There are sev­er­al dif­fer­ent con­ver­sa­tions going on at the same time about the Robbery In May Pen Clarendon last Sunday morn­ing, most of which makes sense.
Some are sym­pa­thet­ic to the offi­cers who were wound­ed, none more than this writer who has been shot in the line of duty as well.
Others are con­cerned about the response time which seemed from my van­tage point to have been pret­ty darn good.
Then there are those who believe that these events are a pre­cur­sor to big­ger things to come.
But one of the salient points I have heard raised is that offi­cers are not expos­ing them­selves to the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem as they did before, no mat­ter what the Prime Minister and or the Minister of National Security says it appears that the dam­age has already been done.

One for­mer col­league has been adamant that as things get clos­er to crit­i­cal mass we will be see­ing a singing of a dif­fer­ent tune by the polit­i­cal lead­er­ship. The Minister Of National Security seems to be adopt­ing a dif­fer­ent tack from his pre­vi­ous tone and tenor but the Prime Minister seems stuck in a one-track mind which has noth­ing to do with the nation’s secu­ri­ty.
Addressing the Police Federation In Ocho Rios Holness said that the JCF was chang­ing and that it was chang­ing to a [force for good]. That by default, means that the force has always been a force for bad.
Holness said that the force over the last decade has changed from a bru­tal force to one that mem­bers may not even see, even though those changes are hap­pen­ing right before their very eyes(not exact­ly a ring­ing endorse­ment of their intel­lect). The Prime Minister said that his Commissioner is imple­ment­ing changes and they are bear­ing fruits.
In oth­er words, the changes being imple­ment­ed are being made with­out the input of the mem­bers of the police depart­ment whom the changes will affect the most.
“I watch a video “Holness said,“an a man seh but dem ya police ya a joke”. the infer­ence being that the police did not take action as they are duty bound to do in the face of crim­i­nal con­duct being com­mit­ted in front of them.
The infer­ence being that tak­ing law­ful action as com­men­su­rate with the laws is tan­ta­mount to being bru­tal. That is the intel­li­gence lev­el of the Jamaican Prime Minister.
Remember that it was just a few days pri­or that that inci­dent in May Pen occurred in which heav­i­ly armed Militia-men sent the police scur­ry­ing for cov­er and two offi­cers near­ly paid with their lives.
And here was the nation’s chief exec­u­tive address­ing police offi­cers mere days later.

Jamaica murder rate 1972 – 2016

Posted on January 3, 2017 by jay

mur­der-rate-jamaica

‘Ten years ago yu coul­nd’t turn on yu tele­vi­sion and not see neg­a­tive accounts of police per­tain­ing to police killings, a bru­tal force” Holness said. ” The per­cep­tion is now chang­ing, “the per­cep­tion of the bru­tal force is now chang­ing I think it is a good thing.“
Holness told mem­bers that for the 151 years the JCF has been used as an instru­ment of bru­tal­i­ty which has nev­er served us well and that Jamaica has nev­er record­ed a sus­tain­able reduc­tion in crime and vio­lence.
The real­i­ty is that Holness’ claim is not sup­port­ed by the facts. Up to and around until around the late 80’s to ear­ly 90’s crime increased in Jamaica as it did in even indus­tri­al­ized nations.
What Holness [did not men­tion], was the fact that despite the lack of resources, despite the lack of Governmental-sup­port, and in his view, the gen­er­al idea that the sac­ri­fices, of many mem­bers pay­ing the ulti­mate price, and the [force is a force for bad](sic) offi­cers have done a ter­rif­ic job.
The Prime Minister then went on to lay out a laun­dry list of polit­i­cal plat­i­tudes and promis­es, safe­ty vests, new police sta­tions, gyms and oth­er basic ameni­ties and accou­ter­ments which ought to be stan­dard fare for the police officers.

In the end, I tuned out Andrew Holness, and came to the con­clu­sion that when Andrew Holness tells us that he came from a two-bed­room board house in Cumberland Spanish Town, we should accept that he is a prod­uct of his envi­ron­ment.
Not the two Bedroom house part(most of us came from even more hum­ble begin­nings), but the geog­ra­phy of his ori­gin, and how it has shaped his [mis­un­der­stand­ing] of what actu­al polic­ing is all about.
Holness’ Utopian con­cept of the new Jamaica Constabulary Force did not include a sin­gle recog­ni­tion that, not only is crime increas­ing, the inci­dents of vio­lence have become more egre­gious, but the method­ol­o­gy and orga­ni­za­tion of the crim­i­nals have changed expo­nen­tial­ly.
The coun­try has had a whole lot of peo­ple deport­ed back, who have spent many many years in devel­oped coun­tries and have lived lives in crime and have learned how to evade police in those devel­oped coun­tries.
I wrote about this years ago that this would inevitably pose a seri­ous chal­lenge to Jamaica and to local law enforce­ment as the lev­el of sophis­ti­ca­tion these crim­i­nals would be employ­ing would require a dif­fer­ent kind of polic­ing.
Unfortunately, as I see it, the police are being watered down instead of being rein­forced.
Jamaica is in for a tor­rid time, I’m afraid. 

In the end, Holness’ lengthy speech was greet­ed at best with less than a luke-warm smat­ter­ing of applause. For the most part, mem­bers sat there in bored silence.
At one stage after talk­ing about the Mobile reserve Holness tried to force applause” well if you don’t clap for that I am hap­py for it,” offi­cers oblig­ed with about five peo­ple clap­ping dejectedly.

There are sev­er­al videos cir­cu­lat­ing on social media and what was clear is that the Robbers were pre­pared to fight regard­less of who inter­cept­ed them.
On one par­tic­u­lar video, sev­er­al police vehi­cles were seen back­ing away from the scene. Whether this was a tac­ti­cal maneu­ver to estab­lish a wider perime­ter is unclear.
What was obvi­ous is that not a sin­gle mem­ber of the group of an esti­mat­ed eight gun­men was killed or inter­cept­ed. So it becomes a lit­tle clear­er to deci­pher that maybe the marked police vehi­cles seen leav­ing the scene were not leav­ing to form a wider perime­ter.
If the the­o­ry is that the offi­cers retreat­ed and did not engage the rob­bers then this is a sem­i­nal moment whether Horace Chang, Andrew Holness or Antony Anderson acknowl­edges it or not. 

Every per­son is free to look at the mul­ti­ple videos on YouTube and form their own con­clu­sion as to whether this is some­thing that is get­ting bet­ter as the Prime Minister would have you believe.
Is this the [new Force for good] that the Prime Minister is mis­lead­ing the nation about?
Every Jamaican has a deci­sion to make because the choic­es are clear. The crit­i­cal ques­tion must be this.
Do you feel safer with this lev­el of secu­ri­ty the Prime Minister is offer­ing you in his new­ly trans­form­ing police force for good?
Here is my chal­lenge to you, lis­ten to the Prime Minister’s speech then deter­mine for your­self whether he made men­tion of the numer­ous mur­ders each and every day, not to men­tion the oth­er acts of vio­lence which do not read­i­ly result in death.
What he is con­cerned about is an image, unfor­tu­nate­ly, image can­not keep peo­ple safe.

Mike Beckles is a for­mer Jamaican police cor­po­ral, busi­ness own­er, avid researcher, and blog­ger. He is also a black achiev­er hon­oree, and pub­lish­er of the blog chatt​-​a​-box​.com. You may sub­scribe to his blogs free of charge.

There is nev­er any doubt about the val­or, brav­ery, and deter­mi­na­tion of some of the men and women who have served their nation, as mem­bers of the Jamaica Constabulary Force(JCF).
Sure there are some who would read­i­ly run away as soon as they hear a fire­crack­er go off.
God knows, I expe­ri­enced that one night in 88 on Blackwood ter­race. Nevertheless, I was blessed to work with some real war­riors in whose hands I would nev­er hes­i­tate to place my life.
I believe they also knew that come what may, I would nev­er leave them in a fire­fight, it was death before dishonor.

It is because of that why my heart swelled up in my throat, as my eyes filled with tears when I read the words of Sergeant David Craddock. (The star dishrag)could not both­er nam­ing the two brave offi­cers.
We have!
As the tears welled up in my eyes a sense of duty washed over me. At no time since I depart­ed the Force did I ever feel like I need­ed to have the com­fort­ing feel of my M16 rifle with the retractable stock in my hands. I want­ed to be there, I real­ly want­ed to be there.

