“THE THREAT LEVEL WAS VERY HIGH”
Deputy Commissioner of Police Clifford Blake tes­ti­fied yes­ter­day that police per­son­nel would have been mas­sa­cred if they had gone into Tivoli Gardens with­out the aid of the Jamaica Defense Force.

This is a crit­i­cal and use­ful assess­ment by Blake, how­ev­er in the inter­est of clar­i­ty it is impor­tant to expand on what that means. The police need­ed the assets of the Military not just it’s man­pow­er but the armor need­ed for force protection.
Blake spoke to that under ques­tion­ing, stat­ing that the police’s focus was the safe­ty of its offi­cers and law-abid­ing cit­i­zens, and cor­rect­ly so.
It is par­tic­u­lar­ly dif­fi­cult to min­i­mize casu­al­ty in what was a war when the ter­rain is against you. In war­fare the forces which occu­py the high ground always has the tac­ti­cal advantage.
Tivoli Gardens like some oth­er Government built hous­ing devel­op­ments are high rise struc­tures , when peo­ple liv­ing in these enclaves are allowed to flirt the rules and thumb their noses at the rule of law what we get is what hap­pened there in 2010.
As a front line cop I took fire in sev­er­al of Jamaica’s Garrisons, Tivoli Gardens included.
What real­ly piss­es me off is pre­ten­tious know-noth­ings who have vary­ing ideas of how the police and mil­i­tary should have han­dled, what was clear­ly an act of war declared on the authen­tic­i­ty of the Jamaican state by forces loy­al to Coke.
It is very easy for peo­ple who wet their pants at the sound of a car back-fir­ing to get on their com­put­ers and be arm-chair generals.
One thing Jamaican cops nev­er lack is bravery.
What they lack are resources , sup­port from their polit­i­cal lead­ers and a nation deserv­ing of their sacrifice.
Deputy Commissioner of police Glenmore Hinds cap­tured it exact­ly when he said “the Jamaican peo­ple are for­ev­er indebt­ed to the secu­ri­ty forces”. Many laid down their lives so that the pre­ten­tious Monday morn­ing Quarter-Backs can con­tin­ue to have the free­dom to grandstand.
Without their sac­ri­fice Jamaica would be a total­ly dif­fer­ent place..

The Jamaica Labor Party has strug­gled with a per­cep­tion prob­lem for ages.
Correctly or incor­rect­ly, there is a per­cep­tion that the Party is a par­ty of rich mulat­toes from uptown, who have no idea how the mass­es live.
This is not exact­ly true. I am a poor dark skinned boy from North East Saint Catherine who was raised on good con­ser­v­a­tive val­ues, yet I saw my val­ues enshrined in the poli­cies of the Labor Party.
With that said it does not mat­ter that it is not the true if that per­cep­tion is allowed to go unchallenged.
It is worse when those jock­ey­ing for pow­er, should the par­ty ever see elect­ed office again, con­tin­ue to do every­thing in their pow­er to show arro­gance and a sense of supe­ri­or­i­ty and enti­tle­ment to others.

I ran across this let­ter in the Jamaica Gleaner writ­ten by a promi­nent JLP wannabe elect­ed official.Normally I would not pay any atten­tion to this non­sense , but this guy seem to have a real sense of enti­tle­ment, I have had a cou­ple of dust-ups with him on social media on pre­vi­ous occa­sions. He has always demon­strat­ed a sense of enti­tle­ment and arrogance.
I thought I would incor­po­rate the entire­ty of his let­ter to the Gleaner and com­ment on it.
My inten­tion is not to beat up on this guy up but to maybe expose him so that he may see the fol­ly of his ways. Maybe Andrew Holness will cor­ral him or bet­ter yet get rid of him.

Here’s what he wrote .

This is an open letter to the commissioner of police, Dr Carl Williams.

Re: (1) The func­tion­ing of the Half-Way-Tree Police Station on Saturday, May 23, 2015; (2) attor­neys-at-law required to pro­duce iden­ti­fi­ca­tion cards from the General Legal Council.

I wish to share my expe­ri­ence with your con­sta­bles on Saturday, May 23 at approx­i­mate­ly 4 p.m. at the Half-Way Tree Police Station.

(A) Facts

(1) That day, I was called ear­ly in the after­noon by a con­cerned cit­i­zen with respect to the tak­ing into cus­tody of Glenroy Ricardo Walker on Friday, May 22, along Anderson Road in Woodford Park in St Andrew by Jamaica Constabulary Force con­sta­bles. I was told he was being held at the Half-Way Tree Police Station.

(2) I was asked to attend upon the Half-Way Tree Police Station to ascer­tain: (i) whether Mr Walker was actu­al­ly in cus­tody there and (ii) what he was being charged for.

(3) On arriv­ing at the Half-Way Tree Police Station, I parked by the hold­ing area to the back of the said sta­tion. I went to the two plain-clothes per­sons seat­ed at the desk and intro­duced myself. No one seat­ed intro­duced them­selves as would be com­mon courtesy.

(4) I was asked by the two seat­ed per­sons to show iden­ti­fi­ca­tion. I told them I did­n’t have any iden­ti­fi­ca­tion from the General Legal Council (GLC) to iden­ti­fy myself as an attor­ney-at-law. I was told by the man and the woman that I had to pro­duce an iden­ti­fi­ca­tion card.

(5) I stat­ed that lawyers did­n’t get IDs from the GLC and repeat­ed that I did­n’t have any such ID. I pro­ceed­ed to ask if they had in their cus­tody one Glenroy Ricardo Walker.

(6) The two plain-clothes con­sta­bles told me they did­n’t know that name and that I was to go to the front of the Half-Way Tree Police Station for more infor­ma­tion. Another female cor­po­ral then sat on the bench by the female plain-clothes con­sta­ble and in an unpleas­ant tone asked me my name. I gave my name again and she, too, asked me for identification.

(7) I repeat­ed to her that I did­n’t have any iden­ti­fi­ca­tion from the General Legal Council to prove I was an attor­ney-at-law. She then told me I was not allowed in that area and I had to leave now.

(8) I then went to the front of the Half-Way Tree Police Station, where­upon I called back the con­cerned cit­i­zen who had called me ear­li­er that after­noon about Mr Walker to ascer­tain if he had his infor­ma­tion in fact cor­rect. The con­cerned cit­i­zen gave me a tele­phone num­ber for one Superintendent Bailey and told me that that was where Mr Walker had been tak­en into custody.

(9) After call­ing but not get­ting through to the num­ber, Supt Bailey called me on my cel­lu­lar with­in a very short peri­od of time. I told him who I was, he had no clue who I was either, and after explain­ing all in para­graphs (1), (2) and (5) above, I asked him if he could help. He was quite unhelpful.

(10) I then pro­ceed­ed to ask for the super­in­ten­dent in charge of the sta­tion at the front desk and was told that that offi­cer was not there.

(11) I was then direct­ed to a sergeant seat­ed in a room by the front desk and I again told him who I was and asked if he had Mr Walker in cus­tody. He, too, asked me for iden­ti­fi­ca­tion and I had to repeat I did­n’t have any iden­ti­fi­ca­tion from the General Legal Council (GLC) to iden­ti­fy myself as an attorney-at-law.

(12) He then told me I had to check with the con­sta­bles at the back of the Half-Way Tree Police Station to ascer­tain if Mr Walker was actu­al­ly in their custody.

(13) Obviously get­ting nowhere with any con­sta­ble at the sta­tion, I left hav­ing wast­ed approx­i­mate­ly 30 min­utes at the said station.

(14) On Tuesday, May 26, I then spoke to the con­cerned cit­i­zen who had called me ear­li­er the after­noon on Saturday, May 23. He told me that Mr Walker had been released from cus­tody that same day.

(B) Issues

(1) Are attor­neys-at-law now required to pro­duce iden­ti­fi­ca­tion cards at the Half-Way Tree Police Station, or any oth­er police sta­tion, for that mat­ter, when they attend upon police sta­tions to see clients or poten­tial clients.

(2) How is it that per­sons tak­en into cus­tody at the Half-Way Tree Police Station are not record­ed in your cus­tody book so that attor­neys-at-law can know if their clients and/​or poten­tial clients are in the cus­tody of the State, i.e., a police station?

© Submissions

(1) Attorneys-at-law should not be told they have to leave any area of the police sta­tion unless they pose a threat to the safe­ty of police con­sta­bles and/​or indi­vid­u­als in custody.

(2) Attorneys-at-law should not have to pro­duce any iden­ti­fi­ca­tion cards from the General Legal Council to prove they are attor­neys-at-law to any police con­sta­ble when an attor­ney-at-law attends upon a police sta­tion seek­ing infor­ma­tion about cit­i­zens who are in cus­tody of the State/​police sta­tions and who are clients and/​or poten­tial clients of those attorneys-at-law.

(D) Closing Comments

(1) The breach­ing of con­sti­tu­tion­al rights of Jamaican cit­i­zens by mem­bers of the Jamaica Constabulary Force and their dis­re­spect­ful behav­iour towards attor­neys-at-law will not only make your job and those of your con­sta­bles extreme­ly dif­fi­cult, but will under­mine trust and con­fi­dence in the whole admin­is­tra­tion of jus­tice in Jamaica.

- Kent Gammon is an attor­ney-at-law and deputy oppo­si­tion spokesman on justice.

Clearly this guy is a law onto him­self, he could have pro­duced his dri­ver’s licence he did not think the police should demand one.
Secondly he stat­ed quote: Attorneys-at-law should not be told they have to leave any area of the police sta­tion unless they pose a threat to the safe­ty of police con­sta­bles and/​or indi­vid­u­als in custody.
♦ (1) Does Kent Gammon have his name and title imprint­ed on his stu­pid fore­head? If not why should the police believe he is who he say he is.
Guaranteed, had they allowed him the access he demand­ed with­out ID, his let­ter would have been about sup­posed lax in the sys­tem of security .
♦(2)  Attorneys-at-law should not have to pro­duce any iden­ti­fi­ca­tion cards from the General Legal Council to prove they are attor­neys-at-law to any police con­sta­ble when an attor­ney-at-law attends upon a police sta­tion seek­ing infor­ma­tion about cit­i­zens who are in cus­tody of the State/​police sta­tions and who are clients and/​or poten­tial clients of those attorneys-at-law.
What a Jackass , you damn well bet­ter believe you must pro­duce Identification , who the hell do you think you are that every­one should know who you are?
♦ (3) What I find most dis­turb­ing was this state­ment by Kent Phillip Gammon : The con­cerned cit­i­zen gave me a tele­phone num­ber for one Superintendent Bailey and told me that that was where Mr Walker had been tak­en into cus­tody. (9) After call­ing but not get­ting through to the num­ber, Supt Bailey called me on my cel­lu­lar with­in a very short peri­od of time. I told him who I was, he had no clue who I was either, and after explain­ing all in para­graphs (1), (2) and (5) above, I asked him if he could help. He was quite unhelpful.

Gammon’s petu­lant lit­tle out­burst is not about police being a law onto them­selves, by his very own admis­sion, he threw a hissy-fit because none of the cops knew who he was or want­ed to kiss his ass.
Not the Constable, Not The Commanding Officer Fitz Bailey.
Gammon’s let­ter is cer­tain­ly not about any­thing the police did wrong .
It’s all about try­ing to make sure more peo­ple know who he was.
An epic fail .
This guy, by his atti­tude will be a drag on the par­ty . Elections are com­ing up pret­ty soon, the par­ty does not need to have the likes of Kent Phillip Gammon drag­ging it down.
It cer­tain­ly does not need him mak­ing ene­mies with the Police department.
I sug­gest Gammon hum­ble him­self and get his behind off his high horse, if he does­n’t, Andrew Holness should do it for him by show­ing him the door pronto.

Three per cent in the first year and an additional two per cent in the second

year of a new two-year deal.

That is the Government’s offer to pub­lic sec­tor workers.
Police offi­cers, teach­ers nurs­es and others.
Additionally the Jamaica Confederation of Trade Union Workers which rep­re­sents over 40,000 work­ers is hop­ing for meet­ings with Horace Dalley Minister with­out port­fo­lio in the finance Ministry to deal with a sim­i­lar wage offer from the Government.
The Governments offer is par­tic­u­lar­ly appalling to pub­lic sec­tor work­ers as it is sup­posed to end the Government imposed freeze on pub­lic sec­tor wages imposed by the International Monetary Fund.

Meanwhile accord­ing to the Jamaica Observer National Security Minister Bunting is urg­ing the Federation to dis­con­tin­ue the appar­ent protest action that com­menced last night.
The Federation Chairman Raymond Wilson, has pushed back stat­ing that the exec­u­tive is oblig­ed to respect the man­date of the body to take action if their demands for a rea­son­able offer is not met.

Bunting’s declared , “This behav­ior is not appro­pri­ate for an essen­tial ser­vice; it expos­es the pub­lic to unnec­es­sary risk; and may dam­age the pro­fes­sion­al image of the JCF that has seen sig­nif­i­cant improve­ments in recent years.”

Ironically Bunting has no chas­tise­ment for the inep­ti­tude of the Administration which con­tin­ues on a path which clear­ly is not work­ing for the Jamaican people.

