“No one wants to wake up and see a front-page sto­ry in our news­pa­pers stat­ing, ‘Jamaica bleeds’,” Bartlett told del­e­gates attend­ing the 56^th Annual General Meeting (AGM) of the Jamaica Hotel and Tourist Association (JHTA) at The Jamaica Pegasus hotel in New Kingston two days ago.

If this state­ment was­n’t so seri­ous­ly unhelp­ful and dan­ger­ous I would bust out laughing .….

Look I have always liked Ed Bartlett. As a Jamaican Politician Ed Bartlett is prob­a­bly one of the nicer per­sons you will find of any of the creeps who tra­verse Gordon House.
I have met and inter­act­ed with Minister Bartlett twice in his capac­i­ty as mem­ber of par­lia­ment of the Nannyville-Back-Bush area of St, Andrew and they were rather pos­i­tive encounters.
On that basis I will try to be char­i­ta­ble to min­is­ter Bartlett , even as I dis­agree with his approach.

TWO SERIOUS INFRACTIONS SUGGESTED WHICH WILL ONLY EXACERBATE THE KILLINGS

♦ Minister Bartlett in his under­stand­able con­cern for the sec­tor over which he has port­fo­lio has unwit­ting­ly sug­gest­ed that dol­lars are more impor­tant than people.
Now lets be real here, there are many peo­ple in this present day Jamaica who aren’t worth fight­ing for , despite that how­ev­er we have to work toward build­ing a bet­ter Jamaica regard­less of those deplorables.

Said Bartlett : While acknowl­edg­ing the role of the media in a free democ­ra­cy, graph­ic details of crime in Jamaica can destroy all the gains that have been made in the tourism sec­tor in recent years.”

In oth­er words lets pre­tend that this isn’t hap­pen­ing. We will just sim­ply sweep the garbage under the rug and pre­tend the house is clean, no one will, know.
Laughable, crime is a metas­ta­siz­ing phe­nom­e­non which feeds on acqui­es­cence and fear.
Those two defin­ing char­ac­ter­is­tics have been part of Jamaica’s atti­tude toward crime for decades.
The year­ly esca­la­tion in the num­ber of homi­cides is tes­ta­ment to the fact that-that pol­i­cy does not fix the prob­lem it enables it.

♦ In a Democracy you don’t get to sup­press news you don’t like .
Instead of lob­by­ing stake­hold­ers with­ing the tourism sec­tor to pony up mon­ey to help train, equip, and pay the police Minister Bartlett wants what lit­tle effec­tive­ness the Media has left to be fur­ther dimin­ished through censorship .
This is what makes Ed Bartlett’s state­ment so significant.

The Minister must know that nei­ther he nor the admin­is­tra­tion of which he is a part have a right to demand where and how the media operates.
On the oth­er hand Minister Bartlett is woe­ful­ly behind the times if he believes that the news out of Jamaica is com­ing large­ly from the few lit­tle news papers there .
Clearly the min­is­ter does not under­stand the pow­er of Blogs and social media plat­forms in shap­ing and dis­sem­i­nat­ing the news and infor­ma­tion in real time organically.

As exas­per­at­ing as the issue of crime and ter­ror­ism is to the del­i­cate tourism indus­try, the answer is cer­tain­ly not to try to sup­press the news but to brain­storm with a view toward resolv­ing this exis­ten­tial issue.
For decades suc­ces­sive gov­ern­ments of both polit­i­cal par­ties have sup­port­ed crim­i­nal con­duct at the expense of the rule of law and law enforcement.
The present Prime Minister, as did the pre­vi­ous labor par­ty Prime Minister Bruce Golding, clear­ly mis­un­der­stood that sup­port­ing those who are opposed to the police would lead to calami­tous con­se­quences for the Island.

As I have said con­sis­tent­ly I do not talk about the People’s National Party when­ev­er the issue of crime and ter­ror is being debated.That par­ty has done immea­sur­able harm to our coun­try which should dis­qual­i­fy that par­ty from rep­re­sen­ta­tion­al pol­i­tics in my opinion.
The labor par­ty should know better.….

With the ter­ri­fy­ing mur­der sta­tis­tics and the turn­ing of pop­u­lar opin­ion on INDECOM Andrew Holness is singing a dif­fer­ent tune, and has recent­ly called for a revis­ing of the INDECOM Act.
This writer has writ­ten dozens if not hun­dreds of arti­cles in this medi­um as well as in oth­er medi­ums in which I have laid out that the JCF must have over­sight but INDECOM is not that oversight.

INDECOM from the out­set through it’s com­mis­sion­er Terrence Williams and Assistant Commissioner Hamish Campbell, set a con­fronta­tion­al anti-police agenda.
That agen­da was evi­denced through INDECOM’S prin­ci­pals shar­ing plat­forms with anti police agi­ta­tors and lob­by­ists like JFJ, the IACHR, FAST to name a few.
Contrary to it’s man­date to re-active­ly inves­ti­gate alle­ga­tions of abuse by the Military,Police and Correction’s Departments, as well as cas­es in which these enti­ties use force as part of their dai­ly rou­tine , INDECOM’s prin­ci­pals turned the agency into a an anti-police , anti-mil­i­tary lobby.

On that basis alone ‚not only should Williams,Campbell and oth­ers from INDECOM who attend­ed the con­fer­ences with those anti-police lob­by groups be fired at the time , the Act should have been revis­it­ed at that time.
The Police and Military protest­ed at the time, yet Bruce Golding and his admin­is­tra­tion refused to cor­rect this egre­gious trav­es­ty result­ing in a mass exo­dus of good cops who saw the writ­ing on the wall.
The Government had estab­lished an agency to col­lab­o­rate with forces against them .

Others took up the offer of ear­ly retire­ment , leav­ing behind a cadre of police impos­tors many of whom were only there for the lit­tle pay-check giv­en the Island’s dis­mal job pro­duc­ing record.
Degrees yes, moti­vat­ed to go out and fight crime , No!
Scenes of crime inves­ti­ga­tions which begin with full pro­to­cols of the process are only a cha­rade which hard­ly result in mur­der­ers being brought to justice .

There is hard­ly any detec­tive work being done out­side the cha­rade of the crime scene tapes and the guys in the long coats.…
Sure we need the gath­er­ing of the sci­en­tif­ic evi­dence but noth­ing replaces the need for good old fash­ioned police work through intel­li­gence gathering.
Police work in Jamaica has being reduced to peo­ple with a few years ser­vice smart­ly dressed in the uni­form of senior­i­ty , sit­ting behind desks mak­ing inane statements.
But whats the use of remov­ing the killers from the streets if the ide­o­log­i­cal­ly lib­er­al judges out of the Norman Manley Law just turns them loose?

There is a nev­er end­ing parade of opin­ions and work­ing papers on how to deal effec­tive­ly with crime in our country.
The vast major­i­ty of what I have seen and read seem to be about the writ­ers sense of them­selves rather than a com­pre­hen­sive assess­ment of what exist and a rad­i­cal approach on how to fix it.

Let me be clear, in order to build a sky-scraper with shiny glass win­dows and cool air-con­di­tioned offices ‚the work of cre­at­ing a design must be done.
Then comes the hard work of dig­ging deep into the earth to estab­lish a foun­da­tion and in many cas­es sev­er­al floors below ground.
After the exca­va­tion is done then comes the hard work of lay­ing con­crete and steel , inch by inch .It is hard dirty work ‚but work which must be done if ever the work­men want to have that tow­er deliv­ered to the owners.

So too is the issue of tak­ing back our streets from the mur­der­ers and gang­sters who con­trol them, hard dirty work .
Not every­one want to face those real­i­ties. It is nec­es­sary work which must be done. This requires police offi­cers , not academics.
Hands must get dirty . hun­dreds of the young men walk­ing around Jamaica rub­bing shoul­ders with law abid­ing Jamaicans have the blood of sev­er­al peo­ple on their hands.
We must nev­er sur­ren­der to the idea that the sheer vol­ume of mur­ders is too great to bring the killers to justice,or bring jus­tice to them , their choice.

There is no arriv­ing at a pros­per­ous and pleas­ant Jamaica using pleas­antries and platitudes.
The hon­est fact is that the dirty work of dri­ving fear into crim­i­nals and putting mur­der­ers in jail and keep­ing them there, must begin if this issue is ever to be addressed successfully.

We can have truth and rec­on­cil­i­a­tion after we have con­trol , not before.
I am not dis­suad­ed by those who crit­i­cize my argu­ments they are exact­ly the argu­ments I expect­ed to hear from mur­der­ers and sup­port­ers of murderers.
We are nev­er ever going to deal effec­tive­ly with crime and ter­ror by sweep­ing mur­der sta­tis­tics under the carpet.

Yesterday I talked about the role women play in Jamaica’s crime cul­ture. It was­n’t my first arti­cle on this phenomenon.
Over the years I have sought to add some con­text to the dynam­ic, of the every evolv­ing crime can­cer which has tak­en over our country.

Most Jamaicans will recall when crime dis­cus­sions were cen­tered around Kingston , parts of St. Andrew and parts of St. Catherine and to a less­er extent St Thomas.
Today, once sleepy parish­es like Portland and Hanover are ground zero of gang activ­i­ty ‚result­ing in num­ber of deaths once unimaginable.

HOW DO WE APPROACH THIS ?

So we are where we are , we can­not nos­tal­gi­cal­ly wish away our present reality.
What do we do in resolv­ing this issue ?
We begin by divorc­ing our­selves from the mis­guid­ed think­ing that if we give every­one a job they will put away the guns and become good law abid­ing citizens.

To begin with the young men and women who have these high pow­ered weapons have already tast­ed the pow­er these weapons of death gives them over others.
There is no going back from that adren­a­line rush. Many have the blood of sev­er­al mur­dered peo­ple on their hands, that to them is the ulti­mate pow­er rush.
There is no sce­nario in which we can paci­fy crime in today’s world with­out a show of strength and force.
That the coun­try is focused on so called human rights abuse poten­tial­ly met­ed out to blood thirsty killers over the rights of crime vic­tims is ludicrous.

Elites Within JLP/​PNP Created Culture Which Protects Them Places Police In Untenable Position…

Prime Minister Andrew Holness came to pow­er talk­ing about INDECOM is here to stay .
He nev­er missed an oppor­tu­ni­ty to tell every­one that hard nosed polic­ing does not work , of course he nev­er pro­duces an iota of evi­dence to back up his theory.
During the 70’s mur­ders got out of hand under the PNP Admistration of Michael Manley , cul­mi­nat­ing in the death of over 800 Jamaicans by the 1980 gen­er­al elections.