Said Sergeant Craddock:
“I told my col­leagues to gwaan leave me, but they said they not leav­ing.” “Another police offi­cer brave it now, and turn on the M‑16.” “And while the shot a fire, enuh, them (police­men) brave it and hold me and draw me behind a wall.” 
“I nev­er expe­ri­ence any­thing like this in all my years as a police offi­cer. It was very ter­ri­ble. I did not know I would live, to be hon­est. My col­leagues, they nev­er leave me in spite of what hap­pened. They said they would die with me.”
Sergeant Craddock detailed that even though he was struck in the abdomen twice his vital organs were spared. Nevertheless, the bul­let which hit him in leg almost sev­ered his leg.
“The foot was dan­gling, it almost come off,” he said.
No oth­er cat­e­go­ry of work­ers has giv­en even close to the sac­ri­fice of police offi­cers.
No cat­e­go­ry of pub­lic sec­tor work­ers con­tributes more to nation-build­ing and the greater good than police offi­cers.
These men and women deserve love and respect. The nation should hang its col­lec­tive head in shame.

Despite the egre­gious injuries to the two offi­cers, the pub­li­ca­tion nev­er once named the two offi­cers. It was like they were an abstrac­tion. Though they did a full report­ing on the offi­cer’s words it was not impor­tant enough for them to both­er putting a name to the indi­vid­u­als.
I thought the report­ing encap­su­lat­ed pre­cise­ly how the Jamaican Nation treats it’s police offi­cers.
From Jamaica House through the court and media hous­es all the way to the last house in the ghet­to.
The harsh­est sen­tences are reserved for police offi­cers who err in judg­ment while in the exe­cu­tion of their duties.
Mass mur­der­ers are sum­mar­i­ly let out on bail to kill repeat­ed­ly until there are no wit­ness­es will­ing to step for­ward to tes­ti­fy against them and they walk free.
Police offi­cers who make alleged errors in sit­u­a­tions in which they have to make life and death deci­sions in frac­tions of a sec­ond, [while on duty] get no qual­i­fied immu­ni­ty.
Not just that but they are forced to spend the dura­tion of time in prison some­times more than sev­en years before they are tried with­out bail.
Violent thugs have their cas­es tossed from court dock­ets if their case man­ages to stay on the dock­et in excess of five years.
And nev­er mind if they are con­vict­ed. The Government is active­ly engaged in hav­ing their mur­der con­vic­tion expunged from their record.
http://jamaica-star.com/article/news/20190529/%E2%80%98i-did-not-know-i-would-live%E2%80%99-cop-hurt-may-pen-shooting-tells-horrifying-tale
http://jamaica-star.com/article/news/20190529/%E2%80%98i-did-not-know-i-would-live%E2%80%99-cop-hurt-may-pen-shooting-tells-horrifying-tale

It is also com­mon knowl­edge that Judges are on the pay­roll of some crim­i­nal enti­ties. This writer has made no bones about expos­ing these pat­terns of sen­tenc­ing dis­par­i­ties which have emerged, not just in the west­ern parts of the coun­try but in oth­er court­rooms across the coun­try.
We are also not shy about expos­ing the veneer of lies which shields the truth of the dan­ger to the Jamaican crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem over­all.
When the Judges are cor­rupt­ed it is check­mate for the sys­tem. Unfortunately, many peo­ple still reside in a bub­ble as it relates to Jamaican judges, and maybe that’s for the good because regard­less of the sever­i­ty of the sit­u­a­tion, faith in the sys­tem can be a net pos­i­tive. It would be an effort in futil­i­ty for me to even begin a process of detail­ing the raw and bla­tant dis­par­i­ty in sen­tenc­ing between Criminals who inten­tion­al­ly set out to kill and police offi­cers, who in the law­ful exe­cu­tion of their duties make errors in judgment.

Example #1

A St Catherine man, who chopped his com­mon-law wife to death two years ago, was sen­tenced to four years in prison when he appeared in the St Catherine Circuit Court last Friday.
Errol Morrison of Pointhill St Catherine, was charged with the mur­der of Hermalin Bell 42-year-old labor­er also of Point hill. The court was told that the two had a dis­agree­ment when Morrison attacked her with a machete and chopped her all over her body. She col­lapsed and died on the spot. Morrison fled the com­mu­ni­ty but lat­er turned him­self over to the police who charged him with mur­der. He plead­ed guilty to the less­er charge of manslaughter.

Example#2

The three cops found guilty of manslaugh­ter in rela­tion to the death of 16-year-old school­girl Vanessa Kirkland in March 2012 have each been sen­tenced to 14 years and six months impris­on­ment. 
Constables Ardewain Smith, 35, Durvin Hayles, 33, and Anna-Kay Bailey, 27, were on February 8 found guilty of manslaugh­ter by a sev­en-mem­ber jury in the Home Circuit Court in down­town Kingston. During the tri­al, the court heard that Constables Bailey, Hayles, and Smith drove on to Norman Lane in Kingston some­time after 9 o’ clock on March 20, 2012, and opened fire on a blue Suzuki Swift motor­car which was parked along the left side of the road. Kirkland and six oth­er occu­pants inside the car were shot. She sub­se­quent­ly died from her injuries.

The killings in Jamaica may be attrib­uted to fail­ures in Government, but we are not fac­ing real­i­ty if we fail to rec­og­nize how the very agen­cies of Government as well as what ought to be an inde­pen­dent media have failed our coun­try.
The cop-hat­ing crim­i­nal ‑cheer-lead­ing which has tak­en over Jamaican pop cul­ture runs the full spec­trum from top to bot­tom side to side.
Every stra­tum of the soci­ety is inher­ent­ly cor­rupt, which by default ren­ders the police pub­lic ene­my num­ber one.
It is with­in this Transparency Internationally rat­ed 84% cor­rup­tion, those police offi­cers are asked to oper­ate with white gloves.
It is impor­tant that when we talk about crime and decide to point fin­gers, we nev­er lose sight of the full facts.
My friend argues suc­cinct­ly that as the raw images of where we are as a nation emerges and begin to be seared into the psy­ches of the power­bro­kers, they will become scared of what we have been warn­ing about.
Their rhetoric will begin to sound like they sup­port the police but offi­cers should nev­er be fooled into think­ing that these wolves in sheep cloth­ing are for real.
They should nev­er for­get how the secu­ri­ty forces were treat­ed after they had annexed Tivoli Gardens to Jamaica.
Fool me once shame on you. Fool me twice shame on me.

Mike Beckles is a for­mer Jamaican police cor­po­ral, busi­ness own­er, avid researcher, and blog­ger. He is also a black achiev­er hon­oree, and pub­lish­er of the blog chatt​-​a​-box​.com. You may sub­scribe to his blogs free of charge.

Gone are the days when Police will be kick­ing in peo­ple’s doors to go after crim­i­nals”, under my admin­is­tra­tion that’s a thing of the past.”

” What I took over in the Police Force was lit­tle more than a glo­ri­fied secu­ri­ty guard com­pa­ny.“
The JCF was large­ly designed to pro­tect the inter­est of prop­er­ty own­ers “where we trained them for six months in mil­i­tary drill, gave them some dis­ci­pline, gave them a big pine baton and a Lee Enfield rifle and then we com­plain that they shoot or beat up somebody.” 

“If you are aban­don­ing the police you can’t imple­ment a state of emergency”.“Minister, retract. Be strong and retract because what you say can have a neg­a­tive impact on all of us.”
“It is wrong. It is ridicu­lous.” 

“I look for­ward to the day when every police offi­cer is a human rights activist.”

When I write truth the hyper-par­ti­san trolls come out in droves to con­demn me for speak­ing the truth out of love for my coun­try.
But I was nev­er one to care about polit­i­cal lack­eys even when I was a con­sta­ble, they were forced to fol­low the law wher­ev­er I was doing police work and that goes to the very top.
Portia Simpson and her band of brig­ands were forced to respect the rule of law because myself and two oth­ers decid­ed that no one was going to steal any bal­lot box­es from the school on White Hall Avenue in 88.