The con­tin­u­ance of a pseu­do-social­ist eco­nom­ic agen­da, Genesised in con­tin­ued tax­a­tion of the over bloat­ed pub­lic sec­tor work­force, cou­pled with mas­sive bor­row­ing to fill the ever increas­ing gap between GDP and bud­getary require­ments is a pre­scrip­tion for mas­sive Inflation and what we have seen with the inevitable worth­less­ness of the Nation’s currency.

Jamaica’s con­tin­ued ties to the International Monetary Fund is inim­i­cal to growth and devel­op­ment. It should be clear to the most ardent sup­port­er of the Administration that five year wage freeze on pub­lic sec­tor wages accom­plished noth­ing to which the coun­try could pin it’s hat as worth­while for the pain felt by these most essen­tial workers.
As I have said repeat­ed­ly the International Monetary Fund is not in the busi­ness of nation-build­ing. Whatever for­mu­la the fund laid down for Jamaica was nev­er intend­ed to grow Jamaica’s econ­o­my which would result in a sub­se­quent wean­ing of the coun­try from the fund.
Fund poli­cies and loan require­ments are geared sole­ly to ensur­ing that con­di­tions are met so the fund can get it’s mon­ey back with mas­sive interest.

Jamaica has a deci­sion to make, since there is no marked gain from the 5 years of pain, we have to decide whether con­tin­u­ing with the fund is a fea­si­ble path for our country.
Clearly Government’s wage offer after the wage freeze, is nowhere near enough to com­pen­sate for infla­tion over those five years, much less to raise the stan­dard of liv­ing of the work­ing poor.
This means that pub­lic sec­tor work­ers are slip­ping deep­er and deep­er into pover­ty with each deval­u­a­tion of the currency.

Public sec­tor work­ers can halt this slide but it will not be accom­plished in Jamaica’s polit­i­cal­ly trib­al­ized envi­ron­ment, which ben­e­fits the Government.
A work stop­page of all pub­lic sec­tor work­ers at the same time would have a greater cumu­la­tive effect , rather that the rag-tag approach which they have tak­en over the decades.The Governing par­ty is acute­ly aware of the con­se­quences that would have on it’s abil­i­ty to stay in pow­er with­out call­ing fresh elections.
The peo­ple need new nation­al Elections now so they may chose their own path forward.
The Governing People’s National Party has done a mas­ter­ful job of plac­ing loy­al­ists in posi­tions of pow­er in lit­er­al­ly every area of nation­al life, effec­tive­ly chok­ing off a com­ing togeth­er of forces which would force it to come to the bar­gain­ing table with a respectable and a respect­ful offer for the coun­try’s pub­lic sec­tor workers.

♦ If we can­not com­mand it we will demand it. If you can’t open your eyes as a Government and see the need to give us ade­quate com­pen­sa­tion, then rest assured we may have to open those eyes for you,”.
Sergeant Raymond Wilson Police Federation Chairman who also serves on the National Housing Trust Board, pulled no punch­es in demand­ing a bet­ter wage increase offer than that present­ly on the table.
“I I just want you to stop and think for a while, what is real­ly five per cent after wait­ing for so long? Is that what the Government real­ly wants to offer?”.
Many mem­bers of the rank-and file though in agree­ment that the Government’s 5% offer is gross­ly inad­e­quate, roll their eyes at Wilson Many mem­bers believe Wilson is a blow-hard that gives off a lot of heat and shed no light.
None of the Officers I spoke to have any idea how Wilson plans on mak­ing good on his threats if the Government does not budge. In fact some are quite will­ing to see the back of Wilson who they say has not accom­plished any­thing on their behalf.
Despite their dis­af­fec­tion, Wilson was just recent­ly returned as pres­i­dent of the Federation.

That aside, the real ques­tion is just how much can the Government afford to pay pub­lic sec­tor work­ers in this finan­cial crunch. Conventional wis­dom sug­gest there is not much more on the table if the International Fund has any­thing to do with it, and it does.

So what are Police , Teachers, Nurses and oth­er pub­lic employ­ees to do?
Threats aside, not much.
The Miller Administration knows these work­ers depend on the mea­ger stipend they are paid with­out which their cir­cum­stances would be much more dire.
The International Monetary fund dic­tates to the Administration just what per­cent­age of the bud­get may go to pay­ing pub­lic sec­tor wages.

Many of these pub­lic sec­tor work­ers have time and again gone to the polls to elect and re-elect this PNP par­ty to form the Government despite it’s abysmal track record of han­dling the economy.
The police as oth­er Jamaicans must sub­se­quent­ly take some respon­si­bil­i­ty for the predica­ment in which it find itself.
Police Commissioner Carl Williams is slat­ed to meet with the Federation today, as is cus­tom­ary for decades, Government dis­patch­es the Commissioner to go talk down to the rank and file about it’s lack of abil­i­ty to pay more.
In the end they will not be get­ting much more if any­thing above that 5% offer if at all.
Commissioner Carl Williams on the oth­er hand earns between $8 and $10 mil­lion annually.
A police constable’s basic pay is J$581,701 each year, a stun­ning just over US$5,000 each year.
It will be dif­fi­cult to weed out cor­rup­tion from the Ranks if offi­cers do not see a sub­stan­tial increase in their abil­i­ty to feed their families.

In-art­ful? Yes !
Could her state­ments be con­strued to be Racist. No !
Classicism ? Maybe !
Then again maybe not it depends on where your head is.
Jodi Stewart-Henriques, also called Jinx, is the wife of Reggae singer Sean Paul. Recently Henriques took to social media to crit­i­cize World cham­pi­on sprint­er Usain Bolt>
Quote ‚” Between the bikes … , loud, hor­rid music, par­ties and screams, I hon­est­ly wish he would go back to where he came from. He’s a hor­ri­ble neigh­bour. I can­not wait to move,”.
She went on to say she report­ed the mat­ter to the Police but because of Bolt’s stature no action has been taken .
True to form when one cop was approached about whether Ms. Henriques actu­al­ly made reports to the Constant Spring Police about night nois­es attrib­uted to Usain Bolt, one cop alleged­ly laugh­ing­ly said “No, sah. That’s news to me … . However, I’ll ask my col­leagues. A weh dem a try do to the athlete?” .
Right that’s how pro­fes­sion­al Police offi­cers ascer­tain whether a report was made to the police.

Henriques obvi­ous­ly frus­trat­ed with the lack of action had much more to say about Jamaica’s Ambassador , world renowned sprint­er Usain Bolt. “So unfair and dis­re­spect­ful. I’ve hon­est­ly lost all respect for him. He takes his nasty behav­iour with him every­where … . So many peo­ple love him and he’s such a poor exam­ple of how to behave. I hon­est­ly can’t blame the set of UPT (uptown) that have him as pop­py show in par­ties or on their boat. He’s the ulti­mate par­ty clown,”.
The reac­tion from Jamaicans was vis­cer­al and viscous.
How dare this no name thing of a per­son crit­i­cize our God Usain Bolt.
One woman said her com­ments were aimed at show­ing “how unim­por­tant Jinx is”.
Ironically the total gist of their crit­i­cism of Ms, Henriques was that she was Racist, class-ist and a bigot.
No one both­ered to give cre­dence to her desire to be able to sleep in peace at night>
Another com­ment­ed that she should have no com­ment because Sean Paul her hus­band makes his mon­ey from mak­ing noise at peo­ple’s heads.

Where can Jamaicans now aspire to live where they may enjoy peace and quite and be able to enjoy their lives if they do not want Spanish Town Road in their neighborhoods?
Even as we con­demn what we con­strue to be clas­si­cism and and stretch­ing every bound­ary by alleg­ing racism, I believe we must also give cre­dence to her con­cerns and not sim­ply brush them aside because the sub­ject of her ire is one of our heroes.
If Usain Bolt is guilty of cre­at­ing night nois­es as she alleges, Bolt should be a good neigh­bor and con­form to the stan­dards of the com­mu­ni­ty.
What kind of coun­try is this where peo­ple can­not com­ment on the qual­i­ty of their neighborhood?
The abil­i­ty to run fast does not give him the right to run rough-shod over his neighbors.

It’s not a mat­ter of where you come from , most of us are from rather hum­ble begin­nings.
Its how we learn to adapt to new sur­round­ings.
A house is more than just a place where we live, for most peo­ple their home is the largest invest­ment they will ever make in their life­time.
They have a right to ensure that the actions of oth­ers do not dimin­ish the val­ue of their prop­er­ty.
And that is sep­a­rate from just the qual­i­ty of life con­cerns she allud­ed to.

Night nois­es have been a prob­lem in our coun­try for decades, unfor­tu­nate­ly for some ordi­nary peo­ple who just want to go to sleep they dare not open their mouths for fear of being shout­ed down or mur­dered. Even when I was a cop , report­ing nigh-time noise pol­lu­tion to some police sta­tions and offi­cers were a waste of time.
For the most part if the dance was not a police ven­ture, the police could be found dressed in uni­form at the dance with Heineken in hand, com­plaint be damned.
It took some real Police offi­cers to step in and pull the plug allow­ing work­ing peo­ple to sleep so they could get up and go to work the next day.
This large­ly unchecked mon­stros­i­ty metas­ta­sized to the point peo­ple wish­ing to go to work at 7:am hav­ing gone sleep­less all night, was bur­dened fur­ther by not being able to dri­ve their cars as their streets are blocked-off by mon­strous sound sys­tem speak­er box­es and hun­dreds of scant­i­ly clad gyrat­ing bodies.
No action from the Police.……

Yes she may have been in-art­ful in the way she spoke out in frus­tra­tion. Bigoted and racist I doubt that. What I do know is that when we accuse oth­ers of being of no name recog­ni­tion, even as we accuse them of class-ism , we need to take a good hard look in the mirror.
The prob­lem of night-time noise pol­lu­tion is only one of the many types of pol­lu­tion which has tak­en over Jamaica
Add Auto-repairs on every street cor­ner and a pro­lif­er­a­tion of zinc-shanties in once pris­tine neigh­bor­hoods add to the mad­ness that was once the beau­ti­ful Island of Jamaica.
This issue is big­ger than both Usain Bolt and Jinx.
Jinx’s tirade is rep­re­sen­ta­tive of a lot of peo­ple’s frus­tra­tion over many decades.
People who are not well rest­ed can­not produce.
Kids who stay up at night because of loud music sleep in class. Kids who sleep in class do not do well.
Poor stu­dents makes poor workers.
Is there any won­der our coun­try is mired in the morass of pover­ty and deprivation?
Or is every­thing ire mon tun it up an pas di rum?
Obviously if you are an ordi­nary per­son and not a inter­na­tion­al star you should not open your mouth , no mat­ter what they do to you.
Such Ignorance»»»»

“We have some­thing com­ing up here called Haitian Flag Day. We have got Haitian Flag Day. We got

Jamaica Day. We have got Bahamas Day. When the hell we going to have Turks and Caicos Day?”

I total­ly agree with Washington Misick Turks and Caicos Islands Finance Minister ‚when you relo­cate to anoth­er country,you ask that coun­try to accept you, by default you agree to be assim­i­lat­ed into that nation’s culture.
That nation has absolute­ly no oblig­a­tion to grant spe­cial des­ig­nat­ed priv­i­leges to you to cel­e­brate spe­cial days to hon­or your for­mer country.
In many cas­es if your coun­try was that great you would not have moved away to begin with .
“If these peo­ple want to be part of us we can­not encour­age, we can’t sup­port them with all these days, if we are going to be Singapore. If you are going to be in this coun­try, be in this coun­try, part of this coun­try. If you want to be in Jamaica, if you want to be in Haiti or The Bahamas, stay there,”.

Misick’s com­ments have gen­er­at­ed a pha­lanx of com­ments in some cir­cles with some peo­ple accus­ing him of Xenophobia.
According to The Jamaica Observer the small Island nation chain has a total pop­u­la­tion of 31,458, of which 12,030 were British Overseas Territories Citizens and/​or Belongers, 10,981 are Haitians, 1,768 are Jamaicans, 1,476 from the Dominican Republic, 818 from the United States of America, 524 from The Bahamas, 403 from Canada, 381 from the United Kingdom, 374 from Guyana, and 262 from oth­er countries.
Each group come with their own cul­ture each usu­al­ly with their own demands on their adopt­ed coun­try. TCI is a tiny nation which can ill afford to give up their sense of iden­ti­ty, at present they are a minor­i­ty in their own country.
Whether we agree or not the finance min­is­ter is on point in say­ing  “If you want to be here, you con­tribute here; if you don’t want to be here, if you want to be some­where else, then American Airlines flies here many times a day,”.

Dissenters should place the shoe on the oth­er foot and say how they would feel if oth­er groups came to Jamaica and asked to be allowed to stay then start to demand all kinds of spe­cial­ly des­ig­nat­ed privileges.

Testifying before the Commission of Inquiry set up sup­pos­ed­ly to flush out what went on in Tivoli Grades in 2010 Deputy Commissioner of Police Glenmore Hinds stat­ed ‚“As a coun­try, most of us in this

room — I think the only per­son who can claim excep­tion is Sir David Simmons — are a part of the prob­lem, includ­ing the secu­ri­ty forces,”.
Hinds allud­ed to sys­tem­at­ic break­downs in the way Tivoli Gardens was allowed to oper­ate as a State with­in the Jamaican state. His com­ments were the most poignant and point­ed of any senior mem­ber of the JCF I have ever heard , past or present on the issue of the sys­tem­at­ic fail­ure of lead­er­ship which has plagued our country.
It is com­mend­able that Hinds has also tak­en respon­si­bil­i­ty for some of those fail­ures of lead­er­ship, even though I dis­agree in prin­ci­ple that every Jamaican share in some way in allow­ing Tivoli to become a place where Jamaica’s laws did not apply.
Over the years since my depar­ture from the JCF I sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly kept up a drum­beat , point­ing to forces with­in the Jamaican state which were aid­ing and abet­ting in the break­down of the rule of law and social order.