By the time Edward Seaga took over and empow­ered the secu­ri­ty forces to act mur­ders trend­ed down­ward , even with the lack of resources we encountered.
Crime is not an abstract con­cept which is treat­ed with a one size fit all Utopian treatment.
By the tie I left the police force in 91 after a mere 10 years , mur­ders were hov­er­ing between 400 ‑500 annually.
By the time Percival James Patterson was fin­ished destroy­ing the police force in 2005 homi­cides were up to 1600.
That’s an over 200% increase in the space of less than a decade and a half.

The Jamaican Prime Minister a stu­dent of the lib­er­al University of the West Indies comes to lead­er­ship with the tired old Utopian con­cepts he gath­ered there.
Those teach­ings pre­vail upon gullible recip­i­ents the non­sen­si­cal idea that being tol­er­ant and kind to ruth­less killers will turn them around.
The evi­dence how­ev­er points in the oppo­site direc­tion , killers become more embold­ened when they know they will not be held accountable.
So the grand social engi­neer­ing scheme cooked up by the Norman Manley law school, the Island’s tri­al lawyers and Jamaica’s elites includ­ing those in Jamaican’s for Justice has failed dismally.
Now as the dead bod­ies pile up Andrew Holness is forced to rec­og­nize that the answer to the nation’s crime prob­lem lies not in neu­ter­ing the police but a 180 degree empow­er­ment to go after the mur­der­ous mind­less scums who take inno­cent life .

Montague Even Though Somewhat Misinformed , Head And Shoulders Above Holness On Crime…

I am vin­di­cat­ed in the work I have per­son­al­ly put into try­ing to bring aware­ness to the fact that the INDECOM Act has had a chill­ing neg­a­tive effect on crime fight­ing.”
No INDECOM is not the only dri­ver of crime on the Island but it is a very big part of it. So too is the incom­pe­tence of the lead­er­ship of the police depart­ment ‚the inept and incom­pe­tent courts sys­tem to name a few.
I have encoun­tered and absorbed count­less ridicule and deri­sion for dar­ing to speak out against a law cooked up by elit­ists with­in the Jamaican soci­ety ‚which did not have a sin­gle word of input from law enforcement.
I will as along as I am able, con­tin­ue to do the work of try­ing to bring atten­tion to how INDECOM and a nar­cis­sis­tic pow­er hun­gry lit­tle bureau­crat is cost­ing hun­dreds of lives each year.

My com­mit­ment to this cause is in no way an indi­ca­tion that I do not want over­sight of the Police.
If any police depart­ment needs over­sight it is the JCF, nev­er­the­less that over­sight can­not be about show-boat­ing and col­lab­o­rat­ing with out­side lob­by groups to mil­i­tate against the police.
The moment Terrence Williams joined Carolyn Gomes to open­ly con­demn and crit­i­cize the police was the moment INDECOM should have under­gone a review.
That review should have begun with the fir­ing of Terrence Williams.

That law enforce­ment input did not even have to come from Jamaican cops, since the Government has no regard for their point of view.
It could have come from law enforce­ment in the United States, Britain or Canada .
The Government of the day decid­ed it did not want to hear from Police , so it came up with a piece of leg­is­la­tion which actu­al­ly was not a law which does much toward root­ing out dirty cops , it empow­ered criminals .

https://​mike​beck​les​.com/​i​n​d​e​c​o​m​-​c​o​n​f​e​r​e​n​c​e​-​o​n​-​p​o​l​i​c​e​-​u​s​e​-​o​f​-​f​o​r​c​e​-​h​a​d​-​n​o​-​p​o​l​i​c​e​-​p​e​r​s​p​e​c​t​i​v​e​-​a​-​f​a​r​c​i​c​a​l​-​s​h​e​l​l​-​g​a​me/

Now Andrew Holness just a few days after ham­ming it up at an INDECOM con­fer­ence has turned around and stat­ed that the INDECOM law needs review.

“Laws pro­tect the inno­cent, laws must pro­tect human rights, laws must nev­er be in such a way that they can be used as a tool to pro­tect criminals.”
“We know that there are some very hard­ened crim­i­nals in our soci­ety, and they act in ways that con­found us. The lev­el of sav­agery that we see, some­times we won­der where is the human­i­ty. This state can­not sit by and allow this to con­tin­ue. It erodes con­fi­dence. It cre­ates a neg­a­tive outlook,”
“We have to find a way to ensure that our police are moti­vat­ed, that they are will­ing to go out there with­out wor­ry that after they try to do the right thing, they end up on the wrong side of the law.”

These state­ments came out of the mouth of Andrew Holness , but for all intents and pur­pos­es it may have been the words of a smarter Holness.
Juilet Holness.
Mrs Holness has stat­ed cat­e­gor­i­cal­ly that she heard from cops on the ground , the effects INDECOM is hav­ing on law enforcement.
Her hus­band on the hand has cho­sen to par­rot the elit­ist point of view .

What has changed?
A lot of dead bodies.

Even if Jamaica was to con­tin­ue mas­sag­ing , cajol­ing and bow­ing to crim­i­nals , the killers would not stop killing we have evi­dence of that .
That is the present strat­e­gy and it is not working .
In the end the very strat­e­gy of heavy hand­ed­ness Andrew Holness seem to be repulsed by, will have to be employed to deal with the problem.
As it was in 2010 so shall it be henceforth.

It makes no sense to argue that heavy hand­ed polic­ing of dan­ger­ous crim­i­nals has not worked when get­ting rid of name-brand cops and eas­ing up on crim­i­nals has demon­stra­bly showed a sharp and con­tin­u­ous increase in vio­lent crimes.
Crime is not sta­t­ic phe­nom­e­non, , there will always be crime so it’s sil­ly to argue that cer­tain poli­cies has­n’t worked when the very pol­i­cy of dis­en­gage­ment which the lib­er­al elit­ists espouse have had dis­as­trous con­se­quences for the most exposed Jamaicans.

We must come to the real­iza­tion that the con­cept of hard nosed polic­ing is not in con­flict with law abid­ing citizens.
Fundamentally also is the dis­in­for­ma­tion being fed the pub­lic that hard nosed polic­ing means abuse of cit­i­zens rights.
I was a very hard nosed cop who had zero tol­er­ance for crime , yet I was cer­tain­ly not bru­tal, dis­re­spect­ful or abu­sive of any­one’s rights.
In fact my hard nosed polic­ing earned me plau­dits and respect across the board result­ing in good intel­li­gence which result­ed in the removal of more dan­ger­ous crim­i­nals from the streets.

The lev­el of effec­tive­ness required to get the job done will not be done with the present crop of peo­ple in the force who are using the force as a place to relax.
Earning a degree then join­ing the force just to get a job where they sit behind desks and give orders will do noth­ing to rec­ti­fy the mur­der spree in progress.
And it cer­tain­ly will not do a damn thing to neu­tral­ize the demon­ic and depraved killers who roam the town and vil­lages of Jamaica with­out fear of ever fac­ing justice.

Over the years, one of the things associates and I have talked about, at least in this forum, is the role women play in the proliferation of crime in Jamaica.

An army going to war must first work out logis­ti­cal­ly how its troops will be sup­plied and resup­plied with ammu­ni­tion, food, med­i­cine, hos­pi­tal for the wound­ed, to name a few requirements.
Without good logis­ti­cal sup­port, that army has almost zero chance of success.

Jamaican women have long made them­selves that logis­ti­cal sup­ply line for the Island’s crim­i­nal men.
By doing so, they have made them­selves will­ing acces­sories before and after the fact and, in far too many cas­es, pri­ma­ry accomplices.
It is no won­der that the crim­i­nal men have now turned their ven­om on the women who enabled them. But, unfor­tu­nate­ly, these heinous killers have lost all con­nec­tion with real­i­ty; as a result, not even chil­dren are being spared their blood-lust.

The Critical Role Women Play In Jamaica’s Culture Of Crime And It’s Boomerang Results….

As a young beat cop, women would tell me to my face how hand­some I was, but they would­n’t date me because police did not make any mon­ey. Missa Beckles yu cute, but my man haf­fi teef and bring nuff mon­ey cum gi mi.
These inner-city women would be adorned with gold trin­kets from head to toe, and they weren’t shy about telling us that their men were thieves and had stolen the jew­el­ry they were wearing.
Jamaican women, regard­less of their title, moth­ers, girl­friends, aunts, sis­ters, or what­ev­er, are true sup­port­ers of the crim­i­nal con­duct of their male associates.

They shield the men from Police. They go out and demon­strate on their behalf. They lie about events when­ev­er they are killed in a con­fronta­tion with the police. They give false affi­davits and account­ing of crit­i­cal events to have effec­tive police offi­cers removed from cer­tain areas, and the brain-dead police hier­ar­chy nev­er fails to fall for it. Area crime fig­ures were nev­er in doubt about the effec­tive­ness of women in build­ing and entrench­ing their crim­i­nal strong­holds. On the con­trary, they were always first on the demon­stra­tion lines claim­ing police mur­da di inno­cent yute who nu du nutten.

They can be found in their num­bers demon­strat­ing and demand­ing the release of their dons…
So it is not out of the ordi­nary that the very mon­sters they cre­at­ed would, in turn ‑turn on their creators.
As a young offi­cer at the CIB, I fig­ured if I knew where cer­tain known crim­i­nal’s moth­ers and girl­friends lived, I had a pret­ty good idea how to catch them when I need­ed to.
I was­n’t wrong. If you believe in the pow­er of kar­ma, then you do under­stand that you reap that which you sow.
For decades Jamaican women have offered them­selves up as bul­warks of sup­port for their mur­der­ous sons, boyfriends, and fam­i­ly mem­bers. Back in the day, women were out of bounds; even if the killers kicked in doors and killed the men, they would leave the women and children.
All of that is his­to­ry now; not even babies are spared. On the con­trary, in most cas­es, the killers active­ly seek out women and chil­dren on whom to exact their mur­der­ous vengeance. Women and chil­dren are being slaugh­tered in alarm­ing num­bers, almost on par with their male coun­ter­parts. Tragically, the chick­ens have come home to roost. The blood-thirsty killers hyped up on drugs and empow­ered by the auto­mat­ic weapons they pos­sess make no dis­tinc­tion about who they kill. As the mur­der ram­page con­tin­ues with numb­ing yet alarm­ing fre­quen­cy, women con­tin­ue to shield killers in their homes, and yes, they even take them into their bodies.