Carl Samuda orches­trat­ed a trans­fer for me along with Deputy Commissioner Ebanks because I demand­ed that he leave the polling sta­tion imme­di­ate­ly in the same year.
That back­fired bad­ly as the peo­ple rose up and all hell broke loose, they want­ed their police offi­cer back.
Ed Bartlett and Ryan Peralto in two sep­a­rate inci­dents were not hap­py when I stepped in to enforce the law, but when I remained firm they stood down.
Trevor Monroe did not like the fact that I was firm that any­one who tried to breach the fence of Jamaica House, with Prime Minister Edward Seaga in office would be shot.
He labeled me a [ter­ror­ist cop], in his com­mu­nist pub­li­ca­tion [the strug­gle].
He lat­er apol­o­gized to me and we set­tled our differences.

I was nev­er threat­ened by politi­cians at the top so I damn sure will nev­er be both­ered by their under­lings.
Who or what par­ty I ulti­mate­ly decid­ed to vote for had noth­ing to do with my crit­i­cisms of the way my coun­try is being run. My vote
and my com­ments are two dif­fer­ent issues.
My love of coun­try needs no val­i­da­tion from any­one regard­less of their sta­tion. I bled for my coun­try, and even if I did­n’t I still would not give a rat’s ass about what some polit­i­cal lack­ey has to say about my views.

It is not just my view that this admin­is­tra­tion has aban­doned the Police. Others have seen it too. KD Knight an Opposition Senator allud­ed to it. I nev­er sub­scribed to KD Knight’ pol­i­tics but he made a cor­rect obser­va­tion in response to Chang’s dis­re­spect­ful com­ments about the police.
Andrew Holness made no attempts to hide his dis­dain for the police.
In his first Zones Of Special Operation des­ig­na­tion in St James, he made it clear that he did not rate the police, he placed the mil­i­tary in charge. Unfortunately, sol­diers are not police so they can­not stop crim­i­nals. Holness’ igno­rance was becom­ing pal­pa­ble.
When it came time to select the Nation’s first National Security Adviser, he chose (Antony Anderson a sol­dier).
When it came time for him to chose a new Police Commissioner, he chose his friend Antony Anderson a sol­dier who has nev­er been in bat­tle. A sol­dier who had zero expe­ri­ence in Law-Enforcement.
When alle­ga­tions arose that a cou­ple of cops had trans­gressed the law and they were from the Mobile Reserve, even though the case is still under inves­ti­ga­tion he ordered Chang to dis­man­tle the back­bone of the nation’s secu­ri­ty, the Mobile Reserve.

There is no ques­tion that for what­ev­er rea­son, this man has decid­ed to destroy the police force by his own poli­cies.
Now his sup­port­ers can call me a PNP all they want, it is their loss that they can only process infor­ma­tion in the nar­row con­fines of polit­i­cal affil­i­a­tions.
What Holness will be sad­dled with are the con­se­quences of his actions.
He will not destroy the JCF and walk away unblem­ished. He will car­ry the scars of all of the killings which occurred on his watch and all that will be forth­com­ing in the future.

For years I have warned that our coun­try is on a pre­cip­i­tous slope, I write dai­ly beg­ging the gov­ern­ment to pay atten­tion, that Jamaica is slid­ing into anar­chy and ulti­mate­ly will be declared a failed state if we do not get our act togeth­er.
Rather than pay atten­tion the two polit­i­cal par­ties have ignored warn­ings and have con­tin­ued with busi­ness as usu­al.
I implored this Prime Minister to use the ben­e­fit of his youth to think dif­fer­ent­ly. Notwithstanding, it is clear that he too is a prod­uct of his envi­ron­ment.
I have warned for years that this is not just crime these are now Militias oper­at­ing in this tiny space of 4411 square miles.
I have warned that this was unten­able even before the events of 2010.

The coun­try is awash in high-pow­ered weapons. The young men are empow­ered, hav­ing seen the respect they are giv­en and that they can take what­ev­er they want through the bar­rel of those weapons.
So here is the stark real­i­ty, this will not be han­dled by com­mu­ni­ty polic­ing, I long told you those days are over.
This will not be han­dled by ask­ing them to turn in their weapons.
This will not be han­dled by inter­ven­tion or social pro­grams.
Fuck all of that, these guys are not inter­est­ed in any of that.
Those weapons will have to be plucked from their life­less fin­gers.
Every day that this gov­ern­ment con­tin­ues to send INDECOM Terrence Williams to inves­ti­gate when police ter­mi­nate these scum is anoth­er day that this Government is [COMPLICIT] in the destruc­tion of Jamaica.

These are not ordi­nary crim­i­nals, fight­ing them requires extra-ordi­nary tac­tics.
As a beg­gar nation, Jamaica allowed the United States to manip­u­late it through the Lehi Act into sur­ren­der­ing to crim­i­nals.
The desire to obtain an American visa and be able to trav­el to America have [trumped], the urgency of get­ting the mur­der­ers.
America does not play with its crim­i­nals and ter­ror­ists.
In the end, Jamaicans will still lose the abil­i­ty to trav­el to America when the state Department des­ig­nates our coun­try a failed state.
Neither polit­i­cal par­ty is will­ing to do what is nec­es­sary to stop this and we are now get­ting to crit­i­cal mass.
Every Police offi­cer with a visa should now lay down arms and walk away.
This is the Jamaica they want­ed all along. It is safe to say that the two polit­i­cal par­ties are filled with a bunch of criminals.

The Jamaican Justice Minister told the Nation’s Parliament that he is ask­ing the Parliament to amend laws to allow con­victs who have aban­doned crim­i­nal­i­ty [for an extend­ed peri­od of time](sic) to have their records expunged.
In seek­ing to make his case, Chuck told Parliament of a man who was charged with mur­der, con­vict­ed of manslaugh­ter, but turned his life around and has been preach­ing for the last 25 years. 

Now I do get the need to clean up the back­log of cas­es on the court’s dock­ets, anoth­er issue Delroy Chuck spoke to in his address to the Parliament last Tuesday. What I find offen­sive is Chuck’s strat­e­gy, which is to toss cas­es which have been on the dock­ets for five(5) years or longer.
Even Murder cas­es.
I do under­stand that per­sons charged under the penal code have a con­sti­tu­tion­al right to a speedy tri­al. Notwithstanding, it is impor­tant to acknowl­edge that in some cas­es the rea­sons cas­es are delayed inor­di­nate­ly are based on (a)some sus­pects inabil­i­ty to pay their lawyers, (b) Deliberate stalling-tac­tics by defense lawyers, © defense wit­ness­es can­not be found, etc.
In fair­ness, it is also true that for every rea­son those cas­es are delayed by the defense’s side, there is a pros­e­cu­tion delay as well.

Nevertheless, as I have point­ed out in pre­vi­ous arti­cles on this sub­ject, allow­ing Chuck to attach an arti­fi­cial time­line to the dis­po­si­tion of cas­es there­after cre­at­ing an excuse to toss cas­es and allow­ing vio­lent crim­i­nals to walk free, spits in the faces of crime vic­tims and does a grave injus­tice to the sys­tem of jus­tice in our coun­try.
It is anti­thet­i­cal to the rule of law and is by nature anoth­er accel­er­ant to the cul­ture of crime which has infect­ed the coun­try.
Simply put, this prac­tice is an encour­age­ment for crim­i­nals and their criminal/​lawyers to usurp the sys­tem of jus­tice even fur­ther with­out consequences.

In mak­ing his case, Delroy Chuck ref­er­enced a man who com­mit­ted mur­der but got con­vict­ed on manslaugh­ter. He argued that the man is now a Minister who wants his record expunged.
But the argu­ments he raised in sup­port of expung­ing that mur­der­er’s vio­lent past, quote; “This pas­tor, how­ev­er, can­not get his records expunged because the act does not cur­rent­ly allow for it, “and that is the sort of per­son we’d want to be expunged.”
Seems to me this man is doing just fine. He has found God, he is a Minister, his vic­tim is gone and has no sec­ond chance.
In what is a mul­ti-pronged approach by the JLP Administration, Jamaicans not engaged in crim­i­nal con­duct must be awake to these facts.

On the front end, the Administration has all but ren­dered the police inef­fec­tive based on its dis­re­spect and regres­sive poli­cies and pos­tures.
In the mid­dle, it is engaged in toss­ing cas­es that have been stalled in the sys­tem, some­times through no fault of the state as I have shown above, while open­ing up a broad chan­nel for more abus­es of the right to adjourn­ments all aimed at run­ning out the clock by way of Chucks arti­fi­cial five-year time­line.
And on the back end, despite the myr­i­ad dif­fi­cul­ties in secur­ing con­vic­tions for vio­lent felons, they are active­ly cre­at­ing the impres­sion that these mur­ders nev­er hap­pened by wip­ing clean the crim­i­nal records of vio­lent mur­ders, all on anoth­er Delroy Chuck cre­at­ed Timeline. 

