The Prime Minister’s con­ces­sion that, quote: ‘The country’s crime prob­lem has “evolved cur­rent­ly, over and above our estab­lished capac­i­ty to address it”, should be a mon­u­men­tal­ly pro­found state­ment polit­i­cal­ly and pol­i­cy-wise, but in a coun­try like ours, it will spark bare­ly a rip­ple except for polit­i­cal mileage.
An inane quote from a dance­hall artiste would gar­ner more inter­est than the Prime Minister’s pro­found con­ces­sion of fail­ure, which he has arrived at way too late.
In 2016 I wrote the arti­cle below in which I implored the Prime Minister to fire Terrence Williams from INDECOM.
My thought process was that since the admin­is­tra­tion would not table leg­is­la­tion in the par­lia­ment to repeal the INDECOM law that was cre­at­ed by a pre­vi­ous JLP admin­is­tra­tion, hope­ful­ly, remov­ing the can­cer­ous growth, Terrence Williams, would help to min­i­mize some of the dam­age being done, until anoth­er admin­is­tra­tion took office that was not blink­ered by myopia.

The above arti­cle has been one of the most wide­ly read that I have writ­ten to-date, gar­ner­ing tens of thou­sands of read­ers, accord­ing to Google ana­lyt­ics.
There is hard­ly a chance that the Prime Minister did not read it, or was told about it, accord­ing to one well-placed source with close ties to the admin­is­tra­tion.
Nevertheless, the Prime Minister did not heed my warn­ings to him to remove the con­tentious, and self ‑serv­ing Terrence Williams from the equa­tion, even if he did not want to remove the (Trojan horse) we have come to know as INDECOM.

Rather than take my unso­licit­ed coun­sel, the Prime Minister dou­bled down on the strat­e­gy which brought him to where we are today, forc­ing him to con­cede defeat to the killers roam­ing our coun­try.
Every Jamaican who is not ben­e­fit­ting from crime should today be extreme­ly agi­tat­ed and up in arms at their Government at the state­ments of defeat com­ing from the nation’s chief exec­u­tive.
We were bound to get here, just days ago I wrote that a Saint Andrew Member of Parliament Fayval Williams extolled the val­ues of peace march­es on her social media page.
I con­tend­ed then, that peo­ple with­out polit­i­cal pow­er can march all they want, but the peo­ple with the pow­er to effec­tu­ate change on behalf of their con­stituents should not be talk­ing about polit­i­cal march­es as a solu­tion to the wave of vio­lent crimes sweep­ing the coun­try.
When politi­cians do that I argued, it is an act of capit­u­la­tion. It says “we are out of options”.

The instances of the Prime Minister throw­ing his sup­port to Terrence Williams and INDECOM and berat­ing the brave offi­cers in our coun­try, which allows him to have a coun­try to gov­ern are many.
In June of 2017, while address­ing a so-called use of force con­fer­ence con­vened at the Jamaica Conference Center by, you guessed it.….….….….INDECOM, Andrew Holness said the fol­low­ing.

Quote: The use of force to main­tain law and order has not achieved any­thing ben­e­fi­cial.
“The soci­ety that we are try­ing to cre­ate can­not rely on the use of force to get the preser­va­tion of law and order. For too long, since our inde­pen­dence, since our colo­nial past, we have relied on force, in order to get law and order.”

The truth of the mat­ter is that there is no fac­tu­al data that sup­port­ed the Prime Minister’s asser­tion that there has been a reliance on force to main­tain law and order.
The real­i­ty is that when cit­i­zens break the laws and law-enforce­ment inter­venes to enforce the laws and those cit­i­zens decide to resist, force becomes a neces­si­ty.
It is because of that why the laws were writ­ten decades and decades ago, long before Andrew Holness or myself were born to give the police the right to use force in the exe­cu­tion of their duties should the need arise.
Nowhere in the world has it been demon­stra­bly more nec­es­sary to use force to enforce the laws than in Jamaica.
Instead of hob­nob­bing with INDECOM, Holness would have been bet­ter served by using his ele­vat­ed plat­form as Prime Minister, to edu­cate the large mass of illit­er­ate and law­less peo­ple who fun­da­men­tal­ly believe it is their God-giv­en right, not just to resist their own arrest, but also to inter­vene in try­ing to pre­vent­ing every oth­er arrest. 

The Prime Minister made no attempt to bal­ance his asser­tions at that con­fer­ence with facts. Surely as the leader of the coun­try, he could have called up the com­mis­sion­er of police and ask for police use of force guide­lines.
He could have asked them to give him data on the num­ber of times force was used against the police, which is crit­i­cal­ly impor­tant data to have when one is writ­ing a speech or is about to deliv­er one on police use of force.
He has a staff of peo­ple who ask “how high” when he says jump.
But he could not be both­ered hav­ing facts, what he cared about was mak­ing the case for INDECOM, it’s bloat­ed bud­get and fine offices and ameni­ties, while police offi­cers were lit­er­al­ly liv­ing and work­ing in bird feces in some police sta­tions.
Since the Prime Minister could not both­er to tell the truth, I decid­ed to pub­lish the truth.