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

Andrew Holness final­ly admits that INDECOM is hav­ing neg­a­tive effect on crime in our Country.
More to come .….

Prime Minister Andrew Holness has indi­cat­ed a need to review the laws under which the Independent Commission of Investigations (INDECOM) operates.

Speaking at yes­ter­day’s open­ing cer­e­mo­ny for the mul­ti­lat­er­al sum­mit on ‘Combating Crime in an Interconnected World’, at the Jamaica Pegasus in New Kingston, the prime min­is­ter said that his Government had to find a way to strike a bal­ance to ensure that the police are moti­vat­ed, and that crim­i­nals don’t feel that they can use exist­ing laws as a way to pro­tect themselves.

“Laws pro­tect the inno­cent, laws must pro­tect human rights, laws must nev­er be in such a way that they can be used as a tool to pro­tect crim­i­nals,” he said.

The sum­mit was attend­ed by well-known crime fight­ers from across the region, includ­ing for­mer New York police com­mis­sion­er Raymond Kelly, and secu­ri­ty and inter­na­tion­al coöper­a­tion advi­sor from Colombia, General Rosso Jose Serrano.

“We know that there are some very hard­ened crim­i­nals in our soci­ety, and they act in ways that con­found us. The lev­el of sav­agery that we see, some­times we won­der where is the human­i­ty. This state can­not sit by and allow this to con­tin­ue. It erodes con­fi­dence. It cre­ates a neg­a­tive out­look,” Holness said.

“The State has to act, while we recog­nise the errors of the past. The State has to be focused, and tar­get­ed and strate­gic and dri­ven by intel­li­gence on the per­pe­tra­tors,” he added.

He said the Government did not want to pull back on INDECOM, but clear­ly the com­mis­sion and the leg­is­la­tion under which it oper­ates needs to be reviewed, like any oth­er new leg­is­la­tion, to ensure that it is not an obsta­cle to law enforcement.

“So, strik­ing that bal­ance is anoth­er polit­i­cal chal­lenge that we have to address,” Holness said.

“We have to find a way to ensure that our police are moti­vat­ed, that they are will­ing to go out there with­out wor­ry that after they try to do the right thing, they end up on the wrong side of the law,” he stat­ed. http://​www​.jamaicaob​serv​er​.com/​l​a​t​e​s​t​n​e​w​s​/​H​o​l​n​e​s​s​_​s​a​y​s​_​G​o​v​;​t​_​l​o​o​k​i​n​g​_​a​t​_​r​e​v​i​e​w​_​o​f​_​I​N​D​E​C​O​M​_​A​c​t​?​p​r​o​f​i​l​e​=​1​228

This sto­ry was updat­ed from it’s orig­i­nal posting.

On Tuesday June 13^th a Lancaster County Jury in the State of Pennsylvania returned a verdict of guilty on two counts of first degree murder against 40 year Jamaica National Leeton Thomas .

Thomas, con­vict­ed on his 40^th birth­day, faces a penal­ty hear­ing at 9 a.m. Wednesday at which the jury will sen­tence him to life in prison with­out parole or death by lethal injection.

The jury delib­er­at­ed less than three hours before find­ing Thomas guilty of first-degree, or pre­med­i­tat­ed, mur­der for the June 2015 stab­bings of Lisa Scheetz, 44, and her daugh­ter, Hailey, 16.
On his arrest Thomas report­ed­ly told Troopers to shoot him in the head.

According to Lancasteronline​.com, the jury of six men and six women heard four days of tes­ti­mo­ny as the pros­e­cu­tion sought to por­tray Thomas, a father of four who had worked as a home re-mod­el­er, as a homi­ci­dal mon­ster bent on elim­i­nat­ing wit­ness­es in his sex­u­al molesta­tion case.

We some­times look at our Parliamentary demo­c­ra­t­ic sys­tem in Jamaica and say we do have a great system.
But do we?
It’s dif­fi­cult to argue with most Jamaicans who live at home, par­tic­u­lar­ly those whom have nev­er trav­eled out­side the coun­try that we don’t have the best sys­tem in the world.

There is a sense among us Jamaicans that our patri­o­tism is tied to the fact we live on the Island, or may have left and returned for what­ev­er rea­son. Even those whom have had a one way flight back home , preach their undy­ing patri­o­tism as if where they are forcibly domi­ciled now, is a func­tion of their own doing.

The truth is that our sys­tem is pat­terned off the British Monarchistic sys­tem, and still today has the British Monarch as the tit­u­lar head of our Government, even though we derive no real mea­sur­able ben­e­fit from the reten­tion of our Colonial Rulers as head of our Government.

WHERE AM I GOING WITH THIS ?

The Jamaican Government just made the deci­sion not to cre­ate over­sight which would over­see the sev­en year old Agency INDECOM cre­at­ed under the Bruce Golding administration.
The Government of Andrew Holness miss­es no oppor­tu­ni­ty to tell Jamaicans that the INDECOM Act is an act of Parliament and as such it is going nowhere.

At the risk of sound­ing flip­pant ‚I agree with that per­spec­tive, just that I see the Agency going nowhere from a dif­fer­ent perspective.
Did the Government make the deci­sion not to have over­sight of INDECOM or did that deci­sion come from a sin­gle indi­vid­ual , Andrew Holness?
The Gold stan­dard of account­abil­i­ty peo­ple look at the world over is the American sys­tem of checks and balances .
If the inten­tion of the Government is to cre­ate sit­u­a­tions in which best prac­tices are adhered to , we must ask why INDECOM is immune from oversight?

The com­mit­tee of the Parliament which has respon­si­bil­i­ty for over­sight of INDECOM strug­gles might­i­ly just to get it’s full mem­ber­ship to attend com­mit­tee hear­ings, much less to mount mean­ing­ful over­sight of an agency which has out­side sup­port and is rapid­ly becom­ing an out of con­trol behe­moth in my opinion.

In response to the Police Federation’s com­plaints that INDECOM is oper­at­ing with­out over­sight , Terrence Williams, INDECOM’s com­mis­sion­er asserts that his agency does have over­sight in the per­son of a retired high court judge.
Strangely it appears that no one out­side of Williams and Andrew Holness is aware of this overseer.

Terrence Williams alleges that this sin­gle over­seer has been empow­ered for over two years and since then there has been not one report against INDECOM.
Could it be that the rea­son for that is that no one knows about this person?

So I placed a call to INDECOM, and spoke to pub­lic rela­tions offi­cer Ms Anderson who assured me that the police were made aware through writ­ten com­mu­niques at the time retired high court Judge Mrs Marjorie Cole-Smith was appoint­ed to head the com­mit­tee which would over­see her agency .

She was unable to pro­vide me with a con­tact num­ber for Mrs Cole-Smith , but she assert­ed that the Police also has the right to judi­cial review under the law which if they have com­plaints against INDECOM.
Of course the ini­tial com­plaint would have to be made to INDECOM before they, or any oth­er agency or indi­vid­ual would have rem­e­dy through the pre­scribed review.

I inquired of her whether there was­n’t a bit of hypocrisy in that process , since the whole premise of INDECOM was that report­ing to police in order to have a pos­i­tive out­come was problematic.
She indi­cat­ed she did not see it, as the con­cerns weren’t about to whom reports were made , but the out­come of said reports of police improprieties.

I would have liked to debunk that notion using INDECOM’s own sta­tis­tics as well as sta­tis­tics which exist­ed before INDECOM, but I though that con­ver­sa­tion would be bet­ter direct­ed at Terrence Williams.
Ms Anderson told me she has no idea why the Police Federation would not know about these avenues of com­plaint avail­able to them.

So who is telling the truth?
Only one way to find out.
I called the Police Federation and asked to speak to Sgt Wilson, or any­one who could shed some light on whether the Federation was aware of the avenues open to it’s mem­bers in the event they have com­plaints against INDECOM.
The per­son who answered the phone (a non JCF staff mem­ber) took my num­ber and assured me Wilson would get back to me as the entire staff was at a meeting.

As the dead bod­ies pile up the police need to know when they go out to do their jobs they have the full back­ing of their civil­ian bosses.
That is the way it works , except in Jamaica where the direc­tion seem to be less and less sup­port for law enforce­ment officers.
If this body to inves­ti­gate com­plaints against INDECOM does exist , how could the police not know about it?
How come INDECOM was unable to fur­nish me with a con­tact num­ber to this over­sight person?
And so we are left with more ques­tion than answers as to where the truth lies in all of this.

As a kid grow­ing up in NE St, Catherine , I was moved to tears , and prob­a­bly changed for­ev­er ‚when an elder­ly man , “Mass Grampa” was bru­tal­ly mur­dered on his farm a few miles from my home.

Mass Grampa (real name has elud­ed me now ),and his wife had spent most of their lives in England and had returned to his home­land to live out the remain­der of their years

They had a decent home just out­side Linstead. Mass Grampa had prop­er­ty on which he did farm­ing in a sparse­ly pop­u­lat­ed com­mu­ni­ty called Palm Hill.
Palm Hill adjoined my dis­trict of Bonnett.

From Monday to Friday evenings Mass Grampa toiled on his farm . He lived there in a one room struc­ture he built .
It was con­crete struc­ture that many peo­ple would die to call home.
On Friday evenings he would trav­el back to Linstead to be home with his beloved wife of many years.
Come Monday morn­ing he would be back on his farm and the cycle continued.

On his farm Mass Grampa grew acres of Gungo peas in the soft pli­ant sandy soil , he also grew coco a kind of tuber that is a Jamaican staple.
He would grow a vari­ety of oth­er crops on those open hill­sides includ­ing Tobacco and of course a lit­tle marijuana.

Mass Grampa’s one room house was perched atop a hill , on both sides of the house the land dropped away rapid­ly , iso­la­tion the struc­ture for plain view from miles around on both sides .
Because of the moun­tain­ous nature of the ter­rain, the sin­gle room struc­ture stood out for miles around like a sore thumb.
It was there in that struc­ture that Mass Grampa’s life was snuffed out in the most bar­bar­ic and grue­some way one night, all because he had some cured Marijuana in the residence .