It is impor­tant that every Jamaican who cheer for this, do under­stand that I am not opposed to peo­ple with non-vio­lent infrac­tions hav­ing a fresh start. For exam­ple with the loos­en­ing of the mar­i­jua­na laws, there is no rea­son that one could rea­son­ably oppose some­one who was arrest­ed on a mar­i­jua­na offense receiv­ing a sec­ond chance.
However, vio­lent offens­es, up to, but not con­fined to, mur­der can­not sim­ply be swept under the car­pet as if they nev­er occurred.

HERE IS WHAT’S GOING TO HAPPEN

These are the kinds of half-ass mea­sures which are designed by politi­cians to cur­ry favor and secure votes.
They are bad poli­cies which seem rea­son­able at face val­ue. In a coun­try like Jamaica which has such high tol­er­ance for crim­i­nal con­duct, these poli­cies are bound to find favor.
The fact is that the Island’s polit­i­cal lead­ers do not care about the inor­di­nate­ly out­ra­geous mur­der sta­tis­tics as long as they hold onto state pow­er and retain the abil­i­ty to feed at the slop trough.
But to the Jamaican peo­ple who are not out killing, rap­ing, shoot­ing and stab­bing oth­ers, these poli­cies will have dev­as­tat­ing con­se­quences for them.

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

I hate to be the bear­er of bad news, or to say ‘I told you so.“Nevertheless, far too many of the things I warn about are hap­pen­ing in front of our eyes.
Law-abid­ing Jamaicans must be pre­pared for the fol­low­ing.
As soon as word gets out, (and get out it will), because we will con­tin­ue to report on this, oth­er coun­tries, a‑la the US Canada and the United Kingdom will pull up the wel­come mat.
These coun­tries are purg­ing them­selves of peo­ple for minor drug infrac­tions and ille­gal entry.
I am dead cer­tain they will not be look­ing to import con­vict­ed mur­der­ers from Jamaica who has had their crim­i­nal records expunged polit­i­cal­ly.
Every poten­tial employ­er has a right to know the his­to­ry of a poten­tial employ­ee.
Every per­son who works in a com­pa­ny deserves to know that his or her co-work­ers are not mur­der­ers who have had the past cleaned up by cor­rupt politi­cians.
Every fam­i­ly with chil­dren has a right to know that the per­son who moved in next door is a sex offend­er. When Delroy Chuck, a crim­i­nal enhance­ment tool, push­es those poli­cies, he is endan­ger­ing your chil­dren.
Why would we cre­ate poli­cies which fur­ther puts inno­cent chil­dren in harms way?
The Delroy Chuck JLP plan takes away all of those (right-to-know) from every decent law abid­ing Jamaican.
One of the rea­sons that the United States, for exam­ple, have declared some nation states, failed states, is exact­ly because their gov­ern­ments can­not be trust­ed to account for their cit­i­zen’s past behav­ior. I won­der how these west­ern pow­ers will react to Jamaica wip­ing away mur­der and oth­er vio­lent felony con­vic­tions?
If these nations can­not deter­mine the his­to­ry of Jamaican cit­i­zens will they real­ly trust that man or woman, those visa appli­cants, aren’t san­i­tized, mur­der­ers?
You decide!!!

LIKE AND SHARE THIS ARTICLE.

Yesterday I wrote about the fail­ure of the Jamaican Prime Minister mis­ter Andrew Holness on the issue of crime.
In the arti­cle, I went to great pains to out­line that (a) I sup­port­ed Holness’ can­di­da­cy and (b) gave the Prime Minister cred­it for his han­dling of the econ­o­my thus far.
I did not make men­tion of the Infrastructure devel­op­ments being car­ried out across the Island, as [some] of those projects were in the pipeline before he took office and speak­ing to those would mean I would have to spend valu­able time giv­ing cred­it to the pre­vi­ous admin­is­tra­tion on an issue I believe can­cels itself out polit­i­cal­ly.
I did not feel I was com­pelled to say I sup­port­ed Holness’ can­di­da­cy, but I felt that in the inter­est of fair­ness I had to give cred­it to the Prime Minister were and if cred­it was war­rant­ed.
I nev­er­the­less cred­it­ed the PM for the good that was obvi­ous from my van­tage point while speak­ing to the bad from the same perch.
Having done so, I hoped that the qual­i­ty of the dis­course on the impor­tant top­ic of the nations crime epi­dem­ic would have been ele­vat­ed over and above the tra­di­tion­al parochial (kas-kas).

I hoped that since we pride our­selves in our abil­i­ty to crit­i­cal-think, we would be able to begin a sub­stan­tive con­ver­sa­tion on this most press­ing issue with a view to at least rec­og­niz­ing that the path we are present­ly on will not solve the present dilem­ma.
Unfortunately, it seems to me that the balka­niza­tion of our pol­i­tics after 1962 to the present day has moved from imag­i­nary geo­graph­i­cal lines of demar­ca­tion to men­tal and psy­cho­log­i­cal lines.
The hard­en­ing of our polit­i­cal views has become a hin­drance to our growth and devel­op­ment. It has so infest­ed our psy­ches, that even though we are no longer mur­der­ing our broth­ers of anoth­er polit­i­cal per­sua­sion, we are unable to engage in sub­stan­tive rea­son­ing because of the con­fin­ing walls of polit­i­cal allegiances.

When the response by Labourites to the crime epi­dem­ic is ‘crime did not begin three years ago( allud­ing to when Holness took office), you can no longer claim cred­i­bil­i­ty on the top­ic, as you have demon­strat­ed that you are unable to see through your polit­i­cal blink­ers.
That kind of think­ing allows for the next par­ty to make the same argu­ments when it becomes their turn to lead once again.
Putting this exis­ten­tial issue on the table does not mean solv­ing it today. Crime did not become an issue in Jamaica at the time Holness took office.
What the nation vot­ed for was a dif­fer­ent approach and that is not hap­pen­ing. So the bird-brained idea that point­ing out where we are going wrong is some­how polit­i­cal, expos­es the lev­el of indi­vid­ual igno­rance in that per­cep­tion, and the degree to which the cor­ro­sive influ­ence of pol­i­tics has cloud­ed our abil­i­ty to think.

Over the years I have pre­sent­ed a raft of pro­pos­als which are to be found on this very medi­um. The fact that Jamaican author­i­ties, of both polit­i­cal par­ties, have failed to adopt tried-and-proven meth­ods, opt­ing instead for crime-fight­ing tech­niques devel­oped by baby doc­tors and police haters is their own fault.
The fact that suc­ces­sive admin­is­tra­tions of both polit­i­cal par­ties lack the tes­tic­u­lar for­ti­tude to exact the pound of flesh nec­es­sary from crim­i­nals, there­by send­ing a clear and unequiv­o­cal mes­sage that their actions will not be tol­er­at­ed is not my fault.
The idea that a call to arms ends up becom­ing an inqui­si­tion into my per­son­al bona fides tells the damn­ing truths that maybe many of us are not as remote­ly smart as we would like to por­tray.
When we fail to see the killing of babies, and lit­tle girls as a bridge too far, we are by default giv­ing license to the killers to push the enve­lope even fur­ther.
When we quib­ble and squab­ble among our­selves about who start­ed what and who presided over what, we basi­cal­ly give crim­i­nals the room they need to con­tin­ue the may­hem they sow in our soci­eties.
My char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of the Jamaican PM yes­ter­day has not changed today. Our coun­try needs lead­er­ship on crime. Leadership that mobi­lizes and gal­va­nizes the peo­ple into a com­mon cause. A cause which is greater than them­selves. A cause which edu­cates them on the way crime reduces their qual­i­ty of life until it even­tu­al­ly takes it away from them.
We need lead­er­ship which empow­ers its police to go get the crim­i­nals, while ensur­ing that those offi­cers who over­step their author­i­ty are held to the strictest stan­dards of account­abil­i­ty.
Then and only then will we begin to see a reduc­tion, not just in the sta­tis­ti­cal num­ber of vio­lent and oth­er crimes but in the brazen­ness and the pro­cliv­i­ty to com­mit those crimes.
It is dif­fi­cult to get Jamaicans to mobi­lize against a mon­ster so large and entrenched. Our coun­try is inher­ent­ly cor­rupt, most detrac­tors of tough anti-crime mea­sures are direct ben­e­fi­cia­ries of crim­i­nal con­duct.
It is to those same people/​voters that the two polit­i­cal par­ties pan­der. It is that which informs the deci­sions on this epi­dem­ic.
Harriet Tubman famous­ly said quote” I freed a thou­sand slaves, and I could have freed a thou­sand more, if only they knew they were slaves”.