Many Jamaicans read­i­ly yet cor­rect­ly point to Politicians , Police and the Church as the chief archi­tects of our coun­try’s decades-long pre­cip­i­tous down­ward spi­ral. Even though the Police must accept some blame, it is impor­tant to under­stand the Jamaican sys­tem of gov­ern­ment and the role polit­i­cal direc­tion plays in the ways laws are enforced, or not.
As such I fun­da­men­tal­ly believe the Police must be absolved of some of the blame for the chaos which was not only Tivoli but Jamaica’s many zones of polit­i­cal exclusions.
No oth­er enti­ty has played a big­ger part in cre­at­ing the Jamaica of today, while being total­ly let off the hook of respon­si­bil­i­ty, than that which pass­es for Media in our country.
Over the many years I have watched as the unac­count­able media unleashed a bar­rage of un-sub­stan­ti­at­ed alle­ga­tions of abuse against police sole­ly on the say-so of local polit­i­cal players.
Radio talk shows blan­ket­ed the air­ways with anti-police pro­pa­gan­da dis­guised as talk-shows.
I heard Barbara Gloudon tell the coun­try to throw stones on police stations.
We wit­nessed to our hor­ror morn­ing tele­vi­sion hosts class police offi­cers as john-crows ( scav­enger vul­ture) on nation­al tele­vi­sion because the police had the gall to arrest one of their crack smok­ing col­leagues in Barbican square.

Anti police dog­ma gave rise to Garnet Roper, Wilmott Perkins, Ronald Thwaites, Barbara Gloudon, and many oth­ers who rose to fame and some degree of for­tune on the backs and on the blood of Jamaica’s police officers.
Even so, it was­n’t just the know-noth­ing bab­blers who shaped opin­ions and per­cep­tions, those who posed as legit­i­mate Journalists joined in the free-for-all in the way the news was pre­sent­ed to an incitable and gullible public.
Hinds touched on that some­what say­ing “We allowed the gang pro­pa­gan­da to hold sway over these cit­i­zens. …[No] police oper­a­tion was [ever] called an oper­a­tion; they were called an incur­sion or an attack or an inva­sion. What we would have done is cement­ed in the sub­con­scious of these cit­i­zens that they were not part of Jamaica, they must be left to their own vices because this soci­ety sees them as off-limit,”.

As far as the inquiry goes I am not sure I under­stand the selec­tion of Barbados David Simmons as chair­man of the com­mis­sion look­ing into the cir­cum­stances of the May 2010 operation.

Simmons a for­mer Barbados Chief Justice seems by words and actions lack­ing in fun­da­men­tal appre­ci­a­tion and respect for law enforce­ment. He also has thus far through his utter­ances, demon­strat­ed a lack of under­stand of the vio­lence law enforce­ment faces in Jamaica dai­ly. On that basis David Simmons is unfit to hear evi­dence and arrive at a fair con­clu­sion in this Inquiry. It becomes pret­ty easy to pre­empt his find­ings and state Simmons find­ings will be heavy on blame for police and our mil­i­tary and syrupy on praise and empa­thy for the poor inno­cent peo­ple of Tivoli Gardens.[sic]

Tivoli Gardens did not become a no-go-zone for police overnight it took decades in devel­op­ing into a state with­in a state. It was not the only (Garrison) zone of polit­i­cal exclu­sion which exist­ed, it was just the best orga­nized. As such it became a tem­plate to Jamaica’s crim­i­nal under­world, to them it rep­re­sent­ed a safe haven , a sanc­tu­ary against Jamaican law enforcement.
It was no sur­prise that Christopher Coke asked for mer­ce­nar­ies across the coun­try to come and defend the sanc­tu­ary of Tivoli Gardens against the Jamaican state.
It was lit­tle sur­prise then that mer­ce­nar­ies heed­ed his call, picked up their weapons and head­ed to Tivoli Gardens.

Bishop Herro Blair a known Labor Party sym­pa­thiz­er stat­ed when he went to Tivoli Gardens in the days lead­ing up to the joint Police Military assault to annex Tivoli, he saw more guns than he have ever wit­nessed in his entire lifetime.
Every damn Jamaican knew what was at stake that day in 2010. Jamaicans are not fools. What we do not need is an old colo­nial mind­ed for­eign­er with an anti­quat­ed title to tell us anything.
This inquiry was not designed to find answers as to why peo­ple died.
It was designed to for­ev­er pin the death of 73 peo­ple on the Jamaica Labor Party, with a view to fur­ther alien­at­ing the peo­ple from the party.
The Administration of Portia Simpson Miller does not care a rats ass about what hap­pened to laborites that day, this fish­ing expe­di­tion is pure­ly political.

We all know that the police implored peo­ple to leave the community.
Not just that , bus­es were pro­vid­ed for their depar­ture. Some argue peo­ple could not take up the offer because they would be seen as trai­tors. We under­stand that point , but the bus­es were pro­vid­ed nonethe­less, the police did what they had to do.
David Simmons seem to be woe­ful­ly unaware that all those pro­vi­sions were put in place to ensure cit­i­zen safe­ty. We saw the white ‑T-shirt clad crowds who marched demand­ing that they leave Coke alone while pro­claim­ing their undy­ing love

and desire to die for him.
We saw the attacks on Police stations.
We saw police offi­cers gunned down.
We say the police sta­tions go up in flames .

Rather than hold­ing a fraud­u­lent inquiry which will yield noth­ing sub­stan­tive beyond blame for the police and the Labor par­ty, let there be be a truth com­mis­sion set up to fer­ret-out how and why Jamaica was allowed to slide so deeply into gar­ri­son cul­ture. This should be done toward ensur­ing that nev­er again will it be allowed to happen.
As Hinds said, “Jamaica is still indebt­ed to the secu­ri­ty forces” for the con­duct of the oper­a­tion that result­ed in the sub­se­quent arrest of Coke, and “to bring back Tivoli Gardens as part of Jamaica”.

As a young offi­cer on the Rangers Squad my col­leagues and I took sus­tained gun­fire from Tivoli Gardens in the mid 80’s as we hun­kered down in the Denham Town Police station.
The Superintendent at the sta­tion gave us orders not to return fire even as gun­shots whizzed through win­dows shat­ter­ing glass.
We were sent there from the Mobile Reserve to prop-up and defend his sta­tion against exact­ly that attack.
The group of six mem­bers of the Rangers squad myself includ­ed were damn sure not afraid to tac­ti­cal­ly enter that enclave and put down the attack based on our train­ing and ded­i­ca­tion to duty. The Superintendent was just too polit­i­cal­ly con­nect­ed and piss scared to do his job, all he had to do was get out of our way.
He could­n’t even do that.
When the shoot­ing sub­sided most of the win­dows had no glass, all shat­tered from Tivoli’s mer­ce­nar­ies. Our truck was destroyed.
I don’t need any­one telling me whats wrong with my coun­try , I know darn well whats wrong and how we got there.…
Read and share.

At the 72^nd Annual Joint Central Conference of the Police Federation held at the Hilton Rose Hall, National Security Minister Peter Bunting told police to sim­ply “turn a blind eye to peo­ple smok­ing weed”.
Presently the Police are not allowed to arrest offend­ers who have small quan­ti­ties of mar­i­jua­na. A small quan­ti­ty based on the recent Amendment is  two ounces of the weed.
The new amend­ment makes two ounces and under a tick­et-able offense rather than an arrest-able offense. The prob­lem is that the Government has not made tick­ets avail­able to the police so the Minister’s direc­tive to the police is sim­ply to “turn a blind eye”.

The Jamaica Observer report­ed that Opposition Spokesman on National Security Derrick Smith, in his address to the con­fer­ence, described the Government’s amend­ment to the Dangerous Drugs Act as an added load to mem­bers of the police force.“The recent amend­ments to the Dangerous Drugs Act, decrim­i­nal­iz­ing the use of gan­ja, are noth­ing but addi­tion­al, unnec­es­sary bur­den brought to bear on

the backs of police,” Smith argued.
Under Jamaican laws the police would be mired in the morass of mak­ing on the spot deter­mi­na­tions whether an offend­er should be tick­et­ed or arrest­ed. This would be a colos­sal waste of police resource at a time when seri­ous crimes are trend­ing upward.
Of course the only way the police would be able to make those assess­ments as it relates to weights, would be to have scales.
You guessed it, they have no scales. Engaging in this ven­ture would cer­tain­ly get the police lost in the weeds[pun intended].

On the face of it, the aver­age observ­er would see this as a vic­to­ry for users of mar­i­jua­na. They would be right. Whats the big deal in police ignor­ing peo­ple smok­ing or pos­sess­ing small quan­ti­ties of the weed?
The sim­ple answer is that there is a two-fold answer to that question.
♦Jamaicans are to a cer­tain degree not par­tic­u­lar­ly respect­ful of the rule of law , or worse those who enforce the laws. This could be a prob­lem with smok­ers of the weed with bad atti­tudes, believ­ing they have been per­se­cut­ed by the prover­bial “Babylon“may very well see this as an oppor­tu­ni­ty to blow some smoke in a “di police bway face”,this is a recipe for dis­as­ter , this will not go down well with police.
Justice Minister Senator Mark Golding recent­ly urged Jamaicans not to make a mock­ery of the police or the law, mak­ing it clear that decrim­i­nal­iza­tion should not be con­fused with the Government pro­mot­ing gan­ja smoking.
Hold that thought.……

The bar­ri­ers sur­round­ing Cannabis are crum­bling around the world as more and more stake-hold­ers point to what they believe are med­i­c­i­nal val­ues from the use of the weed. But when an Administration Minister say to us “decrim­i­nal­iza­tion should not be con­fused with the Government pro­mot­ing gan­ja smok­ing”, it not only gives us pause but offers a per­fect segue into the sec­ond point.
♦ The Government has oth­er motives behind this issue, even though there is evi­dence the walls around Ganga use are crum­bling world-wide.

The rela­tion­ship between police and Jamaica’s under-class has been a testy one for decades , there is not much love lost between the par­ties. Though not con­fined to the use of Cannabis, the rela­tion­ship has not been helped by the laws which pre­vi­ous­ly gave police wide pow­ers of arrest of per­sons hav­ing even minus­cule amounts of the weed.
Jamaica has a large Rastafarian com­mu­ni­ty which large­ly deter­mined that the weed is some kind of holy

sacra­ment. They fun­da­men­tal­ly hold the belief that the coun­try’s laws on Cannabis ought not to include them based on those beliefs. Additionally there is a huge cross sec­tion of young unem­ployed male who use the weed. Not to be out­done many farm­ers plant the weed as a mat­ter of course, even though they may not con­sid­er them­selves Ganja-farm­ers per sey.

When you add all of the fore­gone the Administration of Portia Simpson Miller under­stands full well that there is a huge wind-fall of good­will to come from the decrim­i­nal­iza­tion of the weed. That poten­tial good­will may con­tin­ue for years as poor,uneducated peo­ple point to the PNP as the par­ty in touch with their desires and needs. Ah come on why would they not have tick­ets for the police , if as Minister Golding pro­claim the Administration was not pro­mot­ing Ganga use?
How con­ve­nient that there are no tickets !!!
In I972 Michael Manley swept to pow­er on a raft of pop­ulist promis­es. The imple­men­ta­tion of those poli­cies cre­at­ed tremen­dous neg­a­tive upheaval in the Jamaican soci­ety and for the econ­o­my. Many of the poli­cies were not bad poli­cies, how­ev­er the dog­mat­ic imple­men­ta­tion of those poli­cies cre­at­ed after shocks still being felt today.
Today there may be some feel-good moments for some to say “well what about these”?

♦There are no bas­tard chil­dren anymore.
♦ Poor peo­ple have tak­en back some of the lands from the old colonialists.
So too have Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe but the coun­ty, once Africa’s bread-bas­ket is now a basket-case.
Rampant pover­ty and hunger has turned Zimbabweans into refugees.
♦Micro-dams. Project land-lease. Free edu­ca­tion. Everyone equal. Jamal.etc.…
♦ Did the end jus­ti­fy the means?
It most cer­tain­ly did not, in terms of mate­r­i­al val­ue to the country.
However inso­far as the PNP is con­cerned, this list of sweet tast­ing cot­ton-can­dy-type reforms” cre­at­ed a cult-like fol­low­ing of the mass­es toward the PNP which has remark­ably kept them in office for 28 of the past 40 years.
The PNP not a par­ty to miss an oppor­tu­ni­ty, clear­ly sees this mar­i­jua­na sub­ject as anoth­er water­shed issue which will cement their hold on pow­er exponentially.
Unfortunately for the Opposition JLP there is not much it can do from the pow­er­less oppo­si­tion benches.