His killers chopped him but that was­n’t enough, they ran a gar­den forth through his body, over and over again , with the final thrust they nev­er both­ered remov­ing it.
They ran­sacked the room and left.

I am unsure whether any­one was ever held account­able for his grue­some death.
Mass Grampa died because he dared to work hard.
He could have opt­ed to take it easy, he had already put in a full life’s work.
But being a man he thought he would con­tin­ue to work hard. Whether one agreed with whether he should be plant­i­ng weed is beside the point .
He should not have been killed for his own property.

Barbaric killings are not anom­alies in Jamaica.
They have been going on for decades . Several decades to be exact.
What is dif­fer­ent now than when I was a kid is the fre­quen­cy and lev­el of detach­ment with which these killings occur.
Mass Grampa may have lost his life because peo­ple were taught in the 70’s that what oth­ers have should be divid­ed up and giv­en to them who chose not to work.
As a return­ing res­i­dent Mass Grampa did not stand a chance, farm­ing a few mar­i­jua­na plants which may have yield­ed a few pounds of the weed meant he was unwit­ting­ly sign­ing his own death warrant.

ACQUIESCENCE..

I have long main­tained that the mas­sive increas­es we have wit­nessed in the Island’s vio­lent crime sta­tis­tics are a func­tion of Government and soci­etal acquiescence.
I hard­ly com­ment on indi­vid­ual cas­es in which Jamaicans are slaugh­tered, we now talk about the mul­ti­ple mul­ti vic­tim mur­der scenes.

Despite what was a demon­stra­bly vis­i­ble deter­mined and vis­cous streak in the crim­i­nal under­world , the elit­ist in the soci­ety lob­bied the Government to lay off deal­ing deci­sive­ly with crime , because they said , crime is a socio-eco­nom­ic prob­lem which will go away if peo­ple have jobs.

The only prob­lem with that lib­er­al the­o­ry is that in Jamaica, as it is in oth­er coun­tries where vio­lent mur­ders occur , they are not mur­ders com­mit­ted by a man steal­ing a bunch of Banana because he has to feed his hun­gry children.
The most egre­gious and dar­ing killings are orches­trat­ed by pow­er­ful peo­ple with mon­ey , and connections.
So while in Jamaica they wait for a mirac­u­lous respite as a result of a mirage of an eco­nom­ic pros­per­i­ty , mass mur­ders con­tin­ue unchecked.

Murderers push the enve­lope because they know that Government does not have the balls to do any­thing about them.
They know that politi­cians are far more focused on stay­ing on the gravy train than doing any­thing sub­stan­tive for country.
So the Militia upris­ing of 2010 against the state should have been a bell wether ‚but it wasn’t.

Many oth­er sit­u­a­tions which should have caused mas­sive alarm and a deci­sive mil­i­taris­tic response drew nary a whimper.
In June of 2012 , less than two years lat­er over 30 heav­i­ly armed men invad­ed the com­mu­ni­ty of August Town St Andrew and car­ried out a massacre.
The Government of the day did nothing !

https://​mike​beck​les​.com/​2​9​39/

Since then a new admin­is­tra­tion has tak­en office , but the crim­i­nal­ly com­plic­it dere­lic­tion of duty has remained and may be seen as com­pound­ed on.
A sit­u­a­tion in which an entire com­mu­ni­ty take up arms against the state would have been dealt a mil­i­tary solu­tion in any oth­er country.
Not in Jamaica !!!
The Nation’s secu­ri­ty forces entered Tivoli gar­dens and annexed it , they got a com­mis­sion of Inquiry for their troubles.
Any sit­u­a­tion in which 30 men armed with auto­mat­ic weapons invade a com­mu­ni­ty and killed peo­ple would have been dealt a quick mil­i­taris­tic response, one which would have sent a clear and unequiv­o­cal mes­sage that sim­i­lar inci­dents will be put down.

Not in Jamaica, those instances are seen as mere crim­i­nal acts.
Only prob­lem is, they aren’t !
They are larg­er omi­nous red flags of a more sin­is­ter road ahead.

So when we hear talk from politi­cians , past and present ‚about crime thriv­ing because crim­i­nals feel that there are no consequences .
They are damn right, but what did they do while they were in office.?
Did they use their office as a plat­form to speak out for the rule of law , or did they toe the polit­i­cal line?

The killings in Jamaica for the most part are decid­ed­ly not just crime.
They long ceased being just that.
This is ter­ror­ism , the out­come they desire may not be polit­i­cal as they were in the 70’s and 80’s but they are designed to sow fear.
They are designed to intimidate.

Instead of send­ing the mil­i­tary out to kill these killers the Government has decid­ed to go the oth­er direction.
That direc­tion is to fur­ther empow­er agen­cies and just about any­one who can stand between ter­ror­ists and those who would ren­der jus­tice to them.
Unfortunately for the fam­i­lies of the dead they can expect no respite from the mass killings.
There is no inten­tion to do a damn thing about them.
The Government’s focus is to con­tin­ue to empow­er INDECOM to go after the secu­ri­ty forces .
It is a con­tin­u­a­tion of Bruce Golding’s abbre­vi­at­ed tenure .
May God help the fam­i­lies of those slaugh­tered dai­ly, because the Government has no inter­est in lift­ing a finger.

On April 19^th of this year a young man known to me walked into my store and pur­chased a new Chrome book com­put­er and a mini key­board separately.
The total cost of the trans­ac­tion $320.00 plus tax , he hand­ed me a cred­it card.
As a mat­ter of course we do not ask for Identification,.

Were we to ask for ID for one we would have to do so for all to avoid accu­sa­tions of discrimination.
Additionally it would make the sim­ple act of ring­ing up a sale more laborious.

So we did not ask him for ID.
Initially we had some dif­fi­cul­ty get­ting the machine card read­er to accept the card . He told me he it was a com­pa­ny card and inputting the num­bers as an over ride would be okay.
That worked , he left with his com­put­er and key­board. Before leav­ing, the gen­tle­man left his busi­ness card with me.

On May 10^th my busi­ness check­ing reflect­ed a charge-back for the total­i­ty of the trans­ac­tion on April 19^th.
I went back to the cred­it card receipt and matched the name on the receipt against the name on his busi­ness card .
They were two dif­fer­ent names.
I real­ized that my busi­ness was scammed out of $330.00

I made copies of his busi­ness card, the cred­it card slip he signed , the charge-back noti­fi­ca­tion from the bank and start­ed a search for the gen­tle­man on the web.
I found him in my very first search on LinkedIn, por­trait and all.
I print­ed off his profile.
A slight­ly deep­er search revealed that 3 years ago he was work­ing in a near­by town as a bank teller .
He was arrest­ed by state police for fal­si­fy­ing doc­u­ments and fleec­ing the bank out of $500.00.

I print­ed off the report and placed it into the file I cre­at­ed and took it to the City of Poughkeepsie Police Department on Wednesday May 31^st.
A uni­formed cop took the report and gave me a blot­ter num­ber which I doc­u­ment­ed as well as his name .
He told me a detec­tive would be assigned the next day and he would get in touch with me the very next day.
I thanked him and left the precinct.

So we are no longer in Jamaica where the Police have no vehi­cles to attend to reports.
In fact on any giv­en day you dri­ve past the city of Poughkeepsie Police depart­ment there are any num­ber of ser­vice vehi­cles just parked there.
If you have any rea­son to walk into the detec­tive bureau there are offi­cers sit­ting around chat­ting away .

Nevertheless when I did not receive a call from the police on June 1^st , ‑2^nd-3^rd or 4^th I was a lit­tle pissed but I sur­mised okay they may have big­ger fish to fry than chas­ing down a fraud case for $330 .00.
However by the time it got around to June 8^th , I thought” hell no , this does not hap­pen in white communities”.

I pulled out the card of a dear friend of mine who is a Captain in the depart­ment intend­ing to call him to find out why no one got back in touch with me.
Then I decid­ed “no I am not doing that , I should­n’t have to call some­one in the depart­ment that I know to get the police to do what they are sworn to do”>

So I decid­ed to call the precinct instead . The woman who answered the phone told me she saw the report after I pro­vid­ed her with the Blot # .
I inquired of her why no one had got­ten back in touch with me?
She told me the police does not always get back in touch with complainants.

I asked her how could that be when they specif­i­cal­ly told me that a detec­tive would get in touch with me the very next day , upon which I could turn over the file to him?
She offered to get me the voice­mail of the uni­formed offi­cer’s to whom I had made the ini­tial report .
I told her what was hap­pen­ing was they were shuf­fling me around and I was not going to stand for it .
I hung up the phone.

By this time I was pret­ty angry , the police do not act this way in white communities.
The tax­es I Pay each year is noth­ing to scoff at, not to men­tion sales tax rev­enue which my busi­ness gen­er­ate for the city , coun­ty and state, so that police offi­cers can sit around and do nothing.
I called the Mayor’s office that same evening.

Months ago I had addressed a Religious gath­er­ing , the Mayor and oth­er offi­cials were in attendance.
I was able to schmooze and speak to them afterwards.
I decid­ed that was my best course of action to get some­thing done.
Mayor Rollison was out of office but an aide took the call and assured me she would call the City’s police chief immediately.

Friday June 9^th a detec­tive called me ‚he assured me he was on his way up to speak to me .
Half an hour lat­er he arrived and took my report.
He was very cour­te­ous and pro­fes­sion­al. He apologized .
I will not dis­close the full extent of our con­ver­sa­tion suf­fic­ing to say he assured me he would do what he could to bring the case to a close.

.….….….….….….…..
Every time the ques­tion of the Jamaican police comes up there is vis­cer­al con­dem­na­tion and dis­re­spect for officers.
In most cas­es those who com­plain and crit­i­cize ignore the good things Jamaican offi­cers do but are quick to ampli­fy the negatives.
We should nev­er be accom­mo­dat­ing of lethar­gy or dere­lic­tion of duty in our pub­lic officials .
But in Jamaica’s case it is impor­tant that we nev­er for­get that as a mat­ter of course offi­cers lack the most basic tools to do their jobs.

As we issue our blan­ket con­dem­na­tion of offi­cers , it is impor­tant that we remem­ber that Jamaican cops are cops like cops every­where else, they are humans, they are imperfect.
And some­times they are doing the best they can.
Many talk about the per­fec­tion of police in devel­oped coun­tries, I beg to differ .
I live right her on Earth , not on Planet Utopia.