Yesterday the entire Western world was in a fren­zied Tizzy, it was moth­ers day. Sure moth­ers deserve all of the acco­lades they can get, after all, us men have no idea what it feels like to have anoth­er human being grow­ing inside us for the bet­ter part of nine months and some­times beyond.
Of course, Father’s day is not too far off, it is usu­al­ly cel­e­brat­ed on the third Sunday of June in America.
Fathers need not antic­i­pate much, in gen­er­al, there is fathers day des­ig­na­tion just for the sake of par­i­ty.
To the peo­ple who had lov­ing car­ing moms and mom­my fig­ures, it is a won­der­ful feel­ing to just lay and put your head in her lap and just feel the trou­bles of the world dis­solve away for a while.
Me, I did not have a moth­er in my life but I sure had a moth­er fig­ure in the form of my great aunt who was bet­ter than a lot of real moms, includ­ing mine of course.
And so as we reflect on the day that the west­ern world has set aside to rec­og­nize moth­ers, I can­not help but make a few observations.

Why is there a need to have a war between the gen­ders? I mean it may be nean­derthal of me to sug­gest that God cre­at­ed the sex­es with roles which are clear­ly defined right? No one is deny­ing that if the moth­er dies or is oth­er­wise out of the pic­ture the father can­not fill both roles to the best of his abil­i­ties? Nevertheless, he can be the best father he can be, and he can fill the role of a moth­er as well, but he can­not be a moth­er. So too is it true when fathers are absent from the equa­tion, moth­ers are pressed into dou­ble duty. And regard­less of the hero­ic work moth­ers do, they can­not be fathers, so could we please put that the­o­ry to rest.
The con­stant fem­i­nist bat­ter­ing of the drums of sep­a­ra­tion between the sex­es does noth­ing to engen­der lov­ing rela­tion­ships in our homes and com­mu­ni­ties. When we cre­ate those divi­sions we are by default tear­ing down our societies.

The idea that love is best encap­su­lat­ed in a fem­i­nine wrap­per, man­i­fest­ed in the wip­ing of snooty drool and chang­ing dia­pers over the mas­cu­line go-get­ter who risks life and limb to pro­vide for his fam­i­ly is the most absurd and sim­plis­tic inter­pre­ta­tion of love. 

Inherent in that con­tra­dic­tion, is man’s refusal to stand up and defend the male gen­der choos­ing instead to go along to get along.
And so we find that even those who pro­fess to care about gen­der inequal­i­ty are the biggest hyp­ocrites when it comes to their actions on gen­der issues.
Everywhere you turn these days in the black com­mu­ni­ty there is no short­age of bit­ter-butch self-pro­claimed life coach­es offer­ing to give advice on how to live with­out men(for a fee of course). 

This sub­ject is far deep­er than the obvi­ous war of the sex­es
The scrip­tures say; for we wres­tle not with flesh and blood, but with prin­ci­pal­i­ties and pow­ers and spir­i­tu­al wicked­ness in high places. The pow­er of dark­ness, (Satan) has con­vinced humans that Gods ways are sil­ly, remem­ber God placed the man over the house­hold to lead in love and with dis­ci­pline.
So the west­ern world ele­vates and places women in charge and places a counter-cul­ture upon us which is designed to fur­ther the cause of homo­sex­u­al­i­ty /​Lesbianism while degrad­ing the fam­i­ly struc­ture designed by God.
At the fore­front of this tox­ic gen­der war, there seem to be black women act­ing as van­guards. ‘We don’t need no man, we can do for our­selves”.
The sad real­i­ty is that black women are forced to do for them­selves as a result of (a)powerful forces big­ger than themselves,(b) their own poor deci­sion mak­ing.
The sys­temic break­ing up of the black fam­i­ly from slav­ery, through chat­tel like treat­ment of our peo­ple, a‑la sell­ing mem­bers of one fam­i­ly to far off estates, rapes, and sodomy, etc.
Also the re-enslave­ment of black males in the peri­od called recon­struc­tion, the sys­temic re-enslave­ment of black males by way of laws and ordi­nances which strate­gi­cal­ly tar­gets them, the prison indus­tri­al com­plex today and laws which make it impos­si­ble for black men to get their lives togeth­er after the sys­tem has crim­i­nal­ized them.
These are only a few of the issues which have made it dif­fi­cult for black men to be in their chil­dren’s lives in America.
In all of that, black women have to own their own per­son­al fail­ings when it comes to their choic­es of mates.
The birds require cer­tain stan­dards from the males of their species before mat­ing, what say you?

That black women would be blind to this, or even sub­scribe to this the­o­ry is remark­able, con­sid­er­ing that every study shows that where there are no fathers in the home chil­dren do poor­ly and are at greater risk of fail­ing in life and end­ing up in prison.
That is check­mate for the white pow­er struc­ture.
White women may be hav­ing chil­dren out of wed­lock to some degree, as oth­er eth­nic groups are, but their choic­es are hard­ly the result of any deep anti-male resent­ment. They want chil­dren, they may just not be ready to com­mit to mar­riage, but you best believe that their chil­dren have fathers in their lives.
If you can remove the black male, ren­der him incon­se­quen­tial to his woman, the bat­tle to degrade the race is all but over.

This Article could very well be the pro­logue to a book. I feel strong­ly enough about this sub­ject that I could lit­er­al­ly pro­duce a book on this sub­ject.
Nevertheless, I will be mind­ful that my read­ers may not be inter­est­ed in an elon­gat­ed essay on this top­ic in this par­tic­u­lar forum, so self-con­trol is in order.

The Michigan representative just accepted petitions signed by 10 million Americans who say it is time to act.

By John Nichols

“Can we please start the impeach­ment process now?” Rashida Tlaib asked a month before she was sworn in as the rep­re­sen­ta­tive from Michigan’s 13^th con­gres­sion­al dis­trict. It was the right ques­tion at the right time — a moment in December when President Trump was casu­al­ly announc­ing: “I will shut down the gov­ern­ment.” And Tlaib was the right per­son to ask it: a lawyer with a firm grasp of the Constitution and deep regard for the oath she was about to swear to “sup­port and defend the Constitution of the United States against all ene­mies, for­eign and domes­tic” and to “bear true faith and alle­giance to the same.”

Yet, Tlaib got only a lit­tle notice when she spoke up in December. She got more atten­tion in January when, after being sworn in, she employed some salty lan­guage in an enthu­si­as­tic dec­la­ra­tion. of her deter­mi­na­tion to hold the pres­i­dent to account. Trump labeled her “dis­grace­ful” and “high­ly dis­re­spect­ful to the United States of America.” But Tlaib was unde­terred. She con­sult­ed with experts on the sys­tem of checks and bal­ances and advanced a pro­pos­al root­ed in a savvy recog­ni­tion of the fact that impeach­ment is a process.
Now, as polit­i­cal and media fig­ures who once eschewed dis­cus­sions of the “I” word are sud­den­ly talk­ing about noth­ing else, it is time to rec­og­nize the wis­dom of Tlaib’s proposal. 

Trump is reject­ing the sys­tem of checks and bal­ances. He is abus­ing his exec­u­tive author­i­ty in an effort to thwart con­gres­sion­al review of the full Mueller report, and his attor­ney gen­er­al has refused to coöper­ate with the House Judiciary Committee. The Democratic major­i­ty on the com­mit­tee has tak­en nec­es­sary and appro­pri­ate action, vot­ing last Wednesday to rec­om­mend that the full House hold Attorney General William Barr in con­tempt of Congress for refus­ing to share the unredact­ed report from spe­cial coun­sel Robert Mueller III with the com­mit­tee. Yet, Barr is still refus­ing to coöper­ate. And what of Trump? Committee chair Jerry Nadler (D‑NY) says, “the President is dis­obey­ing the law, is refus­ing all infor­ma­tion to Congress.” “The phrase con­sti­tu­tion­al cri­sis has been overused…” says Nadler, “but, cer­tain­ly, it’s a con­sti­tu­tion­al cri­sis, although I don’t like to use that phrase because it’s been used for far less dan­ger­ous situations.”

