is a Lawyer loy­al to the Opposition Labor Party , which seem to be a haven of Elitist anti-police oper­a­tives wait­ing to get their hands on pow­er with a view to car­ry out the demo­li­tion of the rule of law and the JCf.
Said Foote Quote: I am will­ing to bet that we would not have to deal with his anti-INDECOM cam­paign had the con­cept of INDECOM been craft­ed by, and estab­lished under, the People’s National Party administration.
♦ Ah ..So this is what the attack on Crawford is about . Politics, the fact that the law was con­struct­ed under the Golding Administration does not make it a good law . The reverse is actu­al­ly true , It is a bad law which was for­mu­lat­ed with no con­sid­er­a­tion or study done by impar­tial pro­fes­sion­als on the way the law would impact crime or more sig­nif­i­cant­ly the feel­ing many now have that they can attack police offi­cers at will with­out the com­men­su­rate response nec­es­sary to dis­pel such notions.
I am among those who want over­sight of police and every pub­lic body. What the infan­tile attack on Crawford reveals is exact­ly what I write about in these blogs on a dai­ly basis, the elit­ism of some who live above cross roads who ben­e­fit from police sac­ri­fice yet are not thank­ful for the work they do.

In every pub­lic body there is cor­rup­tion. Jamaican lawyers are some of the most cor­rupt so-called offi­cers of the courts any­where. Every year sev­er­al of them are dis­barred from prac­tic­ing law. Ever won­der why they do not want an effec­tive Police Force? Many of them have engaged in fleec­ing illit­er­ate and unsus­pect­ing clients both abroad and at home. The only rea­son more of them are not in prison is exact­ly because of the inep­ti­tude of the police depart­ment. The only rea­son there is not more phys­i­cal response against them is because too many Jamaicans believe they are some kind of big-man .
Certain Jamaican’s con­tin­ued sup­port of (indecom)has pre­cious lit­tle to do with cor­rup­tion or abuse with­in the three agen­cies with­ing the agen­cy’s scope of respon­si­bil­i­ty but more to do with their con­tin­ued sup­port and engage­ment in crim­i­nal con­duct which places them at odds with effec­tive policing.
If they can muz­zle the police and no one is watch­ing the store they then engage in crim­i­nal acts unperturbed.

Having being sub­ject­ed to some of the most out­ra­geous and degrad­ing names for stand­ing on prin­ci­ple I would bet that Damion Crawford will shrug off this Uninformed par­ti­san assault and con­tin­ue to speak out on issues the way he sees them. Not through unin­formed myopic par­ti­san lens but with seri­ous well though-out and care­ful delib­er­a­tion. the pre­dis­po­si­tion of Jamaicans to berate and demo­nize those with whom they dis­agree can­not be of con­cern to Crawford as it is not with me . Those who resort to vit­ri­olic intem­per­ate out­bursts do so because the facts are not on their side.
The (indecom)Act. is a crime-esca­lat­ing, crime-cre­at­ing law which places the lives of the Police and cit­i­zens alike in deep jeopardy.
The law needs to be repealed and redone. The fact that the law is still being re-worked is proof pos­i­tive the Law is imper­fect and should be abol­ished. We are still not sure how many Jamaicans have lost their lives as a result of the mind­set cre­at­ed from this ill-advised piece of leg­is­la­tion. On the face of it the law offers more pro­tec­tion to Jamaica’s maraud­ing crim­i­nal-gangs than it removes alleged bad cops . Thanks to the atten­tion-starved head of the agency who spends more time com­plain­ing and demand­ing pow­er than he does doing any­thing productive.
A ris­ing tide rais­es all boats , as such well mean­ing Jamaicans have to push back against the destruc­tive nature of this ill-advised law. Otherwise I would be the first to say let sup­port­ers live in a Jamaica with (inde­com) while those with com­mon sense live in a Jamaica with­out that law. Improve and mod­ern­ize the force, pay police offi­cers put in place impar­tial over­sight which has no axe to grind, I’ll sup­port that.
No one who came out of the Norman Manley Law School or the University of the West Indies has the moral com­pass to be a part of that process.