On how to deal effec­tive­ly with terrorism.
.….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….…..

“If our human rights laws pre­vents us from doing it , we’ll change the laws ”
Theresa May.
(BRITISH PM)

So INDECOM con­vened a fan­cy con­fer­ence at the Jamaica Conference cen­ter down­town Kingston to address use of force in law enforcement.
The con­fer­ence was under­tak­en with sup­port from the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development, the United States Embassy and the United Nations office in Jamaica.

Absent from the con­ver­sa­tion on police use of force was you guessed it , the Jamaican Police !!!
After the speech­es by Minister of National Security Robert Montague, Andrew Holness and oth­ers , laugh­ter , back slap­ping for their accom­plish­ments and the hand­ing out of gifts the proud spon­sors and the stu­pid Jamaicans went on their way.

So lets peel back a lit­tle, the lay­ers of hyp­o­crit­i­cal bull­shit about this conference.
Lets look at the Americans present, need I remind any­one about the lethal­i­ty of American police par­tic­u­lar­ly as it relates to threats to officers?
I don’t think so .

It can­not be over empha­sized that American Police kill more peo­ple under dubi­ous cir­cum­stances than Jamaican police could ever get away with .
That fact alone removes the Americans from the equa­tion. The British are just as bad , they cer­tain­ly do not tol­er­ate much in the way of crime in England , and cer­tain­ly even demon­stra­tions have to be done with per­mits under the watch­ful eyes of cops and CCTV cam­eras on every square yard of space on which those protest occur.
The lev­els of crime and law­less­ness in Jamaica would absolute­ly not be tol­er­at­ed for a sin­gle hour in either England or the United States.

So this leaves Jamaica and INDECOM.
INDECOM revealed sta­tis­tics which shows that they charged 3 police offi­cers with mur­der as a result of actions they took while on duty over the last five months.
I need remind no one of the con­fronta­tion­al aggres­sive nature of INDECOM toward prov­ing it’s legitimacy.
Yet in all of the shoot­ings there are only three accu­sa­tions, nev­er mind the sev­er­al dead cops over the last sev­er­al months .
Never mind that Jamaica is one of the most vio­lent nations with one of the high­est mur­der rate.

No one at the con­fer­ence spoke about con­sta­ble Leighton Hanson get­ting killed by a scum­bag in broad day­light or the oth­er offi­cers who died after being shot earlier.
For the fam­i­lies of these dead cops it’s “fuck you and your son”.
What is impor­tant to them is that police stop shoot­ing the mind­less demons who kill mul­ti­ple peo­ple dai­ly or as they say mek dup­py.

Despite that there have only been three offi­cers charged, in a coun­try in which the Government is part­ly crim­i­nal and pret­ty much has no real inter­est in seri­ous law enforcement.
Might I remind you also that being charged with a crime does not mean guilty of a crime , par­tic­u­lar­ly when you con­sid­er the men­tal­i­ty of Terrence Williams and INDECOM’s toward the police.

The shell game Terrence Williams is sell­ing to the dumb , blind and deaf mon­keys is that over the last sev­er­al years police shoot­ings have dropped dramatically.
Well of course , police shoot­ings have dropped , why do you think the voice of the police was not rep­re­sent­ed at the conference?
What was not men­tioned while they slapped each oth­er on the back and con­grat­u­lat­ed each oth­er, was that less and less mur­der­ers are being giv­en a quick sendoff .
Murders rapes , and oth­er vio­lent crimes con­tin­ue to rise steeply, because police have disengaged.

If how­ev­er you find the fact that less crim­i­nals are get­ting shot, and that’s accept­able to you, then by default you have accept­ed that the goal is to have less mur­der­ers get their just desserts and more inno­cents should con­tin­ue to be killed.
Unless you have got­ten to a place where you have begun to won­der if there are any inno­cents in all of this.

Terrence Williams is coy , he is absolute­ly not a fool ‚he wants to con­trol how the pub­lic views this narrative. 
He is also ful­ly con­ver­sant that pub­lic per­cep­tions of INDECOM is begin­ning to soft­en .
He knows that despite hav­ing peo­ple eat­ing out of his hands, he needs to ensure that he does not lose con­trol of the nar­ra­tive in the court of pub­lic opinion.
But he need not wor­ry too much , Jamaicans are very sup­port­ive of crim­i­nals and politicians.
Between their love for politi­cians and crime Williams need not wor­ry that they will wise up remove their heads from their col­lec­tive ass­es and rec­og­nize the con game he has going for the upper Saint Andrew crowd.
The tragedy for the police is that the peas­antry has bought into INDECOM as well.

The Police do not speak for them­selves , they are too afraid of not cur­ry­ing favor .
Williams knows that if a cost ben­e­fit analy­sis is done it would show that INDEDOM is not doing any­thing dif­fer­ent than what the CCRB was doing.

In fact the CCRB was far more effec­tive in remov­ing the crim­i­nals from the depart­ment because it was doing it with­out acrimony.

The Police for it’s part would rather stay on a sink­ing ship as long as they can get pro­mo­tion, than stand up for themselves .
In fact the police have become so brain­washed and neu­tral­ized that it’s hard to fig­ure out what the police think any­more as a col­lec­tive unit.

Not all Jamaicans are blind to this far­ci­cal shell game being per­pet­u­at­ed on the coun­try by the JLP and PNP Elites. In fact sev­er­al per­sons includ­ing a few with­in the JLP as well as Damion Crawford of the PNP have come around to rec­og­niz­ing that this is a fraud being per­pet­u­at­ed on the country.
The minute you begin a fac­tu­al con­ver­sa­tion about the far­ci­cal nature behind the INDECOM shell game the trolls and bots come out with the tired worn out argu­ments about police abuse.

As long as they can keep the con­ver­sa­tion on alleged police abus­es they are win­ning the con­ver­sa­tion about the rel­e­vance of INDECOM.
Unfortunately for the decent law abid­ing peo­ple in the coun­try who are forced to hide in their homes from 6 : 00 pm their views do not matter.
It’s about the mili­tias which roam around with their high-pow­ered weapons , unafraid of the police.

No oth­er police depart­ment in the world is more scru­ti­nized and to some degree the JCF has brought it onto itself through it’s own actions.
But ratio­nal intel­li­gent peo­ple under­stand that with­out police there is no us.
There are peo­ple who say they will be just fine with­out the police , we must con­clude we are talk­ing about them, they are the ones pulling the trig­ger. They are the ones order­ing the murders

A coun­try can­not begin to chas­tise it’s law enforce­ment agen­cies about their use of force lev­els while doing noth­ing about the brazen bru­tal­i­ty of the crim­i­nals who kill with­out fear of apprehension.
Unless of course the objec­tive is to pla­cate the crim­i­nals .
The Jamaican Government has essen­tial­ly become a lob­by for the crim­i­nal underworld.
INDECOM is the gov­ern­men­t’s lob­by­ing arm for non-action against criminals.

Years ago I wrote a short arti­cle about the impro­pri­ety of Terrence Williams attend­ing advo­ca­cy meet­ings with Carolyn Gomes of JFF , and oth­er anti-police advo­ca­cy groups.
At the time the police were up in arms demand­ing that Williams be fired from INDECOM .

The Government of Bruce Golding scoffed at the idea and as the years pro­gressed it has become clear­er and clear­er that Williams is a polit­i­cal activist and a friend of the rul­ing JLP and the Elites on the Island.
To include those with­in the People’s National Party.
He was put in the posi­tion of com­mis­sion­er of INDECOM to do exact­ly what he is doing per­se­cute the police dri­ve up crime and keep law enforce­ment in Jamaica neutered.

As mur­ders, Rapes and oth­er vio­lent crimes con­tin­ue to surge , instead of stand­ing solid­ly behind the Police and Military as Countries like Colombia and even the Philippines have done and con­tin­ue to do, the Jamaican Government (both polit­i­cal par­ties) con­tin­ue to pla­cate crim­i­nals as they active­ly sup­port gang cul­ture in the zones of polit­i­cal exclu­sions (gar­risons) from which they oper­ate (con­stituen­cies.

This places the Police in an unten­able posi­tion. They are tasked with reduc­ing crime while the pow­er base of the politi­cians are in these very zones of polit­i­cal exclu­sions and are sup­port­ed by the Members of Parliaments who dou­ble as legislators.

In some cas­es the mem­bers of Parliament are active crim­i­nals , engag­ing alleged­ly in mur­der for hire, fraud, issu­ing guns to unem­ployed youths and oth­er crimes.
They are basi­cal­ly untouched as the sys­tem they cre­at­ed places them out­side the ambit of law enforcement.

The police are unable to reduce crime as the Government’s loy­al­ty is not to the con­sti­tu­tion , it is not fideli­ty to the rule of law which would cause them to have loy­al­ty and give sup­port to law enforcement.
Their loy­al­ty lies with and with­in the con­stituen­cies which keeps them in office.
This is true of both polit­i­cal par­ties which in many cas­es are lit­tle more than glo­ri­fied crim­i­nal gangs.

Here is a let­ter to a local news­pa­per on the issue of the police watch dog agency the Government of Bruce Golding cre­at­ed in 2010.….

THE EDITOR, Sir:

I took note of the fact that the Independent Commission of Investigations (INDECOM), at its first quar­ter­ly press con­fer­ence on May 26, 2017, expressed alarm at the increase in police fatal shoot­ings for the first quar­ter of 2017 com­pared to the cor­re­spond­ing peri­od last year. The fig­ures pre­sent­ed by INDECOM showed a 45 per cent increase, which the Deputy Commissioner of INDECOM described as quite “dis­turb­ing”.

Mr Editor, let us recall that INDECOM was estab­lished out of a sit­u­a­tion where the pub­lic out­cry at the time was that there exists an inher­ent risk of appre­hend­ed bias in a sys­tem where ‘police inves­ti­gate their own’. This call accord­ed with the old adage: ‘Justice should not only be done, but should be seen to be done.’

Mr Editor, the pos­ture tak­en by INDECOM over time has caused me to ques­tion whether it has prop­er­ly inter­pret­ed its role as con­tained in the INDECOM Act, 2010. Does INDECOM have an advo­ca­cy or inves­tiga­tive role, or both? This seems to be a rea­son­able ques­tion based on the mode of oper­a­tion observed.