This is a dan­ger­ous sit­u­a­tion and its should be addressed with the response that the founders of the American exper­i­ment iden­ti­fied. “If we do not engage in the impeach­ment process, we set a dan­ger­ous prece­dent for all future pres­i­dents — that they can defy the law and tram­ple on our con­sti­tu­tion, tak­ing us on the road to autoc­ra­cy,” saysFree Speech for People’s John Bonifaz, a lawyer who has work­ing with Tlaib on account­abil­i­ty issues.
The key word is “process.”
Before for­mal arti­cles of impeach­ment are writ­ten and vot­ed on by the House, infor­ma­tion must be gath­ered, hear­ings must be held, efforts must be made to pro­vide the American peo­ple with a full sense of why account­abil­i­ty is nec­es­sary, and out­reach must be made to those con­sti­tu­tion­al­ly-inclined Republicans who might rec­og­nize the dan­ger of allow­ing a pres­i­dent — even a pres­i­dent with an “R” after his name — to dis­miss checks and bal­ances and dis­re­gard the rule of law. This process of apply­ing the cure for a con­sti­tu­tion­al cri­sis, as estab­lished by the founders of the American exper­i­ment, moves the dis­cus­sion of account­abil­i­ty toward con­crete reality.Tlaib is propos­ing to begin the process with leg­is­la­tion resolv­ing that:

(1) the Committee on the Judiciary shall inquire whether the House of Representatives should impeach Donald John Trump, President of the United States of America;

(2) the Committee on the Judiciary or any sub­com­mit­tee or task force des­ig­nat­ed by the Committee may, in con­nec­tion with the inquiry under this res­o­lu­tion, take affi­davits and depo­si­tions by a mem­ber, coun­sel, or con­sul­tant of the Committee, pur­suant to notice or sub­poe­na; and

(3) there shall be paid out of the applic­a­ble accounts of the House of Representatives such sums as may be nec­es­sary to assist the Committee on the Judiciary in con­duct­ing the inquiry under this res­o­lu­tion, any of which may be used for the pro­cure­ment of staff or con­sul­tant services.

Tlaib’s pro­pos­al is on point. Her res­o­lu­tion does not out­line spe­cif­ic arti­cles of impeach­ment. It sim­ply sig­nals that the time has come to begin the nec­es­sary process. It is this process that will iden­ti­fy the offens­es that might form the basis for arti­cles the Judiciary Committee and the House could consider.While many in Congress remain cau­tious, the American peo­ple under­stand the wis­dom of Tlaib’s pro­pos­al. Last week, she and Congressman Al Green, the Texas Democrat who has been a stal­wart cham­pi­on of pres­i­den­tial account­abil­i­ty, accept­ed a flash dri­ve con­tain­ing 10 mil­lion sig­na­tures on dig­i­tal peti­tions call­ing for an impeach­ment inquiry. MoveOn, CREDO Mobile, Need to Impeach, Women’s March, By the People, Change​.org, Democracy for America, and Free Speech for People have sup­port­ed the call, which will be ampli­fied this week by activists in DC and nation­wide. “Ten mil­lion peo­ple said that we need to hold this pres­i­dent account­able. I think that speaks vol­umes,” says Rashida Tlaib. “Ten mil­lion peo­ple want us to uphold the United States Constitution.”


ohn Nichols wrote the fore­word for the book The Constitution Demands It: The Case for the Impeachment of Donald Trump (Melville House) by Ron Fein, John Bonifaz, and Ben Clements.


http://​then​ation​.com/​a​r​t​i​c​l​e​/​r​a​s​h​i​d​a​-​t​l​a​i​b​-​d​o​n​a​l​d​-​t​r​u​m​p​-​i​m​p​e​a​c​h​m​e​nt/

The PNP was pathet­ic on crime, for­mer min­is­ter of National Security Peter Bunting in exas­per­a­tion and total­ly clue­less, infa­mous­ly stat­ed, that the Island’s crime sit­u­a­tion need­ed divine inter­ven­tion.
That com­ment was not only stu­pid, it demon­strat­ed that they were out of their league.
Nevertheless, the Andrew Holness Administration has been in office for three years.
He and his Government owns this mess, there can no longer be the nar­ra­tive that they inher­it­ed this. Regardless of what the JLP inher­it­ed, it is in Government. It was elect­ed to fix the prob­lem, this is not the Opposition par­ty’s prob­lem, it is the Administration’s prob­lem, and it is going the oppo­site direc­tion of where it needs to be.

One can eas­i­ly under­stand the con­dem­na­tion which came down on the head of Ackaisha Green who was inside the ATM at Central Police Station on East Queen Street in down­town Kingston when she found a bag filled with mon­ey and turned it over to the police.
After all, even finan­cial­ly well to do peo­ple could hard­ly be expect­ed to do what Ackaisha did.
According to reports the young moth­er had every rea­son to take the mon­ey, being of very mod­est means her­self, but she chose to do the right thing.
The most dif­fi­cult thing for Ms. Green must have come from her own moth­er who berat­ed her for return­ing the mil­lions hav­ing ear­li­er asked her for $200.
Thankfully a flood of pledges of sup­port has been com­ing in for Ms. Green both local­ly and over­seas.
There is still some­thing to cel­e­brate in Jamaica, even more, con­se­quen­tial in my opin­ion, the hon­est 24-year-old is from the rugged inner city and not from uptown. Read the sto­ry here;
https://caribbean​news​den​.com/​2​0​1​9​/​0​5​/​0​8​/​j​a​m​a​i​c​a​-​h​o​n​e​s​t​y​-​p​a​y​s​-​o​f​f​-​f​o​r​-​w​o​m​a​n​-​w​h​o​-​h​a​n​d​e​d​-​o​v​e​r​-​m​i​l​l​i​o​n​s​-​i​n​-​c​a​s​h​-​f​o​u​n​d​-​a​t​-​a​tm/

In the Book of Matthew Chapter 13 vs 1 – 9 Jesus nar­rat­ed the para­ble of the sow­er who went out to sow seeds. According to the sto­ry “A farmer went out to sow his seed. ⁴ As he was scat­ter­ing the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. ⁵ Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quick­ly, because the soil was shal­low. ⁶ But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they with­ered because they had no root. ⁷ Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants. ⁸ Still oth­er seed fell on good soil, where it pro­duced a crop — a hun­dred, six­ty or thir­ty times what was sown. ⁹ Whoever has ears, let them hear.” 

I always mar­veled at the alacrity and effec­tive­ness with which Jamaica’s teach­ers picked up the pace after inde­pen­dence, effec­tive­ly doing a ter­rif­ic job of edu­cat­ing the Island’s chil­dren mak­ing our peo­ple who want­ed to learn, sec­ond to none across the globe.
Accordingly, we have excelled in the areas of Athletics and cul­ture, even though it could be argued that cul­tur­al­ly we are on the wane.
In all of the good things which we have accom­plished, we have made some hor­ri­ble mis­takes even as we claim to make them for the good of the nation.
It is stun­ning that we con­tin­ue to place the cart before the horse. Even when peo­ple with the pow­er of per­cep­tion say, “hey you got it all wrong’, col­lec­tive­ly, rather than turn the thing around we dou­ble down on stupid.

I always mar­veled at the sow­er in Matthew 13, why did­n’t he wait until he found good soil? Why did he flail away hop­ing for the best with the pre­cious seeds he had? Could it be that he too did not under­stand that in order to reap a har­vest, cer­tain things had to be done right, begin­ning with find­ing good fer­tile soil on which to scat­ter his seeds?
As the sow­er care­less­ly scat­tered the pre­cious seeds, so too have Jamaica’s polit­i­cal lead­ers squan­dered scarce resources sup­pos­ed­ly in the quest to end vio­lent crimes across the nation.
Whether it be (SOE’s) State Of Emergency, (ZOSO) Zones Of Special Operations, the Creation of (INDECOM) The Supposed Independent Commission Of Investigations, (OPD) Office Of Public Defender, and the long litany of oth­er catchy Acronym’s we have become so enam­ored with, the cart has been coun­ter­in­tu­itive­ly placed before the horse.

