Both Political Parties Have Made A Mockery Of Our Country On The Issue Of Crime…

Amidst the pan­dem­ic and the blood­shed, the coun­try is cry­ing out for lead­er­ship. Leadership that nei­ther the Governing Jamaica Labor Party nor the Opposition People’s National Party is equipped with, or will­ing to give.
The most impor­tant func­tion of any Government is the secu­ri­ty of the population.
Medieval rulers under­stood that sim­ple con­cept, and they took steps to pro­tect their sub­jects. Rulebreakers were dealt with in ways that I will not endorse here; those who would enter their cities to pil­lage and kill, were kept out with elab­o­rate for­ti­fi­ca­tions. If invaders man­aged to breach those for­ti­fi­ca­tions no quar­ters were giv­en, because none was expected.

We are not in medieval times any­more, but the grue­some­ness of the killings and the killers’ cal­lous­ness are rem­i­nis­cent of the bar­barism that exist­ed dur­ing that peri­od we like to refer to as the dark ages.
It begs a cou­ple of ques­tions; since there was noth­ing dark about the era except for humans’ cal­lous nature and how they treat­ed each oth­er, what sep­a­rates us from the peo­ple of that era?
Certainly, it can­not be the trap­pings of moder­ni­ty; that’s just stuff. It has to be more than sci­en­tif­ic and tech­no­log­i­cal break­throughs that sep­a­rate us from the dark past, or we are no like­wise any more advanced than we were thou­sands of years ago, if we con­tin­ue to act as sav­ages towards others.

The dichoto­my that guides dis­course on crime in Jamaica through com­pet­ing ideals is both destruc­tive and anti­thet­i­cal to putting an end to the pro­tract­ed peri­od of wan­ton killings.
On the one hand, the lead­ers are so immersed in crime that they can­not leg­is­late against it in any mean­ing­ful way. Doing so would lit­er­al­ly take mon­ey from their pockets.
On the oth­er hand, there are those who though not ful­ly appre­cia­tive of the ben­e­fits of a crime-free soci­ety, are less invest­ed in its con­tin­u­ance and there­fore would not mind hav­ing less violence.
However, their world-view is shaped by a left­ist ide­ol­o­gy that does not believe in con­se­quences for actions for the lat­ter group. The oth­er unfor­tu­nate com­po­nent to this lat­ter group, is the edu­ca­tion they earned and, to wit, they believe is an organ that sep­a­rates them from the work­ing class over which they rule.

This lat­ter group pos­es the great­est risk, in my esti­ma­tion to any efforts to sal­vage what’s left of the coun­try. This group would rather burn the damn thing to the ground then rule over the ashes.
There is a tone-deaf­ness to their meth­ods, that may be attrib­uted to their sense of pre­tense and elit­ism. In that mind­set is a stub­born desire to project a sense that Jamaica is a devel­oped coun­try, despite the coun­try being any­thing but.
Like Dame Patricia Routledge, star of the old Brtish sit­com keep­ing up appear­ances, they pre­tend to be some­thing they are not.

This men­tal­i­ty is not that the prac­ti­tion­ers hide behind high walls and gat­ed com­mu­ni­ties; their pre­tense affects all Jamaicans’ lives.
There is a rea­son that the large west­ern nations that we Jamaicans immi­grate to, one and all, make law enforce­ment a cor­ner­stone to their societies.
Those of us who have been priv­i­leged to vis­it and live in those envi­ron­ments know all too well what it means to have the rule of law as guardrails around our­selves and our families.
Sure there are prob­lems with Law enforce­ment in America, that prob­lem is race-based, what is not in ques­tion is resources put toward law enforce­ment, which means leg­isla­tive­ly more than any­thing else.

Our coun­try has become a cir­cus; the penal­ties for vio­lent crimes are a joke. Minsters of Government are active lob­by­ists for crim­i­nals. The vio­lent mur­der­ers in Jamaica have no greater friend than the Minister of Justice, Delroy Chuck. Members of the Police depart­ment have no greater ene­my than the same Minister Delroy Chuck.
Simultaneously, the tiny per­cent­age of the mur­der­ers arrest­ed and even­tu­al­ly con­vict­ed spend their time liv­ing the high life in what pass­es for the prisons.
Recording music, drink­ing booze, tex­ting and talk­ing on their cell phones, and God knows what else.
For many of these crim­i­nals, the only dif­fer­ence with their lifestyles on the inside, is that the tax­pay­ers sub­si­dize their lifestyle, the oth­er half paid for by the pro­ceeds of their crim­i­nal enter­pris­es that they con­tin­ue to run from inside.
Both polit­i­cal par­ties have made a mock­ery of our coun­try, all the time con­tin­u­ing to feed the peo­ple with bull­shit sto­ries about progress on the one hand, and pros­per­i­ty on the other.

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Mike writes for thinkers.

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