Mr Editor, it is my opin­ion that the 2010 act estab­lished INDECOM as an inde­pen­dent inves­tiga­tive body that incor­po­rates the func­tions of both police com­plaint and crit­i­cal inci­dent inves­ti­ga­tions. It, there­fore, means that its mis­sion should be to con­duct trans­par­ent, time­ly and neu­tral or dis­in­ter­est­ed inves­ti­ga­tion of alle­ga­tions of police mis­con­duct. One of the hall­marks of good inves­ti­ga­tion is that they are devoid of emo­tions and based pure­ly upon rea­son and facts.

PRINCIPLE OF NEUTRALITY

Mr Editor, I believe the prin­ci­ple of neu­tral­i­ty or dis­in­ter­est­ed­ness is breached when INDECOM goes to var­i­ous forums, some­times accom­pa­ny­ing advo­ca­cy groups, to lament about increas­es in police fatal shoot­ings. It is a well-known fact that sta­tis­tics, with­out the prop­er con­text, are mean­ing­less. What if the increase in police fatal shoot­ings is because brazen indi­vid­u­als are more inclined to take on the police in con­fronta­tions? What if the increase is a reflec­tion of changes in the polic­ing environment?

Mr Editor, I humbly sub­mit that INDECOM’s focus should be about dis­pas­sion­ate inquiries to ascer­tain whether these police shoot­ings are deemed jus­ti­fi­able or not and pro­nounce its find­ings accord­ing­ly, on a case-by-case basis. At these forums, INDECOM should be inform­ing the pub­lic on the num­ber of fatal shoot­ing inves­ti­ga­tions that have result­ed in charges being prof­fered against police officers.

I urge INDECOM to clar­i­fy its role and leave emo­tion­al utter­ances to lob­by­ists, as jus­tice should not only be done, but should be man­i­fest­ly and undoubt­ed­ly seen to be done. I dare say INDECOM’s job is to investigate.

MOYA WELLINGTON

Here’s what I had to say at the time Terrence Williams decid­ed to share a stage with anti-police groups..

I was nev­er real­ly a fan of Robert Montague, Jamaica’s Minister of National Security but there are areas in which he is begin­ing to grow on me.
At least Montague is able to under­stand that he does­n’t know what he does­n’t know .
I can respect that .
It is a marked improve­ment over his boss Andrew Holness the Island’s Prime Minister, who is unable to rec­og­nize that he does­n’t know what he does­n’t know , and should seek guid­ance from those who know instead of tak­ing advice from those who would try to build careers on the corpses of dead police offi­cers as Terrence Williams the com­mis­sion­er of INDECOM is doing.

At the time Holness took over the reins of the JLP I thought he would be a breath of fresh air. I even wrote some glow­ing arti­cles about him and the poten­tial I believe he would have even up to his return to Jamaica House last year.
What I missed in the process of my analy­sis is that Andrew Holness is a prod­uct of his envi­ron­ment rad­i­cal­ly steeped in Elitism and would be no dif­fer­ent than the oth­er degen­er­ate politi­cians on the Island.

In address­ing a con­fer­ence on Law enforce­ment spon­sored by, (you get it) INDECOM, the United Nations in Jamaica, with the sup­port from the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development, and the Embassy of the United States of America, was pri­mar­i­ly aimed at draft­ing a Model Use of Force Policy for Caribbean Security Forces.

It is impor­tant that those who have eyes to read and brains to under­stand what they read under­stand the con­cept of the idea behind the conference.
Quote, was pri­mar­i­ly aimed at draft­ing a Model Use of Force Policy for Caribbean Security Forces.
The United States which has thou­sands of law enforce­ment agen­cies have their use of force poli­cies which is cen­tered sole­ly on offi­cer safety .
Why are the Americans and the British involved in craft­ing use of force pol­i­cy for Caribbean secu­ri­ty forces when their secu­ri­ty forces are autho­rized to use what­ev­er force they need appro­pri­ate to neu­tral­ize per­ceived threats to include killing a 12 year old child with a toy gun, and killing a man sit­ting in his car with his fam­i­ly strapped in by his seat belt.

The per­cep­tion is that black coun­tries are inca­pable of self gov­er­nance, the psy­chol­o­gy is real sim­ple help them to self destruct.
The well estab­lished idea of white suprema­cy and white excep­tion­al­ism is fur­ther enhanced when we black run coun­tries are fooled into believ­ing that their soci­eties will come togeth­er if peo­ple are able to get jobs.
The notion adopt­ed in Jamaica and oth­er places that if you fix economies crime goes away is like chas­ing rainbows.

On the one hand there can nev­er be eco­nom­ic devel­op­ment in a crime infest­ed society.
On the oth­er, striv­ing for eco­nom­ic pros­per­i­ty under the notion that that will alle­vi­ate crime when their econ­o­my is con­trolled by out­side forces is sim­ply ridiculous.

So though not total­ly not where he ought to be as it relates to what needs to be done about Jamaica;s law­less­ness , Robert Montague is heads and shoul­ders over Holness.

Addressing the same con­fer­ence Montague struck a much dif­fer­ent tone.
“Society grants the police this pow­er because police per­son­nel may have to make deci­sions in the frac­tion of a minute, often in extreme circumstances.”

“Let us not fool our­selves, law enforce­ment has to use the amount of force that is nec­es­sary to mit­i­gate against crit­i­cal inci­dents.”

“Some of us in Jamaica have to lock our­selves behind bur­glar bars every after­noon, effec­tive­ly cre­at­ing our own prison, and some of us would love to have bur­glar bars, but because some of some hous­es are built with infe­ri­or mate­r­i­al we can’t,” he said.

“Not every­one has a police body­guard or can afford to live in a gat­ed com­mu­ni­ty, some­times our envi­ron­ment are not of our choos­ing, but we should under­stand the envi­ron­ment [in which] the police oper­ates” Minister Montague stated.

“Debunk the lies that INDECOM is pre­vent­ing the police from doing their work and that the police is trig­ger happy.”

Clearly Minister Montague needs to evolve a bit more on the lat­ter state­ment. There are some truths in both points.

You know what both­ers me , it’s peo­ple who are able to piece a cou­ple of words togeth­er then con­vince them­selves that they know what they are talk­ing about , when clear­ly they don’t.So they piece togeth­er non­sen­si­cal clich­es which has no edi­fy­ing val­ue to intel­li­gent debate …

Prime Minister Andrew Holness runs around the coun­try talk­ing about police over­sight amidst five mur­ders dai­ly and as the coun­try slips clos­er and clos­er into anarchy.

Lets face it for the most part Jamaica is becom­ing an unman­age­able failed state.
Instead of empow­er­ing the secu­ri­ty forces to go into these law­less com­mu­ni­ties to wipe out the anar­chy the Prime Minister grand­stands about Police accountability.

They cre­at­ed INDECOM rather than use those resources to improve the over­sight which exist­ed. Which would have allowed it to go ahead as it was remov­ing dirty cops and improv­ing recruit­ment procedures.
Now INDECOM’s inves­ti­ga­tions are not pro­duc­ing the results Bruce Golding and Holness as well as the PNP expected .

Despite it’s con­fronta­tion­al approach and mul­ti­ple shoot­ings which involves the Police, INDECOM was only able to accuse two police offi­cers of doing any­thing wrong over a 5 month period.
Now it is impor­tant that we under­stand that Jamaica is a law­less police hat­ing coun­try, yet despite that, only 2 offi­cers were alleged to have oper­at­ed out­side the bounds of their authority.
Not charged with a crime and cer­tain­ly not con­vict­ed of anything.

At the same time there are almost 5 homi­cides per day. Rapes are hard­ly report­ed as judges sim­ply let the per­pe­tra­tors walk out on bond, some­times on their own recognizance.
So when the anti ‑police forces on the Island speak about police shoot­ings we will con­tin­ue to tell the truth that on aver­age, the coun­try of 2.7 mil­lion records over 1200 homi­cides annually.
Gang mem­bers open­ly chal­lenge police offi­cers in shoot-outs. Kill police offi­cers with­out bat­ting an eye . Operate with impuni­ty with the bless­ings and sup­port of the two major polit­i­cal parties.

There are hun­dreds of heav­i­ly armed gangs , roam­ing the country .
Two of the most lethal, the Klansman and One Order Gangs, both of which oper­ate out of the Parish of St Catherine are affil­i­at­ed with the Opposition People’s National Party and the Ruling Jamaica Labor Party respectively.

At the same time the train­ing and oper­a­tional readi­ness of the police are anti­quat­ed , and inef­fec­tive , in many cas­es two offi­cers are unable to restrain a bel­liger­ent woman and place her in handcuffs.
Crowds emerge when­ev­er offi­cers attempt to arrest an offend­er hurl­ing insults , video taping(which they have a right to do but from a safe dis­tance), and oth­er­wise do what­ev­er they can to impede , intim­i­date, and stop the law­ful arrest.

For the most part the police are besieged and out in these law­less com­mu­ni­ties per­form­ing an impos­si­ble task with­out support.
At the risk of imprisonment.
With the high­est elect­ed Political offi­cial offi­cial decid­ed­ly focused on strength­en­ing INDECOM, rather than strength­en­ing the rule of law, the coun­try’s police offi­cers are in for a hard time.

As a strong sup­port­er of the rule of law I feel com­pelled to be fair and just in the way I look at all issues involv­ing law enforce­ment whether they are palat­able or not.

Which leads me to won­der why is it so dif­fi­cult for police depart­ments to com­ply with requests to release dash cam and body cam­era record­ings in sit­u­a­tions where police offi­cers use force, to include dead­ly force?
If a police offi­cer is jus­ti­fied in the actions he takes in using dead­ly force, or even less lethal force, why the reluctance?

Departments have no plau­si­ble rea­sons for refus­ing legit­i­mate demands for the release of videos , unless there are exten­u­at­ing cir­cum­stances in which their release would ver­i­fi­ably jeop­ar­o­dize ongo­ing investigations.
Even so, that deci­sion should be the per­og­a­tive of District Attorney and not the police themselves.

In many cas­es in the United States despite the police being pub­lic ser­vants and employ­ees of the peo­ple , it requires court orders to get depart­ments to com­ply with requests for the release of Video record­ings of police use of force encounters .

The Police should nev­er be ham­strung in their abil­i­ty to do their jobs, but they should nev­er be allowed to be laws onto them­selves , account­able to no one.