A report from the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF) showed that, in 2014, the police were shot at 470 times, 425 times in 2015, and 502 in 2016. During those inci­dents, two police­men were mur­dered and eight injured in 2014, eight were mur­dered and 19 injured in 2015, while six were killed and 22 injured in 2016. At the same time, in 2014 some 112 civil­ians were killed by the police, 92 in 2005, and 102 the fol­low­ing year.

In addi­tion to the vio­lence against the police for those years here is a list of the num­ber of Jamaicans who were report­ed mur­dered to the police.

This infor­ma­tion was eas­i­ly sourced, but Prime Minister Holness did not both­er to source it.
It did not jive with his pre-con­ceived world-view of law enforce­ment, despite his many police body­guards.
What was impor­tant to him was to make the case against the police. His pre­con­ceived ideas are hav­ing con­se­quences now.
Police offi­cers are not allowed to touch the mur­der­ers so they are free to kill at will.
The Police have right­ly shoul­dered arms. 

Mike Beckles is a for­mer Jamaican police Detective cor­po­ral, busi­ness­man, researcher, and blog­ger. 
He is a black achiev­er hon­oree, and pub­lish­er of the blog chatt​-​a​-box​.com. 
He’s also a con­trib­u­tor to sev­er­al web­sites.
You may sub­scribe to his blogs free of charge, or sub­scribe to his Youtube chan­nel @chatt-a-box, for the lat­est pod­cast all free to you of course.

As Mexican troops moved in to arrest Ovidio Guzman Lopez, Mexican nar­co King, and one of the sons of Joaquin El Chapo Guzman serv­ing time in an American Prison, armed gun­men sur­round­ed the sol­diers forc­ing the release of Guzman who was being arrest­ed on an American extra­di­tion war­rant.
Sounds eeri­ly like Déjà vu, where have we heard this before?

The sol­diers were humil­i­at­ed, as events unfold­ed in Culiacan the strong­hold of the Sinaloa Cartel, but not as much as the Government of President Manuel Lopez Obrador.
*Ironically, Lopez Obrador has been high­ly crit­i­cal of what he calls the mil­i­ta­rized approach to law enforce­ment by his pre­de­ces­sors, accord­ing to the Los Angeles Times.
*In our own Jamaica, we have heard the very same idi­ot­ic argu­ments prof­fered by some in the high­est lead­er­ship posi­tions.
In oth­er words, they want to put an end to the stark and ram­pant vio­lence and killing in our coun­try but they want to do so with feath­ered gloves and pow­dered hand­ker­chiefs.
When the house is on fire, you want water or foam to put it out, and it requires skilled fire­men, not talk­ers and pon­tif­i­cates.

The Mexican gangs went around the city set­ting fires to vehi­cles and block­ing the egress of the sol­diers. Several sol­diers were dis­armed and paci­fied by the heav­i­ly armed gangs.

In a weak attempt at face-sav­ing Mexico’s Security Secretary AlfansoDurazo said: “There was no pact with crim­i­nals, there is no failed state.” “There was a failed oper­a­tion.” Typical politi­cian, it is remark­able how they man­age to blame the secu­ri­ty forces when they fuck up and allow crim­i­nals to gain con­trol.
The equal­ly pathet­ic Defense Secretary Luis Cresencio blamed the group of secu­ri­ty offi­cials for what he called eager­ness to pur­sue Guzman with­out autho­riza­tion from super­vi­sors.
Those who are ratio­nal fair and awake will remem­ber that Jamaican author­i­ties did the very same thing after the secu­ri­ty forces valiant­ly annexed the law­less Tivoli Gardens to Jamaica, instead of receiv­ing a tick­er-tape parade they received a tongue lash­ing by the dirt­bags in gov­ern­ment who are total­ly unwor­thy of the posi­tions they held. As if their dis­gust­ing response was­n’t bad enough, they brought in a for­eign­er in the per­son of a for­mer Bajan jurist, to fur­ther dis­re­spect our secu­ri­ty forces.

There was a report­ed 60 secu­ri­ty offi­cers in a con­voy of vehi­cles and they were eas­i­ly over­pow­ered.
Mexico’s secu­ri­ty cab­i­net decid­ed to call off the oper­a­tion alleged­ly with the goal of ( get this), “safe­guard­ing the well-being and tran­quil­i­ty of Culiacan soci­ety.“
If this was­n’t so stu­pid it would be fun­ny. the tran­quil­i­ty of a city run by nar­co-ter­ror­ists and gang­sters.
It was just the pre­vi­ous Monday that nar­co-ter­ror­ists had mur­dered 14 police offi­cers in the state of Michoacan.