As we have seen in the para­ble, the sow­er wast­ed pre­cious resources by not fol­low­ing any mean­ing­ful process. So too has Jamaica decide to demol­ish the police depart­men­t’s abil­i­ty to effec­tive­ly deal with the ter­ror threat on the Island.
Before you sow seeds the land must be cleared, plowed, fer­til­ized and watered. After that, the seeds should be cov­ered, because make no mis­take about it, the birds will eat the seeds if they are left uncov­ered, regard­less of where they are sown.
Only then can there be a rea­son­able expec­ta­tion of a good har­vest com­men­su­rate with the invest­ment.
Both the past PNP and present JLP admin­is­tra­tion have in some case unwit­ting­ly, and in oth­er cas­es arbi­trar­i­ly, gone about deal­ing with the nations crime prob­lem as the sow­er did.
They did so care­less­ly, naive­ly and in the case of the Andrew Holness Administration, mali­cious­ly, reck­less­ly and sur­rep­ti­tious­ly gone after the police depart­ment under the guise of cre­at­ing a new police force.
Without doubt, this half-ass strat­e­gy has embold­ened crim­i­nals to step up their activ­i­ties with the full knowl­edge that the Government will not tol­er­ate the police going after the nations killers.

The strat­e­gy of using ZOSO’s and SOE’s are half-ass strate­gies designed to flood com­mu­ni­ties with the bod­ies of secu­ri­ty forces per­son­nel, cre­at­ing a faux-peace with the sole intent of using what­ev­er ben­e­fits are derived from it as polit­i­cal fod­der.
ZOSO’s and SOE’s do noth­ing to stop the killings in gen­er­al, they do noth­ing to low­er crime across the board. At best they are unsus­tain­able geo­graph­i­cal band-aid which lessen the mas­sive bleed­ing in that Geographical area tem­porar­i­ly, while increas­ing it in oth­er areas.
How can a Prime Minister tell law enforce­ment offi­cers that the days of kick­ing in doors are over? That kind of rhetoric is a gov­ern­men­tal license to crim­i­nals to rest assured they are pro­tect­ed.
Yet, that has been Andrew Holness’ mantra and the crim­i­nals are watch­ing in glee. The crim­i­nal under­world cheers their legal arm INDECOM, which works over­time for their pro­tec­tion.
In a shock­ing depar­ture from past pro­to­col, Andrew Holness has cre­at­ed in our coun­try, a per­cep­tion that a hard-nosed approach to enforce­ment is tan­ta­mount and sim­i­lar to abuse of cit­i­zens rights.
It is igno­rant, it is hyper­bol­ic, and it is dan­ger­ous com­ing from that office.
Not only has Holness com­pro­mised the abil­i­ty of the police to do their jobs, but he has also enhanced the abil­i­ty of the mon­grel attack dogs like Terrence Williams and Hamish Campbell to fur­ther frus­trate the efforts of the police to do their jobs.
And now we are see­ing that through that strat­e­gy crim­i­nals are more embold­ened to attack and mur­der police offi­cers.
This Government must take respon­si­bil­i­ty for this and there is no hid­ing from what they created.

The year was 1983 and I wait­ed with bat­ed breath with my col­leagues that after­noon. We were young con­sta­bles, who were to be trans­ferred from the Beat & Foot Patrol Division to sta­tions across the coun­try.
We were told that for the very first time in our Nation’s his­to­ry, offi­cers not trained specif­i­cal­ly for the Mobile Reserve, would be trans­ferred to that Division.
I want­ed no part of the Mobile Reserve, not because there was any­thing wrong with the Mobile Reserve as it were, but my dream of becom­ing a detec­tive would be severe­ly side­tracked, were I among those sent to the Division.
At that time the Police Force Orders was a con­fi­den­tial doc­u­ment between com­mand struc­ture and per­son­nel.
Criminals and their sup­port struc­tures did not know unit strength, they had no idea where offi­cers were to be trans­ferred to, and they damn sure did not have pri­vate and con­fi­den­tial infor­ma­tion of police offi­cers which should be con­fi­den­tial, avail­able only by court order.
It was the lat­ter-day, new age crowd-pleas­ing, Owen Ellington who made that doc­u­ment pub­lic for absolute­ly no good rea­son.
And so that fate­ful day as the Force Orders arrived and we all crowd­ed around a sin­gle copy of the doc­u­ment, I learned that what I had always con­strued to be shit­ty luck, was not about to change in that Force Order. Not on that day.
Mobile Reserve it would be for me. My tears flowed freely. I did not want to go to a unit which was best known for break­ing up riots and doing sta­t­ic duties. I did not want to be a part of a unit which was rumored to be where careers went to die. I joined the force because I want­ed to inves­ti­gate crimes and put crim­i­nals away.
After spend­ing the bet­ter part of four years there includ­ing on the crack super effec­tive Rangers Squad, I grew into becom­ing a proud mem­ber of that famous Division.
My time spent at the Mobile Reserve will for­ev­er be memo­ri­al­ized in my life’s his­to­ry, as one of the most con­se­quen­tial and invalu­able peri­ods of my per­son­al growth and devel­op­ment.
It was what I learned and lived at the Mobile Reserve which saved my life in a dark alley­way on Blackwood Terrace in 88 when at point-blank range, a would-be mur­der­er opened fire on me, two oth­er cops and a civil­ian mem­ber of the com­mu­ni­ty.
The com­mu­ni­ty mem­ber was shot twice and the two cops ran away leav­ing me to fight off the shoot­er.
It was that tac­ti­cal aware­ness which allowed me to dis­arm the assailant even after I was shot, there­by sav­ing the injured man’s life as well as my own.
There was no call from the Commissioner of Police nor any of his min­ions. There was no state­ment of out­rage that some­thing like that could hap­pen in his con­stituen­cy by the mem­ber of Parliament.
He was prob­a­bly ecsta­t­ic, because he had no love for me based on my no-non­sense approach to the low-life scum­bags who oper­at­ed out of his con­stituen­cy.
There was no nation­al hon­or, I was back to my beloved CIB office the next day.
Back then that is what we did, that is who we were. We were made that way. 

It is rather dif­fi­cult to break through the self-assured igno­rance and the inces­sant gib­ber­ish of a plu­ral­i­ty of our peo­ple.
It is near impos­si­ble to con­vince our peo­ple to seek facts, then insert their opin­ions, rather than to hard­en their own pre­con­ceived notions and opin­ions, ignor­ing facts which sur­face lat­er.
As a Jamaican, I too had to come to grips with the real­i­ty that we are extra­or­di­nar­i­ly opin­ion­at­ed, even when we have no access to facts, we cre­ate our own nar­ra­tives then fend off the truth of what­ev­er top­ic is under dis­cus­sion.
I also learned that truth in our coun­try is processed depend­ing on the teller.
Our polit­i­cal, reli­gious, soci­etal and oth­er beliefs struc­tures, large­ly inform how we process infor­ma­tion.
They deter­mine whether fac­tu­al infor­ma­tion find fer­tile space in our sub-con­scious or are dis­card­ed and replaced with our pre­con­ceived notions and opinions.

And so even though infor­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy has made it pos­si­ble to rad­i­cal­ly trans­form dark spaces of igno­rance into bright hemi­spheres of light, there are some who will ignore the real­i­ty of avail­able cred­i­ble infor­ma­tion, choos­ing instead the default option of stale and ran­cid opin­ion-based non­sense.
I had one such con­ver­sa­tion yes­ter­day with a man who tells me that his girl­friend is a cop back home. He pro­ceed­ed to lam­baste the police even though he had just told me that his girl­friend is a police offi­cer with over twen­ty years of ser­vice.
I quick­ly real­ized he was one of the pro­grammed opin­ion­at­ed facts-be-damned types, so I lim­it­ed what I said and allowed him enough lever­age to hang himself.