CONVERSELY.…

On the oth­er hand it is remark­able how police depart­ments are quick to release dam­ag­ing infor­ma­tion on celebri­ties when­ev­er they are arrest­ed on sus­pi­cion of hav­ing bro­ken some minor traf­fic law.
I hold no brief for Tiger Woods , but it begs the ques­tion , what val­ue is added to the case against Tiger Woods or any celebri­ty when they are arrest­ed under sus­pi­cion of dri­ving under the influ­ence by releas­ing the video?

What is the dif­fer­ence between cit­i­zens demand for videos of police actions for account­abil­i­ty pur­pos­es and the response of depart­ments in try­ing to shame mem­bers of the pub­lic when they are accused of minor infractions?

We can only have a just soci­ety when the laws apply to each and every per­son just­ly and equitably.
No one is big­ger than the law, cer­tain­ly not those whose jobs it is to enforce them.

You can have our own opin­ion but you can­not have your own facts .
I absolute­ly hate clich­es’ but here I am using a cliché’ to make a point, you will for­give me I hope.

On read­ing the INDECOM Act which was writ­ten and passed under the Bruce Golding’s JLP Government with the PNP ‘s bless­ings, I said crime would increase expo­nen­tial­ly, crim­i­nals would be embold­ened, and more and more Jamaicans would be killed , includ­ing Police officers.
All of the afore­men­tioned have been proven to be unmit­i­gat­ed truths.

At the time the INDECOM Act was writ­ten, term (“writ­ten” )used loose­ly , there was large scale con­sen­sus that some­thing need­ed to be done about the cor­rup­tion with­in the Jamaica Constabulary Force.
This for­mer mem­ber of the Force will not lie and pre­tend that I too was­n’t mad as hell, to see crim­i­nals invade the JCF I loved and turned it into a den of thieves.

What I did know after read­ing the cob­bled togeth­er piece of crap was it was either the work of a bunch of ele­men­tary school chil­dren, or it was delib­er­ate­ly offen­sive and anti-police .
Or both !!!!

I decid­ed that I would con­tin­ue to do what I could to impress upon whomev­er would lis­ten, that this law does not rem­e­dy police cor­rup­tion , it embold­ens crim­i­nals to com­mit crime , to be dis­re­spect­ful of the rule of law and would be a sig­nif­i­cant dri­ver of crime.

Laws can­not be cob­bled togeth­er in anger, angst, or in a knee-jerk respon­sive way with­out seri­ous consequences.
Legislation requires data input , it requires lis­ten­ing to all par­ties involved with a view toward incor­po­rat­ing all view­points into the debate.
It is hard­ly ever good law to do what seems the most obvi­ous. Sometimes what seem the most obvi­ous end up hav­ing the oppo­site of the desired result.

Raising the sales tax would seem like a good idea to take in more rev­enue for states.
But a per­son who goes in to pur­chase a pair of $100 shoes with 8% sales tax is con­di­tioned to take with him $108 to cov­er the pur­chase of the shoes and the tax.
Raising the sales tax to 10% makes a huge leap in assum­ing that that shop­per has access to an extra $2.

That shop­per may not have the extra mon­ey or may sim­ply decide it’s too much to spend.
Instead of receiv­ing $10 in sales tax the State los­es $8.
Multiply that across the econ­o­my and the cost is mon­u­men­tal . It means that stores sell less mer­chan­dise ‚so they lay off staff, or fail to hire new ones.
Given enough time, it con­stricts the econ­o­my and cre­ates even greater unfore­seen prob­lems as it relates to poten­tial investors refus­ing to invest in new start ups.
All because some genius decid­ed to raise the sales tax with­out think­ing or consultation.

Passing the INDECOM Act was exact­ly like the sales tax illus­tra­tion , com­ing down hard on what they thought were rogue cops with­out due def­er­ence to good police offi­cer or the larg­er issue of the rule of law had exact­ly the oppo­site effect .

AND SO.….

FEWER than six per cent of police offi­cers inves­ti­gat­ed by the Independent Commission of Investigations (INDECOM) in the first quar­ter of 2017 for fatal shoot­ings are cer­tain to face trial.
According to an INDECOM report tabled in Parliament, of 51 cas­es against the police inves­ti­gat­ed by the com­mis­sion, only three led to rec­om­men­da­tions for fur­ther action, and only two involved rec­om­men­da­tion of mur­der charges against the police.(Observer)

INDECOM’S Deputy Commissioner Hamish Campbell sug­gest­ed yes­ter­day that the fig­ures show that the com­mis­sion is not com­bat­ive in deal­ing with the police, but was seek­ing to nur­ture a cul­ture of account­abil­i­ty among its mem­bers involved in con­fronta­tions with the pub­lic which lead to the deaths of cit­i­zens.

Lets dis­pense with the niceties.
This is unadul­ter­at­ed bullshit.

INDECOM’s atti­tude toward the JCF was exact­ly the epit­o­me of con­fronta­tion­al for the most part since it’s unfor­tu­nate cre­ation in 2010.
Since then, hun­dreds of Jamaicans have been killed over and above pre­vi­ous years, except 2005.
What has changed is the way ordi­nary Jamaicans see the role of INDECOM .
The tide of pop­u­lar opin­ion has begun to shift as peo­ple see their loved ones mur­dered includ­ing police offi­cers killed in broad day­light in a part of Kingston which was once a pris­tine neighborhood.

Campbell claimed that the fail­ure of INDECOM to pur­sue most of the issues fur­ther was pri­mar­i­ly due to the fail­ure of wit­ness­es to fol­low up their accu­sa­tions with state­ments to the commission.
That’s because most of these accu­sa­tions were false to begin with, or hearsay at best

“These reports are based on whether there is any evi­dence from eye­wit­ness­es. In many of the cas­es there are no wit­ness­es. They say a lot at the time of the shoot­ing, but they refuse to give writ­ten state­ments,” Campbell said.
Welcome to Jamaica !!! some wit­ness­es claimed that they were threat­ened, or they just feared being involved in the case.
But they don’t fear the Dons and Gangs who send them out to tell lies about the sequence of shoot­ing events.

“The attri­tion of the wit­ness­es is sig­nif­i­cant, so we are left with a bland report,” he added.

Campbell claims INDECOM felt it was nec­es­sary to release the details of the 51 cas­es in response to fre­quent claims by cops that the work of the com­mis­sion was ham­per­ing the police in their jobs.“We chose to put the cas­es of fatal shoot­ings out there because they are the ones most often dis­cussed in the media.”

The truth of the mat­ter is that it is becom­ing clear­er by the day that the resources spent on INDECOM are a colos­sal waste on a poor­ly thought out idea whose time has come.
Sure police should have over­sight , this is cer­tain­ly not it.
A cost ben­e­fit analy­sis will bear out that there is con­tin­ued rise in seri­ous crimes.
The con­tin­ued mass killings by Jamaica’s heav­i­ly armed thugs.
The finan­cial cost being exact­ed on the coun­try as a result of the high mur­der and seri­ous felony rates are far more con­se­quen­tial than the dol­lars and cents wast­ed on this agency to pro­duce two cas­es rec­om­mend­ed for mur­der trial.
Mark you these rec­om­men­da­tions are not con­vic­tions, they are mere recommendations.

The bot­tom line is that as I have point­ed out over the years, there are cer­tain­ly bad police shootings.
No one should be com­fort­able with even a sin­gle bad police shooting.
We should as a soci­ety , do what­ev­er we can to ensure that we hold account­able the peo­ple in whom we invest the pow­er of life and death.
That we do that is of crit­i­cal importance.
What we can­not do in the process, is to empow­er those who would exter­mi­nate us ‚were it not for those very same peo­ple who step for­ward to take up that chal­lenge to run toward the bul­lets when every­one else runs away.

Day in day out the news is dom­i­nat­ed with ref­er­ence to Terrorism .
We can’t avoid it ‚Broadcast Networks lead with news of Terrorism regard­less of where ter­ror­ism occur across the Globe.
The only respite is to switch to sports or turn off the damn Television.
Cable News run with ter­ror news 24 – 7 . In many cas­es their broad­cast run the very same ter­ror sto­ry cov­er to cov­er for days.
Newspapers and even social media plat­forms are inun­dat­ed with the grim real­i­ties of ter­ror­ism and it’s evil con­se­quences on mankind.

With that said , it has become clear­er by the day that Terrorism (as far as Americans under­stand ) is con­fined to Muslims com­mit­ting acts of vio­lence .……Period.
There is hard­ly any recog­ni­tion at least from the tele­vi­sion talk­ing heads that Muslim ter­ror­ists kill more Muslims than they do any­one else.
Which negates the well prop­a­gat­ed lie that Muslim trans­late into Terrorist.

Now albeit that I hold no brief for Muslims or car­ry water for them , they are quite capa­ble of artic­u­lat­ing the truth for themselves .
As a Christian how­ev­er, I have a duty to speak truth to the lying pur­vey­ors of hatred and racial and reli­gious big­otry and intol­er­ance under the guise of Christianity.

Terrorism

The use of vio­lent acts to fright­en the peo­ple in an area as a way of try­ing to achieve a polit­i­cal goal.(Merriam)

On the evening of June 17, 2015. During a prayer ser­vice, nine peo­ple (includ­ing the senior pas­tor, state sen­a­torClementa C. Pinckney) were killed by gun­man Dylan Roof, a 21-year-old white suprema­cist. Three oth­er vic­tims sur­vived. The morn­ing after the attack, police arrest­ed Roof in Shelby, North Carolina. Roof con­fessed to com­mit­ting the shoot­ing in hopes of ignit­ing a race war. The shoot­ing tar­get­ed one of the United States’ old­est black church­es, which has long been a site for com­mu­ni­ty orga­ni­za­tion around civ­il rights.(wikipedia)

Police arrest­ed Dylan Roof with­out inci­dent, he was not rid­dled with bul­lets as the Boston Bomber or many oth­er non-whites who run afoul of the laws have been.
In fact the Police were report­ed to have bought him fast food from McDonalds after he was tak­en into custody.
Dylan Roof con­fessed to the killings and told police he want­ed to start a race war between blacks and whites.
Dylan Roof espoused racial hatred in both a web­site man­i­festo pub­lished before the shoot­ing, and a jour­nal writ­ten from jail after­wards. Photographs post­ed on the web­site showed Roof pos­ing with emblems asso­ci­at­ed with white suprema­cy and with pho­tos of the Confederate bat­tle flag.