We live in an evolv­ing glob­al­ized world, as such nations now adhere to sim­i­lar prin­ci­ples and rules as part of a broad­er International com­mu­ni­ty. Nations in their own inter­ests , sign onto Charters as a sign that they are part of the com­mu­ni­ty of nations. Unfortunately many small­er nations which sign these char­ters do so not because they agree in prin­ci­ple with what’s in the char­ter, but because they are lit­er­al­ly forced to.
No nation should be forced to adhere to prin­ci­ples that it feel is anti­thet­i­cal to it’s core beliefs for the sake of expe­di­en­cy. This is true in Jamaica’s case, because of it’s size, or lack there­of, and it’s inabil­i­ty to sus­tain itself financially .

Jamaica has been deal­ing with this on the issue of Homosexuality.
The Jamaican peo­ple are large­ly opposed to the prac­tice of same sex relationships.
Jamaican law makes it a crime for two men to engage in sex­u­al inter­course , con­sen­su­al or not.
However it would be a tremen­dous stretch to find a case where any­one was ever arrest­ed ‚much less pros­e­cut­ed for engag­ing in homo­sex­u­al acts.
The International com­mu­ni­ty , large­ly west­ern Europe and the United States ‚are vehe­ment­ly opposed to Jamaica’s bug­gery laws. Jamaica has been under tremen­dous pres­sure from these quar­ters to abol­ish the bug­gery laws from its penal code.
What the pro­po­nents of legal­ized homo­sex­u­al­i­ty do not real­ize is that you can­not leg­is­late peo­ple’s attitudes.
If peo­ple’s atti­tudes could be leg­is­lat­ed Racism would be a thing of the past in America. Unfortunately despite numer­ous Federal statutes on the sub­ject of racism, that vise is just as preva­lent as when King and oth­ers marched for social jus­tice 50 years ago.

Despite prob­lems in their own coun­tries on the issue of homo­sex­u­al accep­tance and police bru­tal­i­ty, the United States and Western European Nations have tak­en it upon them­selves to dic­tate to small­er more depen­dent nations like Jamaica, how their laws ought to be con­fig­ured on these issues.
No nation could begin to dic­tate to the United States or any European nation what their laws should be , or how they should be tailored.
Nevertheless Canada the United States and Britain have engaged in a sys­tem­at­ic pat­tern of assum­ing to dic­tate to Jamaica what it’s laws ought to be on the issues of homo­sex­u­al­i­ty and alleged police abuse.
Canada has even threat­ened eco­nom­ic ter­ror­ism on the Jamaican econ­o­my in the past. We have report­ed on this in this very medi­um. Bruce Golding for­mer Jamaican Prime Minister found him­self forced from office under the guise that he did not release a sus­pect the United States want­ed. The truth is Golding was set up to fall on the very issue of homo­sex­u­al­i­ty when he answered “not in my cab­i­net” to a British Journalist’s ques­tion on whether he would allow Gays to serve in his Government.

At the United Nations’ work­ing group’s Universal Periodic Review (UPR)of its human rights record, Mark Golding Jamaica’s Justice Minister point­ed to our coun­try’s long and cher­ished his­to­ry of pro­mot­ing and pro­tect­ing human rights”.
This was not enough for the large inter­na­tion­al bul­lies in attendance .
The Americans want Jamaica to “decrim­i­nal­ize con­sen­su­al same-sex con­duct between adults”.
Britain wants the “intro­duc­tion and imple­men­ta­tion of ful­ly com­pre­hen­sive anti-dis­crim­i­na­tion leg­is­la­tion to include sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion and gender”.
“Sweden rec­om­mends the Government of Jamaica repeal the legal pro­vi­sions mak­ing same-sex inti­ma­cy among men — described as ‘gross inde­cen­cy and bug­gery’ — illegal,”

Australia had strong words on the lev­el of police killings in Jamaica, although wel­com­ing the estab­lish­ment of the Independent Commission of Investigations (INDECOM) in 2011 to inves­ti­gate these killings.“Australia rec­om­mends Jamaica give INDECOM the pow­er it needs to inves­ti­gate crim­i­nal acts com­mit­ted by the police,” said the Australian mis­sion to the UN.
This how­ev­er has to take the cake:
The US also had a rec­om­men­da­tion for the Jamaican Government regard­ing “exces­sive or unlaw­ful use of force” by both the Jamaica Constabulary Force and the Jamaica Defence Force. Its rep­re­sen­ta­tives sug­gest­ed inten­si­fied efforts to inves­ti­gate those alle­ga­tions, as well as to ensure pros­e­cu­tion where appropriate.
Are the Americans seri­ous when they dare to make these sug­ges­tions? And where is Golding while these acts of unmit­i­gat­ed pre­sump­tu­ous­ness are being per­pet­u­at­ed? Did he just sit there with­out pre­sent­ing facts and fig­ures to push back against the unmit­i­gat­ed gall of the conferees?
Did Golding just sit there like a petu­lant child absorb­ing chas­tise­ment by the cadre of hyp­o­crit­i­cal pharisees?

Frankly as Jamaicans we do not care what Sweden or Australia, think period .
It would be wise, pru­dent and indeed advis­able if the pompous same-sex-lov­ing Brits would con­tem­plate pay­ing Jamaicans for the hun­dreds of years of slav­ery and the unimag­in­able pogrom it vis­it­ed on our ancestors.
Since they have no moral com­pass and sub­se­quent­ly will not pay, nei­ther will they for­give any of Jamaica’s debt they are hold­ing, Jamaicans should not be par­tic­u­lar­ly mind­ful of what they believe.
When the time comes that us Jamaicans can dic­tate how much resti­tu­tion they pay us for slav­ery , maybe that will be a time when we con­sid­er what they think.

The Americans for their part, has got to be the most laugh­able in their demands. Have they no shame?
Why would the United States even attempt to speak to any oth­er nation on the issue of dis­crim­i­na­tion or police abuse?
The Nation the United States, was built on Segregation, manipulation,discrimination,and intim­i­da­tion. I could sym­pa­thize with America’s lec­tur­ing oth­er coun­tries had she man­aged to extri­cate and remove her­self from the 400 year-old premise of Caucasian superiority.
The fact is she has­n’t , as such she has no moral author­i­ty to lec­ture anyone.
Every year thou­sands of Americans are killed under dubi­ous cir­cum­stances by America’s thou­sands of police forces. Victims are gen­er­al­ly Blacks, Latinos, and poor whites.
In fact no one even knows the true num­ber of peo­ple killed by police across the coun­try. There are no true audit or require­ments which would give an accu­rate account of the exact numbers.
The ACLU report­ed that through exhaus­tive dig­ging it ascer­tained that for the month of January 2015 over 200 peo­ple were killed by police in the the United States.

As we pre­pare this Article , res­i­dents in Cleveland are ral­ly­ing against a Judge’s rul­ing set­ting free a cop who was among a group who gave chase to an African-American cou­ple in their old­er mod­el car. Police fired over 147 bul­lets into the car. The cop in ques­tion fired 49 bul­lets ‚many after the car had stopped, he jumped onto the hood of the car emp­ty­ing two clips into the couple.
Prosecutors argued he used the cou­ple for tar­get practice.
The cou­ple had no weapon, their crime was that their car back­fired as they drove pass police headquarters.
The judge ruled that because the pros­e­cu­tor could not prove that the accused cop’s bul­lets actu­al­ly were the bul­lets which end­ed the cou­ple’s lives, he would not find him guilty.
Yes they stretch the law to pro­tect their own.
All across America Racial ani­mus is on the rise. The homo­sex­u­al­i­ty issue is still not set­tled. The Supreme Court is yet to rule on the Constitutionality of same-sex-mar­riage. Many States are push­ing back hard against the Obama Administration’s push to force them to accept and agree to Sodomy.

Jamaica should not change any of it’s laws to accom­mo­date or facil­i­tate any coun­try which takes it onto them­selves to dic­tate the way her laws are con­fig­ured. Jamaica’s Homosexuals are sub­ject to the same laws and pro­tec­tion as every­one else. Jamaica has a far way to go in the equi­table and fair dis­pen­sa­tion of jus­tice . So too does the United States, Britain, Canada, and all of the others.
Let all nations fix their own unjust sys­tems and prac­tices before they point fingers.
Despite Jamaica’s size she has an envi­able record of deal­ing cor­dial­ly and just with all of it’s cit­i­zens, can any of the big bul­lies say the same?

Have you ever won­dered why Police abuse and kill peo­ple and there nev­er seem to be redress or a seri­ous attempt to cease and desist from those practices ?
Here’s what Commissioner William Bratton the leader of the NYPD, the world’s largest police depart­ment had to say about film­ing cops who abuse citizens.

“The cam­eras are every­where, but when they start lit­er­al­ly get­ting in your face, inter­rupt­ing arrests, it starts to become prob­lem­at­ic,”. Bratton spoke crit­i­cal­ly about the prac­tice of film­ing police

encoun­ters, say­ing it is often “agi­tat­ing sit­u­a­tions.”Bratton was speak­ing at The Atlantic’s “New York Ideas” symposium.
This com­ment is the most brain-dead as well as tone-deaf thing that Bratton could have said on the issue, and you know what in most cas­es it’s a total lie.
Police gen­er­al­ly are opposed to being filmed when they oper­ate. Even though cit­i­zens are well with­ing their legal rights to film police action as long as film­ing does not place offi­cers in dan­ger or hin­der their work.Generally police quick­ly estab­lish a perime­ter when they oper­ate, this they usu­al­ly do to pre­vent peo­ple film­ing them.
They are gen­er­al­ly abu­sive and abra­sive when they do. So Bratton’s com­ments have no basis in fact.

Bratton’s com­ments are par­tic­u­lar­ly appalling in light of a litany of police killings and abuse of cit­i­zens many of which are right there in the behe­moth New York Police Department which seem to be a de-fac­to gov­ern­ment in the city all by itself, answer­able to no one.
Rather than mov­ing to trans­form the way his agency is per­ceived , Bratton’s com­ments indi­cate a dou­bling-down on abro­gat­ing the rights of citizens.

In a state­ment, Loyda Colon, co-direc­tor of The Justice Committee, called Bratton’s remarks “out­ra­geous and offen­sive.” Colon not­ed that The Justice Committee “encour­ages all New Yorkers to sup­port pub­lic safe­ty by watch­ing and film­ing police activ­i­ty as a means of deter­ring and doc­u­ment­ing abuse, a prac­tice we call ‘Cop Watch.’ ” “Bratton’s mis­char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of this prac­tice rais­es seri­ous ques­tions about why he wants to avoid pub­lic scruti­ny and demon­strates his unwill­ing­ness to take respon­si­bil­i­ty for his offi­cers’ dis­re­spect of and vio­lence against our com­mu­ni­ties,” Colon added.

Bratton is engaged in clas­sic blam­ing of the vic­tim, the absur­di­ty of those com­ments ought to give every sane per­son, even the most ardent cop-apol­o­gist seri­ous pause.

Every per­son has a fun­da­men­tal right to film or pho­to­graph events occur­ring in pub­lic. No per­son can have an expec­ta­tion of pri­va­cy while in pub­lic spaces.
Cops gen­er­al­ly see them­selves above the laws , yet these rules apply to them also.
Police have wide lat­i­tude to do their jobs. They are vest­ed with fright­en­ing pow­ers includ­ing the pow­er to take life.
They have pow­er to arrest any­one who gets in their way while they are car­ry­ing out their law­ful duties. Obstruction of Governmental Administration is pun­ish­able by up to a year in jail. For defen­dants arrest­ed in New York City (Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island), this sen­tence will be served on the infa­mous Rikers Island.
Cops gen­er­al­ly tack on the charge of resist­ing arrest for good mea­sure when charg­ing “Obstruction “. The resist­ing charge gen­er­al­ly car­ry the same penalty .
Fortunately for many arrest­ed by NYPD cops, some Judges are able to see through the lies.
Fair judges cor­rect­ly dis­miss the resist­ing charge, oth­ers in the pock­ets of the police union don’t.
In many instances NYPD cops charge sus­pects with resist­ing arrest with­out a sup­port­ing charge that neces­si­tat­ed the arrest in the first instance.

Why then is Bratton and his boys opposed to being filmed?
For the sim­ple rea­son that they will not be able to use those lies to incar­cer­ate peo­ple they don’t like or deem trou­ble makers.
Incredibly the res­i­dents of NYC are inclined to believe the police depart­ment is work­ing to trans­form itself from a good ‑old-boys net­work of blue-clad thugs who inher­it the job passed down from gen­er­a­tion to gen­er­a­tion. Some res­i­dents actu­al­ly believe that the depart­ment no longer beat and kill peo­ple unlaw­ful­ly. Some are inclined to believe that they do not plant evi­dence, sum­mar­i­ly lie and fal­si­fy reports. Some actu­al­ly believe these guys are work­ing in their interest.
The fact is for a large cross-sec­tion of the city the only cops they see are the abu­sive crim­i­nal cops who show them no respect. Bill Bratton was just in front of the city coun­cil ask­ing for an addi­tion­al 1000 cops to add to the over 35,000 stand­ing army he present­ly have under his con­trol. Many in the city coun­cil are quite will­ing to add anoth­er 1000 blue clad un-account­able cops to the mam­moth army that is already on the city’s payroll.

If you thought Bratton was done you are wrong he went on to say quote :
“There are so many cop-haters out there. Everybody wants to get that cam­era out, and not record the good things that are hap­pen­ing. They are all try­ing to incite or record an offi­cer step­ping out of line.”