According to reports, con­voys of trucks dri­ven by masked gun­men patrolled the city cen­ter, at least one of the mount­ed with a .50-cal­iber machine gun. They seized and set fire to dozens of vehi­cles includ­ing a bus and a police car, and block­ing at least 14 roads.
The specter of armed gang­sters parad­ing the streets of Kingston before the secu­ri­ty forces went into Tivoli Gardens is still fresh in the minds of many Jamaicans. After all, it was just nine (9) years ago.
One Mexican woman bemoaned what she char­ac­ter­ized as the gov­ern­men­t’s sur­ren­der. “The peo­ple who real­ly are in charge here are the nar­cos”.
As are the gang­sters in Jamaica!
In response to the shock­ing humil­i­a­tion of the secu­ri­ty forces, the Mexican President said: “The cap­ture of one crim­i­nal can­not be worth more than the lives of peo­ple”.

It is the lan­guage being used today even as crime con­tin­ues to esca­late in Jamaica. This year alone, over a thou­sand peo­ple have been mur­dered with over two months to go in the year.
Jamaica’s Prime Minister Andrew Holness, told a group of peo­ple who sur­round­ed him com­plain­ing about the police, that the police may have caught a crim­i­nal, but they alien­at­ed the com­mu­ni­ty. Imagine a law­less Jamaican crim­i­nal-lov­ing inner-city com­mu­ni­ty being alien­at­ed from the rule of law?
No oth­er Jamaican Prime Minister has so immersed him­self into the day to day affairs of law ‑enforce­ment, in which he has no busi­ness, as Andrew Holness has. As such he will bear the full respon­si­bil­i­ty for the con­tin­ued ero­sion of the rule of law in our coun­try.
That is the kind of talk the Mexican President and Defense Secretary Luis Cresencio used against their own secu­ri­ty forces, instead of lay­ing blame where it belongs with the blood-thirsty narco-terrorists.

In recent weeks the Jamaican Justice Minister Delroy Chuck lam­pooned the secu­ri­ty forces for arrest­ing Ruel Reid and oth­ers of their clique on cor­rup­tion charges.
Chuck, who had no idea what the evi­dence was against Reid when he spoke, and whose daugh­ter, an attor­ney, is rep­re­sent­ing Ruel Reid, berat­ed the police for mak­ing the arrest.
He has since with­drawn the broad­side but the dam­age was done.
Additionally, the youth arm of the rul­ing JLP also came out and accused the police of wrong-doing even though there has been no evi­dence of any wrong-doing so far.

The Jamaican Government of the day, as has the one before it, con­tin­ued to mis­use and abuse the secu­ri­ty forces in an attempt to con­tin­ue the inep­ti­tude of the inves­tiga­tive capa­bil­i­ty of the police.
It con­tin­ues to pro­mote to senior posi­tions in the JCF, men, and women who are inca­pable of for­mu­lat­ing a crime strat­e­gy, much less exe­cut­ing one under com­mand.
As a con­se­quence, the JCF is a top-heavy low capa­bil­i­ty force. As was the sit­u­a­tion, two and three decades ago, the JCF use work­horse offi­cers to sup­press out of con­trol hot-spots, while recent­ly pro­mot­ed senior offi­cers sit in cushy offices.
Well-know com­man­ders who have a proven track record of suc­cess are passed over for pro­mo­tions, while lack­eys and lap­dogs receive pro­mo­tions to posi­tions they can­not justify.

As the blood-let­ting con­tin­ues in Saint Andrew South, for exam­ple, this pub­li­ca­tion wish­es the new­ly installed com­man­der, Superintendent Wayne Cameron all the best in this new com­mand.
Superintendent Cameron’s intel­lect and stel­lar com­mand suc­cess­es in Portland, Manchester, and places beyond, were enough to get him thrown into the morass of Saint Andrew South.
Those very same attrib­ut­es were not enough to get him pro­mot­ed in the last go-around, nor the time before that, nor the time before.
We wish you well Wayne Cameron.….…

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Mike Beckles is a for­mer Jamaican police Detective cor­po­ral, a busi­ness own­er, avid researcher, and blog­ger. 
He is a black achiev­er hon­oree, and pub­lish­er of the blog chatt​-​a​-box​.com. 
He’s also a con­trib­u­tor to sev­er­al web­sites.
You may sub­scribe to his blogs free of charge, or sub­scribe to his Youtube chan­nel @chatt-a-box, for the lat­est pod­cast all free to you of course.