Roof was con­vict­ed in Federal court of 33 fed­er­al hate crimes he faces the death penalty.
Yet the Media and politi­cians do not call Roof what he is, a domes­tic chris­t­ian terrorist.
The Federal Bureau of Investigations strug­gled to label this heinous killing by this inbred mon­ster ‚what it was , a text­book  case of domes­tic Terrorism.

Since the com­mence­ment of Donald Trump’s cam­paign for the American Presidency , his vio­lent incen­di­ary and hate­ful speech­es against Blacks , Muslims, Mexicans , Immigrants and any­one not a Caucasian , inci­dents of hate­ful attacks has gone up as well as ter­ror­ist attacks by white men against mem­bers of the afore­men­tioned groups.

According to News One , Hate crimes in nine U.S. met­ro­pol­i­tan areas rose more than 20 per­cent last year — revers­ing a down­ward trend in the last few years — fueled in part due to the pres­i­den­tial cam­paign of Donald Trump, accord­ing to a promi­nent researcher’s new report.
California researcher Brian Levin said that bias crimes appeared to increase in some cities fol­low­ing the Nov. 8 elec­tion of Donald Trump, includ­ing bomb threats to mosques and des­e­cra­tion of Jewish cemeteries.

There were 56 hate crimes report­ed in New York City as of Sunday, Feb. 12, up from just 31 inci­dents over the same time peri­od last year, accord­ing to fig­ures released by the New York Police Department.

More and more News Organizations are now track­ing inci­dents of hate crimes across the coun­try . One of those sources Think Progress ‚since November 9, 2016, they tracked 261 hate inci­dents across the country.

WHITE SUPREMACY IS DEADLY: WHEN WILL WE START TAKING THIS RHETORIC SERIOUSLY?

The focus con­tin­ue to be sin­gu­lar­ly direct­ed at Muslim Terrorists while local home grow ter­ror­ists con­tin­ue to stock up on high pow­ered weapon­ry here in America .
They train as Militias and spread their mes­sage of ter­ror and hatred with lit­tle atten­tion being paid to them by law enforce­ment at both the fed­er­al and local levels.

The ques­tion which we must answer is whether ter­ror­ism has been re-defined to mean The use of vio­lent acts to fright­en the peo­ple in an area as a way of try­ing to achieve a polit­i­cal goal when com­mit­ted by Muslims?

Two men killed on Portland train while trying to stop anti-Muslim hate speech

A known white suprema­cist alleged­ly mur­dered two men for inter­ven­ing the harass­ment of Muslim women in Portland.

Two men were killed Friday in Portland when they tried to stop an anti-Muslim rant on the MAX train at the Hollywood Transit Station, the Oregonian report­ed. Another man also suf­fered stab wounds, but he is expect­ed to survive.
Police say that the sus­pect fled from the scene, but was even­tu­al­ly arrest­ed in Northeast Portland.

The attack occurred in the mid-after­noon when the sus­pect, lat­er iden­ti­fied to be 35-year-old Jeremy Joseph Christian, began yelling “hate speech or biased lan­guage” direct­ed at two young women, one of whom was wear­ing a hijab, the Oregonian report­ed. Some good samar­i­tans tried to inter­vene, but then the man rant­i­ng turned on them with a knife. One man died on the train, while the oth­er passed away at the hospital.

“These were folks just rid­ing the train and unfor­tu­nate­ly got caught up in this,” Portland police spokesman Sgt. Pete Simpson said, accord­ing to the Oregonian.
“He was talk­ing about a lot of dif­fer­ent things, not just specif­i­cal­ly anti-Muslim,” Simpson said. “We don’t know if he’s got men­tal health issues. We don’t know if he’s under the influ­ence of drugs or alco­hol or all of the above.”

The Council on American-Islamic Relations con­demned the inci­dent Friday, ref­er­enc­ing President Donald Trump’s anti-immi­grant rhetoric as a pos­si­ble cause.

“President Trump must speak out per­son­al­ly against the ris­ing tide of Islamophobia and oth­er forms of big­otry and racism in our nation that he has pro­voked through his numer­ous state­ments, poli­cies and appoint­ments that have neg­a­tive­ly impact­ed minor­i­ty com­mu­ni­ties,” CAIR National Executive Director Nihad Awad said, Reuters report­ed.

Christian was booked Saturday morn­ing into a Multnomah County jail on sus­pi­cion of aggra­vat­ed mur­der and attempt­ed mur­der, the Oregonian report­ed. A Facebook page under the suspect’s name con­nects him to an alt-right protest in Portland and shows that he was a part of vio­lent online groups, the Oregonian reported.
http://​www​.salon​.com/​2​0​1​7​/​0​5​/​2​7​/​t​w​o​-​m​e​n​-​k​i​l​l​e​d​-​o​n​-​p​o​r​t​l​a​n​d​-​t​r​a​i​n​-​w​h​i​l​e​-​t​r​y​i​n​g​-​t​o​-​s​t​o​p​-​a​n​t​i​-​m​u​s​l​i​m​-​h​a​t​e​-​s​p​e​e​ch/

Literally every case of significance in the Jamaican criminal justice system places the system itself on trial.
The incredible incompetence and inability of the system to successfully bring the most dangerous and corrupt criminals to justice is a shameful reflection of the country’s inability to govern itself.

Sadly ‚as ordinary Jamaicans still hopefully seek justice from the creaking, broken down corrupt excuse of a system they continue to be disappointed in the faith they misguidedly place in it.

In 2008 Carlos Hill the head of a pyra­mid scheme which oper­at­ed under the name cash plus,(cash-pot) was arrest­ed for oper­at­ing a pyra­mid scheme.
Like the larg­er scams in the United States where Bernie Madoff and a pha­lanx of oth­er con artistes suc­cess­ful­ly conned enough peo­ple to invest in pho­ny schemes with promis­es of huge prof­its of up to 20% per month, Hill’s cash plus pyra­mid bilked gullible Jamaicans of their hard earned money.
According to local esti­mates Hill’s unreg­u­lat­ed invest­ment scheme fold­ed with $10 bil­lion owed to more than 40,000 investors.

Like all pyra­mid schemes month­ly pay­outs are tied to the schemers abil­i­ty to recruit more and more gullible peo­ple will­ing to part with their hard earned cash.
Like oth­er pyra­mids before it Carlos Hill’s cash plus house of cards collapsed.

Nine years after Hill was final­ly arrest­ed for oper­at­ing his pyra­mid, Carlos Hill walked out of a Kingston court room a free man.
The result ?
You guessed it , the pros­e­cu­tion col­lapsed because wit­ness­es sim­ply refused to show up to court anymore.
That they refused to show up is a sep­a­rate issue which requires vig­or­ous debate .

Were they paid off, intim­i­dat­ed , or sim­ply too tired of show­ing up after 9 years?
These are all rea­son­able ques­tions to look at with­in the con­text of whats hap­pen­ing to Jamaica’s crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem as we try to under­stand what this is doing to increase crime in our country.

Said Director of Public Prosecution Paula Llewellyn ‚“This is a demon­stra­tion of unen­light­ened self-inter­est lead­ing to total dis­en­gage­ment in the process.”
Llewellyn has been crit­i­cal of any oth­er body being empow­ered with pros­e­cu­to­r­i­al pow­er at the same time the com­fort of tenure has made Paula Llewellyn fat and lazy .Not in a phys­i­cal sense but in the way she approach­es her duties .

That the DPP would char­ac­ter­ize the col­lapse of her case as a demon­stra­tion of unen­light­ened self-inter­est lead­ing to total dis­en­gage­ment in the process,”and not a calami­tous fail­ure of the sys­tem of which she is an inte­gral part speaks vol­umes about how out of touch she is with the fail­ures which con­tin­ue to pile up on her watch.

The idea of easy mon­ey is a lure which has caused many to lose their rationale .
At the time the cash plus scheme was hap­pen­ing sev­er­al Jamaicans liv­ing here in my city here in new York State came into my place of busi­ness and told me how excit­ed they were about the prospect of mak­ing lucra­tive returns on their investments.

Some told me that when they go to Jamaica their friends liv­ing at home wine and dine them , while telling them “yu mon­ey nu good dung ya suh “when it came time to pay.
My warn­ings gen­er­al­ly fell on deaf ears at the time.
Many scoffed when I warned that a 20% rate of return per month was vir­tu­al­ly impos­si­ble, in a legal invest­ment portfolio.
Many lost their hard earned money.

I grow tired of writ­ing about crime and the fail­ure of Government to do the basic things to pro­tect the nation from peo­ple like Carlos Hill on the white col­lar side ‚and the killers who use vio­lence as a means to the end they desire on the other.
The idea that a case of this nature could lan­guish in the court sys­tem for 9 years and end up this way is uncon­scionable, and reprehensible .

More sig­nif­i­cant is the fact that 40’000 Jamaican could lose their hard earned resources and expe­ri­ence this outcome.
Without giv­ing cre­dence to the lengthy excus­es Llewellyn gave to local media as the rea­son for her fail­ure to deliv­er jus­tice to the over 40’000 , I once again call for smarter faster justice.

It is past time that the Legislature pass into law mech­a­nisms which allows affi­davits giv­en to police to stand ‚even if the giv­er dies or no longer wish­es to par­tic­i­pate in the process.
It is not out­side the scope of com­mon sense to ensure that when cas­es are drawn out or vic­tims are intim­i­dat­ed or killed the case against accused does not fall apart.
Other juris­dic­tions have moved to allow the ini­tial report giv­en to law enforce­ment to stand regard­less of the stance tak­en by the com­plainant later.

The Minister of Justice Delroy Chuck has been push­ing for a purge of the court dock­ets, under the guise it will make the sys­tem more efficient.
The fact of the mat­ter is that the Carlos Hill case, like so many oth­ers before it, demon­strates what hap­pens when cas­es are will­ful­ly dragged out .

The ulti­mate aim of the courts must be appro­pri­ate and time­ly dis­pen­sa­tion of justice .
On both counts, in one fell swoop ‚and in one case, over 40’000 Jamaicans were vic­tim­ized by the very Institution which was sup­posed to stand up for them .
This is a colos­sal fail­ure which will dis­ap­pear and no one will feel shame or dis­gust by it.