Are you kid­ding me ? Of course it’s about record­ing them step­ping out of line.
Why would Bratton not see a prob­lem with cops step­ping out of line?
Fix your cops com­mis­sion­er, and stop wor­ry­ing about cit­i­zens engag­ing in their con­sti­tu­tion­al­ly guar­an­teed func­tion of film­ing them to ensure that peo­ple’s rights are protected .

Cops on the beat do what they are told to do. They hear the con­ver­sa­tions from their seniors at the precinct lev­el , they hear from their union and they sure as hell hear from their bosses.
In a city run by a Mayor and not the Police depart­ment, the Mayor would be all over these unsa­vory , ill-advised and das­tard­ly com­ments from a police chief whose offi­cers are fre­quent­ly being accused of exces­sive use of force.
Unfortunately de Blasio can­not get involved in dis­ci­plin­ing Bratton his sub­or­di­nate. After all it was Bratton who gave him cov­er recent­ly when the two cops were killed in Queens. NYPD’s finest staged a insur­rec­tion which start­ed with them turn­ing their backs on him.
It took Bratton to smooth things over, since then deBlasio can­not extri­cate his nose from the rear end of the police department.
Mayor de Balasio is not about to chas­tise Bratton , on that we are sure.

NYPD Commissioner William Bratton was heck­led as he asked the New York City Council for mon­ey to hire 1,000 more cops.
Mayor de Blasio $78.3 bil­lion dol­lar bud­get did not include any mon­ey for new hires. The strength of the NYPD present­ly stands at about 35,0000 cops. de Blasio’s argu­ments for not imme­di­ate­ly adding more cops is that the dra­mat­ic drop in stop-and-frisk frees up cops to tack­le more seri­ous issues.
I would argue it would prob­a­bly be more effec­tive­ly in reduc­ing poten­tial­ly volatile sit­u­a­tions between com­mu­ni­ties of col­or and the mas­sive police army which is the New York City Police Department.

Some crit­ics argue that low lev­el crimes are down and rather than adding cops the depart­ment should be

reduc­ing the size of the depart­ment. The New Daily news reports that over­all, crime in the city is down 7%, includ­ing a 10% decrease in the city’s hous­ing projects, where crime had jumped 31% from 2009 through 2013. But vio­lent crime is up city­wide. There have been 115 mur­ders, a 12.7% increase over the 102 killings that hap­pened by this date in 2014. According to the Ministry of National Security’s web­site the The Establishment of the JCF is 9930 plus fifty five (55) super­nu­mer­ary posi­tions mak­ing a total of 9985, but the cur­rent strength is 8441.

New York City has a pop­u­la­tion of 8 mil­lion peo­ple of vary­ing back­grounds. The city is the world’s largest. Statistics show seri­ous crimes trend­ing upward with homi­cides been 115 a 12.7% increase over the 102 killings that hap­pened by the cor­re­spond­ing date in 2014.
Jamaica has a pop­u­la­tion of 2.8 mil­lion and a land mass of 4411 square miles. I recent­ly wrote that the Jamaica Constabulary Force can do a bet­ter job despite the woe­ful inad­e­qua­cies it has to deal with from those in the polit­i­cal direc­torate. According to the US State Department, Jamaica’s per capi­ta mur­der rate remains high, at 37 per 100,000; there are only six coun­tries where the most recent inter­na­tion­al­ly report­ed mur­der rate exceeds this fig­ure. The police are only able to resolve (make arrests) in 45 per­cent of homi­cides annu­al­ly, and they only con­vict per­pe­tra­tors in sev­en per­cent of the homi­cide cases.

All things con­sid­ered, we believe the Jamaica Constabulary can do a bet­ter job , despite the lim­i­ta­tions and lack of resources. The Department must man­age it’s most valu­able resource , (it’s offi­cers ) in ways which are more pro­duc­tive, giv­ing cit­i­zens bet­ter val­ue for mon­ey. This builds trust between the com­mu­ni­ties and the Police, some­thing which is a must, as both par­ties need each other.
Recently I read that Commissioner Carl Williams demand­ed that mem­bers refrain from wear­ing oth­er gar­ments which are not depart­ment issue. For those not in the “know” that means, offi­cers gen­er­al­ly wear the more com­fort­able and prac­ti­cal den­im work clothes and a peak cap , much like the ones worn by swat or spe­cial police teams the world over.

In defense of the rank-and-file, offi­cers who have to ride hors­es, motor-cycles- or give foot chase to crim­i­nals can­not effec­tive­ly do so wear­ing a sil­ly pair of pants with a cum­mer­bund. The fact that some­one stu­pid­ly came up with that as a prac­ti­cal work dress does not mean that the depart­ment must con­tin­ue on with that mind-bog­gling lunacy.
How about giv­ing offi­cers com­fort­able clothing?

This is up to the Government, peo­ple pro­duce when they are made to believe they mat­ter. Change the imprac­ti­cal colo­nial dress and bring the depart­ment into the 21^st cen­tu­ry. It should not be too dif­fi­cult in light of the salary they are paid. If offi­cers have decent dress which the high com­mand insist on, they will wear them. While you are at it put all gazetted offi­cers in the same prac­ti­cal work uni­form and trash the skirts women wear. Every woman who joins the depart­ment should wear pants, skirts are impractical.

As I stat­ed before, retrain­ing is crit­i­cal. The train­ing the Academy has is imprac­ti­cal, out­dat­ed and inef­fec­tive. I must con­fess I am a not par­tic­u­lar­ly con­ver­sant with every aspect of the present training

cur­ricu­lum. What I do know is that I have seen more than enough cas­es where sev­er­al offi­cers stand around as a col­league strug­gles with a sus­pect he is try­ing to place under arrest.
In oth­er cas­es I have seen female offi­cers who offer zero help to her male col­league who is being assault­ed in the process of effect­ing an arrest. Either you are a cop or you are not.
What kind of train­ing allows this? It mat­ters not that you may teach prop­er tech­niques and pro­to­cols at the Academy, if offi­cers are not uti­liz­ing them ‚there is some­thing wrong with the train­ing. It is a failure.
Could it be that offi­cers fear get­ting involved because they do not want to end up on sus­pen­sion for doing their jobs?
Maybe !!!

If so, that is some­thing Commissioner Williams needs to address with the nation’s Parliament. Police over­sight is crit­i­cal, it can­not be crippling.

Many of my read­ers did not exact­ly agree with the assess­ment of my pre­vi­ous Article that mem­bers of the JCF can do more. I have con­sis­tent­ly argued that it can be done because we did it before, with high­ly mea­sur­able success.
Jamaican cops are not the only cops fac­ing bud­getary or man­pow­er cuts. At the same time offi­cers must see them­selves as deliv­er­ers of a service.
Security deliv­ery is a ser­vice, offi­cers from Carl Williams on down must see them­selves as in the busi­ness of secu­ri­ty deliver.
Each offi­cer must ask him/​herself whether he/​she is giv­ing the pub­lic val­ue for money?

It real­ly does not take much to under­stand that peo­ple are the same regard­less of color.
Me I’m just a guy who will tell you what I believe, yet respect your right to believe what you believe.
I believe God cre­at­ed this plan­et and all oth­er plan­ets and galax­ies. I know that some­thing does not come from nothing.
God alone cre­ates stuff from noth­ing, he cre­at­ed not just us but even the great unknown galax­ies of which we can only imagine.
I under­stand that peo­ple regard­less of col­or, are sim­ply peo­ple. Like flow­ers in a Meadow, blue , white , black, yel­low.….. flow­ers all.
Like Cattle, black, white, brown,.….… cat­tle all.
Like the birds, green yel­low, blue, white black, mul­ti-hued, a beau­ti­ful cor­nu­copia of bril­liance. God cre­at­ed them all, a Rainbow of beau­ty, all part of his mag­nif­i­cent, grace and love.
The blood we give is not sep­a­rat­ed by col­or , it is red.
The blood we receive in life sav­ing sit­u­a­tions is dis­tin­guished by type.
When we receive it we nev­er won­der whose life-sav­ing blood did I receive?
Was it black blood or white blood, was it Jewish or Arabic, was it Asian or Latino?
We nev­er do because in the great scheme of things it does not mat­ter, we received blood.
What we are hap­py about is that through the kind­ness of those who donate, the won­ders of mod­ern Science and the gra­cious­ness of God, we get a sec­ond chance at life.
Trust me I should know.

So what is it then which make some peo­ple believe they are supe­ri­or to others?
To ful­ly grasp the depth of this issue we must first accept that some peo­ple do not believe they should

com­pete on a lev­el play­ing field. They believe in hav­ing a leg up, being giv­en a jump-start ahead of the pack.
This goes to the heart of white enti­tle­ment in America. It’s the per­va­sive attach­ment it feels to white privilege.
More than half a cen­tu­ry after Malcolm X and Dr. King were forcibly removed from the stage for shin­ing a light on America’s igno­ble affin­i­ty for injus­tice, the prob­lem of Racism in America is more entrenched than ever.
Racism is not some­thing peo­ple are born with. It is learned behav­ior. What that means is that in homes all across America peo­ple do and say things to their chil­dren which per­pet­u­ates the belief that some­how white peo­ple have some genet­ic or bio­log­i­cal trait which make them supe­ri­or to oth­er races, more impor­tant­ly the Black race.
Those are the very peo­ple who say Black peo­ple make every­thing about race , even as they are the great­est ben­e­fi­cia­ries of the entrenched built-in inequities with­in the system.
Those are they who will point to President Obama’s Presidency. There is a black guy in the White House, what more do you peo­ple want.

The fact is , Obama was elect­ed President of the United States because of the pop­u­lous Democratic Northern States, the Pacific North west and California, geo­graph­ic areas with rich diverse populations

and a bonan­za of elec­toral votes.
Obama received less than 7% of the vote in some coun­ties of sev­er­al south­ern states and in oth­er areas of the coun­try , where appar­ent­ly they haven’t received the memo it is the 21 century.

It is clear to assume that in many of these coun­ties Obama did not receive a sin­gle white vote.
So lets dis­pense with the absurd lie that he was over­whelm­ing­ly elect­ed and re-elect­ed on the white vote.
True lots of decent white peo­ple vot­ed for the President, but he swept to pow­er on an avalanche of hope , opti­mism and pride felt in a lot of peo­ple of col­or and vary­ing spe­cial defin­ing characteristics.
Bottom line, Obama was elect­ed twice on the strength of the vote of intel­li­gent edu­cat­ed white kids, an out­pour­ing of black, and Latino votes, women Gays , and oth­er minori­ties. His vic­to­ries had noth­ing to do with old­er whites hav­ing a come to Jesus moment real­iz­ing that Racism is utter­ly stu­pid, weak-mind­ed and pathetic.
Nevertheless whites con­tin­ued to per­pet­u­ate the myth that they are supe­ri­or by point­ing to cer­tain areas.
What they for­get to tell you is that the rea­son they were ahead in those areas was because they owned the ball, they made the rules and the con­trolled the Refs.
They nev­er both­er to men­tion that the con­di­tions they cre­at­ed makes it almost impos­si­ble for blacks to win.

If you did­n’t know bet­ter you would think whites were bet­ter box­ers until Max Schmeling found him­self on his back look­ing up at the rafters with the birds swirling around whistling in his head.
They were bet­ter at base­ball until blacks got a toe-hold dom­i­nat­ed it and pret­ty much walked away from it.
They were bet­ter at bas­ket­ball until .….
Well they were nev­er bet­ter. Once they let our peo­ple in it was a wrap… Basketball does not require expen­sive Gymnasiums, black kids play in the streets.
They were bet­ter at Golf until Tiger.
They were bet­ter at Tennis until Arthur Ashe and Mister Williams decid­ed his two lit­tle girls were going to play Tennis and they were going to be good at it.
They were bet­ter at ice-hock­ey , well they don’t build any hock­ey rinks in the hood.
They are bet­ter at swim­ming yet they do not build swim­ming pools in the hood either.
The White House was the epit­o­me of white dom­i­nance and superiority.
Then came Barack !!!
It is immoral and disin­gen­u­ous to kill the fathers then laugh at the father-less children.

They are bet­ter intel­lec­tu­al­ly. What they fail to men­tion was that not to long in the past , blacks would be killed if they were caught reading.
Once blacks emerged from that they were not allowed into good schools.
When the Federal Government said “Oh yes you must co-exist in the same Schools” it required Federal troops to make it a reality

It is immoral when you cre­ate the envi­ron­ment in the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem which crim­i­nal­izes the young black men you hate, then make laws which says “Oh you can­not be a lawyer , you can’t be a Judge because you have a record”. Oh and you can’t get a job, because of your incarceration>
Ps. One more thing you can­not vote either.
Welcome to the prison Industrial complex.

But moral­i­ty and hon­or were nev­er guid­ing prin­ci­ples of those who sought to place them­selves above oth­ers ‚cit­ing fic­ti­tious char­ac­ter­is­tics they them­selves created.
The press­ing issue of the day is Police aggres­sion against young Black men.
The fact is that Police aggres­sion is not exclu­sive to black peo­ple. It may be exam­ined in the con­text of the per­cent­age of Blacks in the Population and the num­ber of Blacks who find them­selves suf­fer­ing incred­i­ble pain at the hands of Police.
It is also of incred­i­ble sig­nif­i­cance that we take keen note of the bla­tant dis­crep­an­cy in the way events are processed and report­ed in the Media.
Importantly is the response of law enforce­ment to sit­u­a­tions in the Black com­mu­ni­ty when com­pared to sim­i­lar or worse sit­u­a­tions in the white community.

As far as report­ing goes many peo­ple have already dis­card­ed what we know as the main stream media, replac­ing them with up to the sec­ond report­ing made pos­si­ble social media and the Internet.
Now peo­ple receive images and audio in the most organ­ic untouched form.
No longer are we forced to wait until the cor­po­rate media feeds us what they want us to hear , watered down and sprin­kled with what they want us to think.
Why then despite what we see in front of our eyes are white peo­ple detached from the killings and abuse?
Why do they defend the police regard­less of the evidence?
They do because every ille­gal action by the police to a per­son of col­or is in fur­ther­ance of white supremacy.
They will tell you they are not racists , they will even tell you they do not ask for any spe­cial privileges.

What they can­not tell you is that the do not ben­e­fit from it !
Every-time a cop ask a Black man what he’s doing in a cer­tain area deemed a white area, he is enforc­ing white supremacy.
These injus­tices can­not be pinned to police offi­cers alone.
They are per­va­sive in Housing . Education. The crim­i­nal Justice sys­tem. Banking. The Health Sector. Government.
Institutionalized one-up-man-ship is built into the sys­tem, whether whites want it, ask for it or not, they ben­e­fit from it.
They know it , they believe in it and they will not give it up with­out a fight. It’s the only way they have ever know, com­pet­ing on a play­ing field con­struct­ed to suit and ben­e­fit them.

The issue of police killings have dom­i­nat­ed the news for well over a year.
In the age of social-media which makes dis­sem­i­na­tion of infor­ma­tion as easy as the press of a button,each and every case is ampli­fied which in turn cre­ates more anx­i­ety and anger toward the police.
On these pages we have not been shy in div­ing into what we believe are clear instances of state abuse of cit­i­zens through their agents the police.
Decency and moral­i­ty dic­tate that con­sci­en­tious peo­ple stand on the side of what’s right. It is only when we speak out against injus­tice, stare it down, that we may elim­i­nate it from among our midst and cre­ate a bet­ter world in the process.

President Obama, through exec­u­tive order has banned the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment from pro­vid­ing cer­tain mil­i­tary equip­ment to police depart­ments. Effective imme­di­ate­ly, the gov­ern­ment will no longer pro­vide local law enforce­ment with armored vehi­cles, grenade launch­ers and bay­o­nets. Other items like explo­sives and riot equip­ment will be trans­ferred to police only if they pro­vide addi­tion­al cer­ti­fi­ca­tion and assur­ances that the gear will be used responsibly.

The pres­i­den­t’s action is part of a broad­er effort to relieve ten­sions between law enforce­ment and minor­i­ty com­mu­ni­ties after the deaths of sev­er­al black men at the hands of police in Ferguson, Missouri; Baltimore; and oth­er cities. In Ferguson, for exam­ple, local police rolled out armored tanks and riot gear in response to protests over the 2014 death of Michael Brown, a reac­tion that many saw as mak­ing the sit­u­a­tion dra­mat­i­cal­ly worse.

“The idea is to make sure that we strike a bal­ance in pro­vid­ing the equip­ment, which is appro­pri­ate and use­ful and impor­tant for local law enforce­ment agen­cies to keep the com­mu­ni­ty safe, while at the same time putting stan­dards in place so that there’s a clear rea­son for the trans­fer of that equip­ment, that there’s clear train­ing and safe­ty pro­ce­dures in place,” White House Director of Domestic Policy Cecilia Muñoz said in a Sunday call with reporters. Huffpost​.com.

I would be remiss if I did not address some of the behav­ior of young black men even as these trans­for­ma­tion­al changes are occurring.
Yes there is insti­tu­tion­al­ized Racism in America.

Yes the Justice sys­tem is slant­ed toward cer­tain peo­ple and against oth­ers, we get that.
Yes many cops are hor­ri­ble crea­tures who should nev­er ever don a uniform.
But the real­i­ty is that too many young African American men walk around look­ing for trouble.
As a small busi­ness own­er in small town America no one sees this more than I do.
Not all police offi­cers are monsters
Not all young black men are evil crea­tures to be put down .
But far too many place them­selves in posi­tions where they believe oth­ers will be intim­i­dat­ed by them.
We saw Michael Brown strong arm the store clerk.
No, the offi­cer did not see him do it , he was not aware of it when he came in con­tact with him.
However we did see Michael Brown strong-arm the clerk, we can­not pre­tend it did not happen.
It can­not be par for the course . It can­not be the way things work.

If you fan­cy your­self a thug, and a gang­ster, believ­ing the world owe you some­thing you may just run

into some­one who ain’t hav­ing it .
We hear much talk about jobs and opportunities.
Opportunities will come to those who are actu­al­ly look­ing to make some­thing of their lives.
Far too many young black men are inter­est­ed in sell­ing drugs as a way of life.
It mat­ters not how low the unem­ploy­ment num­bers are, they will always be out of a legit­i­mate job because they do not want a job.
They would much rather walk around in packs cre­at­ing mis­chief and resist­ing arrest when cops attempt to arrest them.Here’s hop­ing that the mas­sive mil­i­ta­riza­tion of police depart­ments will stop.
Here’s hop­ing more cops drop the brava­do and stop act­ing like their neigh­bors are a for­eign enemy.
Here’s hop­ing that the sys­tem of jus­tice will become fair, more just.
Here’s hop­ing that the pres­i­den­t’s lat­est move will have some mea­sur­able effect.
It is not a panacea but it is a step in the right direction

Pope Francis can­on­ized two Palestinian Nuns to the cha­grin of Zionist Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Marie Alphonsine Ghattas – to be known as St Marie Alphonsine – was born in Jerusalem and ded­i­cat­ed her life to women’s edu­ca­tion and left behind a net­work of con­vents, schools and reli­gious cen­tres, known as the Rosary Sisters. She died, aged 80, in British Mandate Palestine in 1927. Mariam Bauardy Haddad, was born in the vil­lage of Ibillin in what is now Israel’s Galilee region in 1846 and died in Bethlehem in1878. She estab­lished a Carmelite con­vent in Bethlehem which still exists today.

The Vatican con­firmed it had con­clud­ed a treaty which effec­tive­ly recog­nis­es Palestinian state­hood, prompt­ing crit­i­cism from Israel, which says such recog­ni­tion pre­empts essen­tial peace negotiations.
Only there are no peace nego­ti­a­tions. On the eve of the March 17^th Israeli Elections, Netanyahu out-right­ly stat­ed there would be no Palestinian state on his watch.
Former President Jimmy Carter a tire­less cam­paign­er for peace, dur­ing and since leav­ing office has long dis­missed the war­mon­ger­ing Netanyahu as a viable part­ner for peace.
As far as Netanyahu is con­cerned the Palestinian peo­ple should hang in lim­bo for­ev­er with­out a homeland.
Both women have been can­on­ized in hon­or of mir­a­cles said to have been attrib­uted to prayers made to them after their deaths. Some prac­tices of the Christian church con­tin­ue to defy log­ic, com­mon sense, or the­o­log­i­cal precedence.
Informed peo­ple today know the dead has no pow­er to answer prayers or do any­thing else for that mat­ter. Benjamin Netanyahu knows this, so does Pope Francis. So lets dis­pense with the fairy-tales and deal with the politics.

Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinians must know that hav­ing this Pope on their side means poten­tial­ly hav­ing rough­ly 1.1 bil­lion Catholics sym­pa­thet­ic to their cause with anoth­er 14 mil­lion con­verts annually.
Going to the Vatican as a path to State-hood , sym­bol­ic or not, is a shrewd tac­ti­cal move by Abbas and the Palestinians . This move caus­es Netanyahu a great deal of con­ster­na­tion and heart-burn.
In response to the Vatican’s Treaty rec­og­niz­ing Palestinian Statehood, Benjamin Netanyahu said Jerusalem has his­tor­i­cal­ly only been the cap­i­tal of the Jewish peo­ple, and so it will remain, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared Sunday at the gov­ern­men­t’s offi­cial Jerusalem Day Ceremony at Ammunition Hill.
Jerusalem is also cen­tral to the Palestinians accord­ing to the ADL. For the Palestinians, Jerusalem, or al-Quds, will be the cap­i­tal of the future Palestinian state, bas­ing their claim on reli­gion, his­to­ry and their demo­graph­ic pres­ence in the city.
Palestinians point to their large, long pres­ence in Jerusalem, which cur­rent­ly con­sti­tutes 30 per­cent of the city’s pop­u­la­tion. Religiously, Palestinians lay claim to Muslim holy sites (in con­flict with Jordanian claims), as well as those holy to Palestinian Christians.

Based on these two dia­met­ri­cal­ly oppos­ing per­spec­tives there will be no meet­ing of the minds between Israelis and Palestinians unless some­one changes their mind.
In the mean­time Israel is rapid­ly build­ing more and more set­tle­ments against the wish­es of even their great­est backer and bene­fac­tor the United States and some European countries.
Of course Netanyahu’s jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for the land-grab is that any space left by Israel will be filled by rad­i­cal Islam, backed by Iran.
Using the term Radical Islam, effec­tive­ly reduces every Palestinian man ‚woman and child to a Terrorist which must be con­tained and terminated.
Ironically, the rea­son the Palestinians are using crude weapons to fight against Israel’s mighty 21^st cen­tu­ry mil­i­tary, is exact­ly because of Israel’s occu­pa­tion and con­tin­ued annex­a­tion of their land since 1947.

The European Union which most­ly con­sists of right-wing Governments with the excep­tion of France and a few oth­ers post­poned a vote to rec­og­nize Palestine as a state late last year. Pressure from their oppo­si­tions forced their hand after Sweden vot­ed to rec­og­nize Palestine as a state. Lawmakers failed to reach a con­sen­sus on the exact word­ing of the motion, sources in Israel and Europe said.
Though buoyed by the post­pone­ment Netanyahu blast­ed the Swedes stat­ing quote.  “This is what is going to pro­duce peace? To ask Israel to put the sub­urbs of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv in the hands of Islamic mil­i­tants? This is irre­spon­si­ble. It’s not con­ducive to peace,”.

Israel’s ambas­sador to the UN, Ron Prosor, launched a bit­ter attack against Europe for sup­port­ing uni­lat­er­al Palestinian state­hood. “Israel is tired of hol­low promis­es from European lead­ers,” he told del­e­gates the UN General Assembly dur­ing a dis­cus­sion on the Palestinian ques­tion. “The Jewish peo­ple have a long mem­o­ry. We will nev­er ever for­get that you failed us in the 1940s. You failed us in 1973. And you are fail­ing us again today.”

Every European par­lia­ment vot­ing to rec­og­nize a Palestinian state “is giv­ing the Palestinians exact­ly what they want — state­hood with­out peace,” he said. “By hand­ing them a state on a sil­ver plat­ter, you are reward­ing uni­lat­er­al actions and tak­ing away any incen­tive for the Palestinians to nego­ti­ate or com­pro­mise or renounce vio­lence. You are send­ing the mes­sage that the Palestinian Authority can sit in a gov­ern­ment with ter­ror­ists and incite vio­lence against Israel with­out pay­ing any price.”

In an usu­al­ly harsh tirade, Prosor lam­bast­ed Sweden for hav­ing rec­og­nized a Palestinian state. “The Swedish gov­ern­ment may host the Nobel Prize cer­e­mo­ny, but there is noth­ing noble about their cyn­i­cal polit­i­cal cam­paign to appease the Arabs in order to get a seat on the Security Council,” he said. Stockholm has shown “no sense, no sen­si­tiv­i­ty and no sen­si­bil­i­ty. Just non­sense,” he said.

Notwithstanding on Wednesday December 17^th 2014 the vote came on the same day as a meet­ing of sig­na­to­ries to the Geneva con­ven­tions warned that Israel must respect inter­na­tion­al human­i­tar­i­an law in the occu­pied Palestinian ter­ri­to­ries. The rare inter­na­tion­al meet­ing in Switzerland of the high con­tract­ing par­ties to the Geneva con­ven­tions was boy­cotted by Israel, the US, Canada and Australia. In a fur­ther upset for Israel, the EU’s sec­ond-high­est court ordered the removal of Hamas from a ter­ror­ist black­list, cit­ing legal prob­lems with the list­ing, though it added that the Islamist group’s assets would remain frozen for three months pend­ing an almost cer­tain appeal.

Once again the United States allowed it’s loy­al­ties to the Zionist State to trump whats right. For decades Israel strength­ened by the United States and oth­er west­ern nations, have cir­cum­vent­ed International laws which oth­er nations are required to abide by.
It is time that Israel end it’s occu­pa­tion and quit pre­tend­ing that the tram­pled Palestinian peo­ple are a real threat to it’s sov­er­eign­ty and survival.
Israel, based on the strength of it’s mon­ey and pow­er­ful friends is assured sur­vival. It is disin­gen­u­ous to per­pet­u­ate the myth that Israel’s great con­cern is Palestinian refusal to rec­og­nize it’s right to exist.
Hopefully this Vatican char­ter though not a panacea, will be one more step to full recog­ni­tion for the right of the Palestinian peo­ple to emerge from under the boots of Israel’s apartheid dominance.

The Jamaica Gleaner report­ed that the PNP affil­i­at­ed Clansman crim­i­nal gang is suck­ing the life-blood out of legit­i­mate busi­ness­es in the nation’s old cap­i­tal of Spanish Town.
The report con­ced­ed that the reign of ter­ror is not con­fined to Spanish Town but has woven it’s way to Half-Way- Tree and Portmore.
Okay so this is not news, we are mere­ly regur­gi­tat­ing old news because the sit­u­a­tion is so dire.
In it’s Saturday Editorial the Gleaner bemoans the fact that the police know who the crim­i­nals are, know approx­i­mate­ly how much mon­ey they are suck­ing out of busi­ness-peo­ple yet they take no action.

I wrote yes­ter­day about police com­mis­sion­er Carl Williams com­ments that police inef­fi­cien­cy is to be blamed for some of the nation’s crime prob­lems. We were less than rev­er­en­tial to the good­ly Dr, Williams’ com­ments, because we believe it is his job to fix the depart­ments problems.
As we opined yes­ter­day Commissioner Williams was hired to lead the depart­ment in it’s fight against law­less­ness and crim­i­nal­i­ty in the tiny Island nation of 2.7 mil­lion peo­ple, not tell us what we already know.

Grandstanding and fin­ger-point­ing will not solve crime. Williams must step up now and imple­ment seri­ous mea­sures which will bring some lev­el of assur­ance to the pub­lic or seek some oth­er employment.

I believe I gave up on the Jamaica Constabulary Force 24 years ago when I walked away after only 10 years.
I walked away because more than half of the serv­ing mem­bers were dead-wood, receiv­ing a salary but hav­ing no impact on crime.
From the most senior kha­ki-clad pot-bel­lied gazetted offi­cers to the last joined con­sta­ble, the depart­ment was a cesspool of inef­fi­cien­cy, out­dat­ed bull-shit and friend look­ing out for friends.
Twenty four years lat­er the depart­ment seem to be lit­tle more than just that.
The agency was always rich on form but a pau­per on substance.
Throughout my brief car­rear there were some over-achiev­ers who toiled end­less­ly, those offi­cers reaped tremen­dous results but were nev­er reward­ed and cer­tain­ly were not sup­port­ed or encour­aged by the department.

Subsequently those offi­cers walked away leav­ing the dead-wood and a cadre of pre­tenders from the UWI who are there only for the paycheck.
That is not to say there are no good cops in the JCF any­more, far from it, the prob­lem is lack of senior lead­er­ship which under­stands how to pro­duce good results.
One of the things we hear con­sis­tent­ly is that the police do not have enough equip­ment , of course that is true it was always true.
Jamaica’s polit­i­cal sys­tem is one which favors the indi­vid­ual , it is not a coun­try of laws.
No Administration is going to ade­quate­ly fund the depart­ment, pay offi­cers well and give them the respect they deserve.
Are you kid­ding me ? most of the coun­try’s politi­cians would be behind bars.
Instead they cre­ate a “yard-bway” sys­tem in the police.(Yard bway)colloquial Jamaican term which means a type of servant.
Officers have to either align with one polit­i­cal par­ty or anoth­er, or they can kiss advance­ment goodbye.
Juxtapose that with ram­pant nepo­tism and abu­sive and incom­pe­tent senior lead­er­ship the JCF is a colos­sal waste of tax­pay­ers money.
A pri­vate com­pa­ny with the rate of returns of the JCF would have been insol­vent decades ago.

The sim­ple truth is that the inep­ti­tude of the police though part­ly the fault of politi­cians, is large­ly a func­tion of incom­pe­tence in its senior man­age­ment structure.
Most are fat , lazy , half-baked idiots.
The rest which came in from the UWI to prop up senior man­age­ment are there because there are no jobs in they country.
The are not true believ­ers. It takes a cer­tain type of ded­i­cat­ed per­son to be an effec­tive cop peri­od, to do so in a coun­try like Jamaica requires even more grav­i­tas. Those offi­cers are not nur­tured pro­tect­ed and encouraged.

Like every oth­er arm of Government the police is sim­ply a drain on tax-payers.
The police depart­ment can do a marked­ly bet­ter job with the resources it has it isn’t that difficult.
There sim­ply is a cri­sis of lead­er­ship and will.

Police Commissioner Dr Carl Williams yes­ter­day blamed inef­fi­cien­cy on the part of some of his sub­or­di­nates for many of the country’s unre­solved crimes.

Williams on Thursday said he was con­cerned about reports of crime ‎in var­i­ous divi­sions and felt that many of the prob­lems could be solved if offi­cers on the ground were oper­at­ing more effi­cient­ly. The com­mis­sion­er said effi­cien­cy could be achieved with greater lev­el of mon­i­tor­ing of ground offi­cers by their supe​ri​ors​.As report­ed by the JamaicaObserver.

The prob­lem of inef­fi­cien­cy in the pub­lic sec­tor is noth­ing new in Jamaica. In fact inef­fi­cien­cy is per­va­sive in most gov­ern­ments across the globe.
This though true of the police depart­ment is not unique to it.
Inefficiency, though a ter­ri­ble drain on scarce pub­lic resources and the cred­i­bil­i­ty of the agency is part of the rea­son Carl Williams is the Commissioner of police.
It’s part of his job descrip­tion to fix those problems.
Williams did not get the job as the first PhD to talk down to rank and file offi­cers who take the risks and do the dirty work but receive none of the accolades.

Real lead­ers chas­tise their charges pri­vate­ly and praise them publicly.
Ballooning crime sta­tis­tics under Carl Williams lead­er­ship may not be total­ly his fault, but his com­ments indi­cate to an old crime fight­er like myself, that inso­far as crime is con­cerned in Jamaica Commissioner Carl Williams has no clue how to bring the num­bers down.
It may very well be that inef­fi­cien­cy is part of the prob­lem, but Williams is the head of the team , he is the coach.
We hire coach­es to fix teams , not bad ‑mouth them.
On that note Williams has already failed the team.

I under­stand full well that each and every per­son has opin­ions on the way polic­ing is to be done effectively.
Of course yours tru­ly is no dif­fer­ent than any oth­er opin­ion­at­ed out­sider in that regard.
Jamaica has char­ac­ter­is­tics which are unique to itself, as such some things which work in oth­er local­i­ties may not be applic­a­ble to our Jamaican situation.
I do how­ev­er believe that the per­for­mance based eval­u­a­tion DCP Novelette Grant spoke about recent­ly, ought to be at the fore­front at any strat­e­gy aimed at increas­ing per­for­mance in the department.
What ought to be left out how­ev­er, is the notion that per­for­mance means fill­ing quotas.

There are oth­er ways to mea­sure per­for­mance ‚which will not fur­ther bur­den the already over­bur­dened pop­u­lace, than to issue more tickets.
The best way to increase mea­sur­able pro­duc­tiv­i­ty is to revamp and recon­fig­ure the way homi­cide inves­ti­ga­tions are done.
Teams should be assigned to run down leads in each case with a view to solv­ing each one as quick­ly as pos­si­ble. Once sus­pects are in cus­tody much senior offi­cers should dou­ble-down on ensur­ing that the lead Investigator is sup­port­ed in pre­sent­ing to the courts , a case which will stand muster.

Each uni­formed Officer who is called to a scene must present a full report on the way each report is han­dled by him or her. Sub-Officers must then doc­u­ment these reports as soon as they are resolved.
This will enable the depart­ment to access that data in the even it’s cus­tomers com­plain that they received no help from the department.
Before all of this can be done how­ev­er Commissioner Williams must have work­able depart­men­tal poli­cies which offi­cers are con­ver­sant with.
I sug­gest the com­mis­sion­er get to work devel­op­ing these and oth­er strate­gies instead of say­ing what every­one already knows.
As I have said on many occa­sions, to be a top cop does not require a PhD . If the top cop has a Doctorate it’s all good, but it is noth­ing if the peo­ple still get no return on their investments.
Policing is not exact­ly rocket-science.
A bad work­man blames his tools.

Those who use the death of cops to ampli­fy the drum-beat about the dan­gers of the job are try­ing to silent crit­ics of police abuse.
Every per­son who sign up to be a police offi­cer, does so know­ing full well the dan­gers inher­ent in that job.
They know that behind the pow­er to wear a gun and badge and being able to restrict the rights of cit­i­zens, have pre­cious lit­tle to do with Hollywood’s roman­tic notions of police work.
Anyone who joined, then now pre­tend he or she was not con­ver­sant that every traf­fic-stop could be his/​her last is a men­tal incom­pe­tent who nev­er deserved to be a cop in the first place.
More fun­da­men­tal­ly impor­tant is the notion that because police work is poten­tial­ly dan­ger­ous it can­not be done with­out killing and gross­ly abus­ing the rights of citizens.
Those who con­tin­ue to per­pet­u­ate the lie that because of the poten­tial­ly vio­lent nature of the job police must be aggres­sive, assertive, and abuse does a tremen­dous dis-ser­vice to the truth, to the police and to the gen­er­al public.

I am not behold­en to any­one when I assert these truths.
As a young Police Officer in September 1987 I almost lost my life in a dark alley-way in Kingston Jamaica. I took a bul­let that night in direct ser­vice to the pub­lic, yet I nev­er felt it was the pub­lic against me when I go out to do my job.
When Police Officers adopt a pos­ture of ‘them against us” it is bad for the public,it sets up a poten­tial­ly dan­ger­ous face-off between police and mem­bers of the pub­lic as we are see­ing in cities and towns all across America.
I observed as a for­mer police offi­cer that there is a marked dif­fer­ence between the way police approach their jobs in the United States and the way we approached ours in Jamaica.
As a young police recruit in the Academy we were taught nev­er to take what cit­i­zens do personally.
They com­mit­ted them­selves against the state, not you the officer.
If you per­son­al­ize cit­i­zens trans­gres­sions you are more like­ly to assert your author­i­ty in a way that esca­lates the sit­u­a­tion rather than de-esca­late it.
In that sit­u­a­tion there are no winners.

Cops in the United States are aggres­sive, they per­son­al­ize the tini­est trans­gres­sions cit­i­zens make, par­tic­u­lar­ly black cit­i­zens. They esca­late the most minute sit­u­a­tions until they have cre­at­ed an arrest-able sce­nario. Often times these arrests end up becom­ing vio­lent because sub­jects of these arrest believe they did noth­ing wrong which would neces­si­tate them being arrested.
Over the years I have spo­ken with offi­cers from sev­er­al police depart­ments here in the United States, I have also observed their actions personally.
Some offi­cers have been sur­pris­ing­ly can­did in assess­ing their roles as ser­vants of the peo­ple. Officers have inti­mat­ed to me that their depart­ment heads do not want them to have cor­dial rela­tion­ships with the pub­lic. They want them to go out write traf­fic tick­ets, and enforce low-lev­el infractions.
Some offi­cers have con­fid­ed in me that their boss­es want them to be enforcers and not social workers.
The sour rela­tion­ship between New York City’s Police Department and the city’s minor­i­ty com­mu­ni­ties are a direct result of those aggres­sive poli­cies which police boss­es argue are nec­es­sary to tamp down on seri­ous crimes but crit­ics argue they are designed to stock pub­lic cof­fers from traf­fic fines and crim­i­nal­ize young men of color.

It is impor­tant as we grap­ple with this epi­dem­ic that we under­stand that these issues are not hap­pen­ing in a vac­u­um. There is prece­dent for this .
Up until 50 years ago insti­tu­tion­al­ized racism was the law of America.
When Martin Luther King and oth­ers marched and demand­ed social jus­tice the num­ber one issue in front of them was police abuse of blacks.
Today the num­ber on issue fac­ing blacks is police abuse.

From the 1880s into the 1960s, a major­i­ty of American states enforced seg­re­ga­tion through “Jim Crow” laws (so called after a black char­ac­ter in min­strel shows). From Delaware to California, and from North Dakota to Texas, many states (and cities, too) could impose legal pun­ish­ments on peo­ple for con­sort­ing with mem­bers of anoth­er race. The most com­mon types of laws for­bade inter­mar­riage and ordered busi­ness own­ers and pub­lic insti­tu­tions to keep their black and white clien­tele separated.

Here is a sam­pling of laws from var­i­ous states:

Nurses No per­son or cor­po­ra­tion shall require any white female nurse to nurse in wards or rooms in hos­pi­tals, either pub­lic or pri­vate, in which negro men are placed. Alabama

Buses All pas­sen­ger sta­tions in this state oper­at­ed by any motor trans­porta­tion com­pa­ny shall have sep­a­rate wait­ing rooms or space and sep­a­rate tick­et win­dows for the white and col­ored races. Alabama

Railroads The con­duc­tor of each pas­sen­ger train is autho­rized and required to assign each pas­sen­ger to the car or the divi­sion of the car, when it is divid­ed by a par­ti­tion, des­ig­nat­ed for the race to which such pas­sen­ger belongs. Alabama

Restaurants It shall be unlaw­ful to con­duct a restau­rant or oth­er place for the serv­ing of food in the city, at which white and col­ored peo­ple are served in the same room, unless such white and col­ored per­sons are effec­tu­al­ly sep­a­rat­ed by a sol­id par­ti­tion extend­ing from the floor upward to a dis­tance of sev­en feet or high­er, and unless a sep­a­rate entrance from the street is pro­vid­ed for each com­part­ment.Alabama

Pool and Billiard Rooms It shall be unlaw­ful for a negro and white per­son to play togeth­er or in com­pa­ny with each oth­er at any game of pool or bil­liards.Alabama

Toilet Facilities, Male Every employ­er of white or negro males shall pro­vide for such white or negro males rea­son­ably acces­si­ble and sep­a­rate toi­let facil­i­ties.Alabama

Intermarriage The mar­riage of a per­son of Caucasian blood with a Negro, Mongolian, Malay, or Hindu shall be null and void. Arizona

Intermarriage All mar­riages between a white per­son and a negro, or between a white per­son and a per­son of negro descent to the fourth gen­er­a­tion inclu­sive, are here­by for­ev­er pro­hib­it­ed. Florida

Cohabitation Any negro man and white woman, or any white man and negro woman, who are not mar­ried to each oth­er, who shall habit­u­al­ly live in and occu­py in the night­time the same room shall each be pun­ished by impris­on­ment not exceed­ing twelve (12) months, or by fine not exceed­ing five hun­dred ($500.00) dol­lars.Florida

Education The schools for white chil­dren and the schools for negro chil­dren shall be con­duct­ed sep­a­rate­ly.Florida

Juvenile Delinquents There shall be sep­a­rate build­ings, not near­er than one fourth mile to each oth­er, one for white boys and one for negro boys. White boys and negro boys shall not, in any man­ner, be asso­ci­at­ed togeth­er or worked togeth­er.Florida

Mental Hospitals The Board of Control shall see that prop­er and dis­tinct apart­ments are arranged for said patients, so that in no case shall Negroes and white per­sons be togeth­er. Georgia

Intermarriage It shall be unlaw­ful for a white per­son to mar­ry any­one except a white per­son. Any mar­riage in vio­la­tion of this sec­tion shall be void. Georgia

Barbers No col­ored bar­ber shall serve as a bar­ber [to] white women or girls.Georgia

Burial The offi­cer in charge shall not bury, or allow to be buried, any col­ored per­sons upon ground set apart or used for the bur­ial of white per­sons. Georgia

Restaurants All per­sons licensed to con­duct a restau­rant, shall serve either white peo­ple exclu­sive­ly or col­ored peo­ple exclu­sive­ly and shall not sell to the two races with­in the same room or serve the two races any­where under the same license.Georgia

Amateur Baseball It shall be unlaw­ful for any ama­teur white base­ball team to play base­ball on any vacant lot or base­ball dia­mond with­in two blocks of a play­ground devot­ed to the Negro race, and it shall be unlaw­ful for any ama­teur col­ored base­ball team to play base­ball in any vacant lot or base­ball dia­mond with­in two blocks of any play­ground devot­ed to the white race. Georgia

Parks It shall be unlaw­ful for col­ored peo­ple to fre­quent any park owned or main­tained by the city for the ben­e­fit, use and enjoy­ment of white persons…and unlaw­ful for any white per­son to fre­quent any park owned or main­tained by the city for the use and ben­e­fit of col­ored per­sons. Georgia

Wine and Beer All per­sons licensed to con­duct the busi­ness of sell­ing beer or wine…shall serve either white peo­ple exclu­sive­ly or col­ored peo­ple exclu­sive­ly and shall not sell to the two races with­in the same room at any time. Georgia

Reform Schools The chil­dren of white and col­ored races com­mit­ted to the hous­es of reform shall be kept entire­ly sep­a­rate from each oth­er. Kentucky

Circus Tickets All cir­cus­es, shows, and tent exhi­bi­tions, to which the atten­dance of…more than one race is invit­ed or expect­ed to attend shall pro­vide for the con­ve­nience of its patrons not less than two tick­et offices with indi­vid­ual tick­et sell­ers, and not less than two entrances to the said per­for­mance, with indi­vid­ual tick­et tak­ers and receivers, and in the case of out­side or tent per­for­mances, the said tick­et offices shall not be less than twen­ty-five (25) feet apart. Louisiana

Housing Any person…who shall rent any part of any such build­ing to a negro per­son or a negro fam­i­ly when such build­ing is already in whole or in part in occu­pan­cy by a white per­son or white fam­i­ly, or vice ver­sa when the build­ing is in occu­pan­cy by a negro per­son or negro fam­i­ly, shall be guilty of a mis­de­meanor and on con­vic­tion there­of shall be pun­ished by a fine of not less than twen­ty-five ($25.00) nor more than one hun­dred ($100.00) dol­lars or be impris­oned not less than 10, or more than 60 days, or both such fine and impris­on­ment in the dis­cre­tion of the court. Louisiana

The Blind The board of trustees shall…maintain a sep­a­rate building…on sep­a­rate ground for the admis­sion, care, instruc­tion, and sup­port of all blind per­sons of the col­ored or black race. Louisiana

Intermarriage All mar­riages between a white per­son and a negro, or between a white per­son and a per­son of negro descent, to the third gen­er­a­tion, inclu­sive, or between a white per­son and a mem­ber of the Malay race; or between the negro a nd a mem­ber of the Malay race; or between a per­son of Negro descent, to the third gen­er­a­tion, inclu­sive, and a mem­ber of the Malay race, are for­ev­er pro­hib­it­ed, and shall be void. Maryland

Railroads All rail­road com­pa­nies and cor­po­ra­tions, and all per­sons run­ning or oper­at­ing cars or coach­es by steam on any rail­road line or track in the State of Maryland, for the trans­porta­tion of pas­sen­gers, are here­by required to pro­vide sep­a­rate cars or coach­es for the trav­el and trans­porta­tion of the white and col­ored pas­sen­gers. Maryland

Education Separate schools shall be main­tained for the chil­dren of the white and col­ored races. Mississippi

Promotion of Equality Any person…who shall be guilty of print­ing, pub­lish­ing or cir­cu­lat­ing print­ed, type­writ­ten or writ­ten mat­ter urg­ing or pre­sent­ing for pub­lic accep­tance or gen­er­al infor­ma­tion, argu­ments or sug­ges­tions in favor of social equal­i­ty or of inter­mar­riage between whites and negroes, shall be guilty of a mis­de­meanor and sub­ject to fine or not exceed­ing five hun­dred (500.00) dol­lars or impris­on­ment not exceed­ing six (6) months or both. Mississippi

Intermarriage The mar­riage of a white per­son with a negro or mulat­to or per­son who shall have one-eighth or more of negro blood, shall be unlaw­ful and void.Mississippi

Hospital Entrances There shall be main­tained by the gov­ern­ing author­i­ties of every hos­pi­tal main­tained by the state for treat­ment of white and col­ored patients sep­a­rate entrances for white and col­ored patients and vis­i­tors, and such entrances shall be used by the race only for which they are pre­pared. Mississippi

Prisons The war­den shall see that the white con­victs shall have sep­a­rate apart­ments for both eat­ing and sleep­ing from the negro con­victs. Mississippi

Education Separate free schools shall be estab­lished for the edu­ca­tion of chil­dren of African descent; and it shall be unlaw­ful for any col­ored child to attend any white school, or any white child to attend a col­ored school.Missouri

Intermarriage All mar­riages between…white per­sons and negroes or white per­sons and Mongolians…are pro­hib­it­ed and declared absolute­ly void…No per­son hav­ing one-eighth part or more of negro blood shall be per­mit­ted to mar­ry any white per­son, nor shall any white per­son be per­mit­ted to mar­ry any negro or per­son hav­ing one-eighth part or more of negro blood. Missouri

Education Separate rooms [shall] be pro­vid­ed for the teach­ing of pupils of African descent, and [when] said rooms are so pro­vid­ed, such pupils may not be admit­ted to the school rooms occu­pied and used by pupils of Caucasian or oth­er descent. New Mexico

Textbooks Books shall not be inter­change­able between the white and col­ored schools, but shall con­tin­ue to be used by the race first using them. North Carolina

Libraries The state librar­i­an is direct­ed to fit up and main­tain a sep­a­rate place for the use of the col­ored peo­ple who may come to the library for the pur­pose of read­ing books or peri­od­i­cals. North Carolina

Militia The white and col­ored mili­tia shall be sep­a­rate­ly enrolled, and shall nev­er be com­pelled to serve in the same orga​ni​za​tion​.No orga­ni­za­tion of col­ored troops shall be per­mit­ted where white troops are avail­able, and while white per­mit­ted to be orga­nized, col­ored troops shall be under the com­mand of white offi­cers. North Carolina

Transportation The…Utilities Commission…is empow­ered and direct­ed to require the estab­lish­ment of sep­a­rate wait­ing rooms at all sta­tions for the white and col­ored races. North Carolina

Teaching Any instruc­tor who shall teach in any school, col­lege or insti­tu­tion where mem­bers of the white and col­ored race are received and enrolled as pupils for instruc­tion shall be deemed guilty of a mis­de­meanor, and upon con­vic­tion there­of, shall be fined in any sum not less than ten dol­lars ($10.00) nor more than fifty dol­lars ($50.00) for each offense. Oklahoma

Fishing, Boating, and Bathing The [Conservation] Commission shall have the right to make seg­re­ga­tion of the white and col­ored races as to the exer­cise of rights of fish­ing, boat­ing and bathing. Oklahoma

Mining The baths and lock­ers for the negroes shall be sep­a­rate from the white race, but may be in the same build­ing. Oklahoma

Telephone Booths The Corporation Commission is here­by vest­ed with pow­er and author­i­ty to require tele­phone companies…to main­tain sep­a­rate booths for white and col­ored patrons when there is a demand for such sep­a­rate booths. That the Corporation Commission shall deter­mine the neces­si­ty for said sep­a­rate booths only upon com­plaint of the peo­ple in the town and vicin­i­ty to be served after due hear­ing as now pro­vid­ed by law in oth­er com­plaints filed with the Corporation Commission. Oklahoma

Lunch Counters No per­sons, firms, or cor­po­ra­tions, who or which fur­nish meals to pas­sen­gers at sta­tion restau­rants or sta­tion eat­ing hous­es, in times lim­it­ed by com­mon car­ri­ers of said pas­sen­gers, shall fur­nish said meals to white and col­ored pas­sen­gers in the same room, or at the same table, or at the same counter. South Carolina

Child Custody It shall be unlaw­ful for any par­ent, rel­a­tive, or oth­er white per­son in this State, hav­ing the con­trol or cus­tody of any white child, by right of guardian­ship, nat­ur­al or acquired, or oth­er­wise, to dis­pose of, give or sur­ren­der such white child per­ma­nent­ly into the cus­tody, con­trol, main­te­nance, or sup­port, of a negro. South Carolina

Libraries Any white per­son of such coun­ty may use the coun­ty free library under the rules and reg­u­la­tions pre­scribed by the com­mis­sion­ers court and may be enti­tled to all the priv­i­leges there­of. Said court shall make prop­er pro­vi­sion for the negroes of said coun­ty to be served through a sep­a­rate branch or branch­es of the coun­ty free library, which shall be admin­is­tered by [a] cus­to­di­an of the negro race under the super­vi­sion of the coun­ty librar­i­an. Texas

Education [The County Board of Education] shall pro­vide schools of two kinds; those for white chil­dren and those for col­ored chil­dren. Texas

Theaters Every person…operating…any pub­lic hall, the­atre, opera house, motion pic­ture show or any place of pub­lic enter­tain­ment or pub­lic assem­blage which is attend­ed by both white and col­ored per­sons, shall sep­a­rate the white race and the col­ored race and shall set apart and designate…certain seats there­in to be occu­pied by white per­sons and a por­tion there­of , or cer­tain seats there­in, to be occu­pied by col­ored per­sons. Virginia

Railroads The con­duc­tors or man­agers on all such rail­roads shall have pow­er, and are here­by required, to assign to each white or col­ored pas­sen­ger his or her respec­tive car, coach or com­part­ment. If the pas­sen­ger fails to dis­close his race, the con­duc­tor and man­agers, act­ing in good faith, shall be the sole judges of his race.Virginia

Intermarriage All mar­riages of white per­sons with Negroes, Mulattos, Mongolians, or Malaya here­after con­tract­ed in the State of Wyoming are and shall be ille­gal and void. Wyoming>

It is impor­tant as we grap­ple with this issue going for­ward, that pol­i­cy mak­ers rec­og­nize that vio­lence begets violence.
People react vio­lent­ly when they expect that vio­lence will be used against them.
I have repeat­ed­ly stat­ed that it is a false argu­ment when police apol­o­gists tell you that police work can only be done by being aggres­sive, arro­gant, abu­sive, and over­ly assertive.
The best police work is achiev­able when offi­cers do the exact oppo­site of the aforementioned.
That of course is depen­dent on whether those who make pol­i­cy want that kind of interaction.
It depends on whether pol­i­cy mak­ers want that kind of country.
In many parts of the coun­try they don’t .
Already there is new data show­ing that more police offi­cers are being shot.
The envi­ron­ment is tox­ic with inci­dents of police killing unarmed black men, as peo­ple demon­strate against police across the nation more offi­cers are pay­ing the ulti­mate price.
No police offi­cer deserves to die for doing his job.
No inno­cent per­son (regard­less of col­or) should be harassed, abused or mur­dered, that’s the bot­tom line.