He pro­ceed­ed to tell me that Jamaican police are lazy and that they need to work more hours. This gen­tle­man knows I am a for­mer law enforce­ment offi­cer, and he was stand­ing in my busi­ness-place telling me this.
I asked him whether he thought his girl­friend was lazy he said ‘no,” she works hard.
I asked him, “do you con­sid­er me lazy, “when­ev­er you come here, I am here work­ing, I led”? he replied in the neg­a­tive.
He then went into the canned nar­ra­tive about police sta­tions being closed at nights in Jamaica.
I asked whether he had ever gone to a police sta­tion for help and not received assis­tance, whether night or day, he respond­ed no.
I then asked him whether the two precinct hous­es with­in a three miles radius of where we were stand­ing were opened at nights, or does one have to enter and speak to an offi­cer through an inter­com, he respond­ed they are closed.
I end­ed my con­ver­sa­tion with him there.
As a young offi­cer, I worked so hard some­times my hands shook for lack of sleep. Nevertheless, we have a coun­try which has come of age on an inces­sant anti-police drum­beat.
One made pos­si­ble by the likes of Wilmott Perkins, Ronald Thwaites, Barbara Gloudon, Garnett Roper, Cliff Hughes, and oth­ers.
A dem­a­gog­ic cliché of self-serv­ing trai­tors to our coun­try, who like ter­mites ate away at the foun­da­tions of the rule of law, and now the very foun­da­tions of our embry­on­ic democ­ra­cy are at the per­il of crumbling.

Jamaica wants to become a devel­oped coun­try but it woe­ful­ly lacks crit­i­cal think­ing among those who lead to ever be a seri­ous con­tender for that des­ig­na­tion.
Jamaicans like to point to the Singaporean mod­el as a mod­el which copied strains of our sys­tem, yet what the Singaporeans did to arrive at where they are, have com­plete­ly elud­ed Jamaicans.
There is no rea­son that Jamaica’s Tourism, Bauxite, reg­gae, Ganja, Coffee, our rich fer­tile soil in which every­thing thrives and the dynamism of our peo­ple should not make us the Dubai of the Caribbean and the envy of the world.
Unfortunately, the Island can nev­er be that, because at best we are a peo­ple who rather like to hear our­selves talk.
We are giant pon­tif­i­ca­tors and prog­nos­ti­ca­tors, nev­er mind that when we do both we some­times have no idea what we are talk­ing about.

The idea to dis­man­tle the Mobile Reserve has been one of their goals all along.
The ele­va­tion of Carolyn Gomes to rel­e­vance in the way our laws are struc­tured to go after mur­der­ers and gang­sters, the cre­ation of INDECOM and the appoint­ment of rabid anti-police dem­a­gogue Terrence Williams and the British Imposter Hamish Campbell.
A man who did noth­ing to inves­ti­gate his cor­rupt for­mer col­leagues who plant­ed evi­dence on black peo­ple in England, is proof that they want­ed to dis­man­tle the force.
So when Horace Chang referred to the Police Department as a glo­ri­fied secu­ri­ty guard com­pa­ny, don’t believe for one moment that was a slip of the tongue.
Don’t believe for one moment that Andrew Holness’ con­stant state­ments, that, “no longer would police be kick­ing in doors”, were made in the abstract.
He knew all along that he want­ed to car­ry out the man­date of Bruce Golding before him. He want­ed to fin­ish what Golding start­ed with INDECOM, and the acqui­es­cence of the PNP, tells its own sto­ry of cor­rup­tion and deceit.
Throughout its his­to­ry, the Mobile Reserve has stood as a bas­tion of solace to free­dom lov­ing law abid­ing Jamaicans.
True to form, those who would mur­der and maim had it out for that unit, none more so than the filthy scum­bags who pass for politi­cians but are suit-wear­ing gang­sters.
Imagine a coun­try in which the mem­ber of par­lia­ment with the most vio­lent gar­ri­son in his con­stituen­cy is the Minister with the respon­si­bil­i­ty to quell the nation’s crime epi­dem­ic.
And so they devise a plan to destroy the force while telling the nation that they intend to rebrand it, what they do not say is that the peo­ple who will staff the new and improved force will not be com­ing from China or Mars, they will come from the very same 84% cor­rupt Jamaica, so clear­ly that method­ol­o­gy is a fake and a fraud.
The clear and unequiv­o­cal intent of Andrew Holness and his Administration is to dis­man­tle the JCF and replace it with a [cour­tesy corp of degreed]stooges who talk a good game, but have no clue how to han­dle the Nation’s rapid­ly grow­ing mur­der­ous gangs.

At the end of the day dis­man­tling bas­tions of cer­ti­tude only to cre­ate the illu­so­ry effect that you are mak­ing changes is a solace to fools. How can you puri­fy water by mov­ing the same dirty water to a dif­fer­ent ves­sel? The bright young offi­cers they are talk­ing about are peo­ple steeped in UWI phi­los­o­phy of human rights. They have zero strate­gies, skills or will to stamp out crime and so they intend to per­fume the shit while the peo­ple are being slaugh­tered dai­ly.
It can­not con­tin­ue that peo­ple are being slaugh­tered every day while the PM and his Government with the full acqui­es­cence of the Opposition par­ty tears down the police depart­ment and make it out to be the bad guys. The police have been set up to fail from the get-go, first, they pro­mote fools and lack­eys and polit­i­cal lap­dogs, then they pro­mote slav­ish yes-peo­ple, effec­tive­ly forc­ing out ded­i­cate good career peo­ple and now they have peo­ple with more degrees that they have guns at up park camp but none of it has helped. The Prime min­is­ter and Chang who runs the most killer gar­ri­son (laugh­able) tell Antony Anderson to reduce the force to noth­ing, that is the rea­son he was hired. Anderson in his igno­rance said he hopes to see the day when all police offi­cers are human rights offi­cers. What absurd igno­rance? Every real per­son who stepped for­ward to be a cop was already a human rights activists, they place their lives on the line for peo­ple they do not know. Which of the so-called human rights activists in the coun­try can claim that they have ever been shot at, much less shot, defend­ing any­one’s right to life (their most sacred right)? But Anderson would nev­er under­stand it because he is a fake cop, and the peo­ple above him are police haters. 

The only thing that the PNP and the JLP agree on, is some­thing that is anti­thet­i­cal to the good of the coun­try.
That thing is the total destruc­tion of the Jamaica Constabulary Force.
Through the Starving of the Department of resources, Support to gang­sters in the Garrisons, Interference in law enforce­ment, set­ting up oth­er gov­ern­ment agen­cies to be antag­o­nis­tic toward the police, and a raft of oth­er sub­ver­sive meth­ods, both crim­i­nal gangs have effec­tive­ly destroyed the once proud agency.
This they did with the glee­ful assis­tance of some in civ­il soci­ety and the media.
Make no mis­take about it, a com­pe­tent non-aligned police force is a dan­ger­ous force to the crim­i­nals who sit in the peo­ple’s house.
As my friend said to me today, the law-mak­ers are the law­break­ers, but for the most part, the peo­ple are too stu­pid and brain­washed to see it.
That is why there is no longer any hol­ler­ing from the PNP about Petrojam.
If a thor­ough and pro­fes­sion­al inves­ti­ga­tion was to be done many in both polit­i­cal gangs would die in prison.
So some­one high up in the PNP hier­ar­chy told them to lay off the issue.
A total and com­pete bunch of scum, but then again why would either of these sets of gang­sters stop with their crim­i­nal­i­ty?
Where there is no wis­dom the peo­ple per­ish.
Those of you who think that this new cour­tesy corp that Andrew Holness and Horace Chang with the con­sent of the PNP is cre­at­ing, will stop the blood­shed in your com­mu­ni­ties think again.
Neither of these sets of gang­sters cares about the close to 1700, who are mur­dered each year.
Neither do they care about your daugh­ters being raped and dis­card­ed like thrash by the ani­mals who pose as human men.
But then again you get what you deserve.

John Singleton, who made his direc­to­r­i­al debut with the acclaimed film “Boyz n the Hood” about young men strug­gling in a gang-rid­den Los Angeles neigh­bor­hood, died on Monday at the age of 51, his fam­i­ly said, days after he suf­fered a stroke.

“We are sad to relay that John Singleton has died,” the fam­i­ly said in a state­ment. “John passed away peace­ful­ly, sur­round­ed by his fam­i­ly and friends.“Earlier on Monday, the fam­i­ly said it had made the “ago­niz­ing deci­sion” to with­draw life sup­port from Singleton, who was being cared for at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles since hav­ing a stroke on April 17.

Singleton was a native of South Central Los Angeles, the com­mu­ni­ty that was the set­ting for “Boyz n the Hood,” a dra­ma about friend­ship amid the per­il of gang violence.He became the first African-American and the youngest per­son to be nom­i­nat­ed for an Academy award for best direc­tor, at age 24, for the movie, which he also wrote. 

Singleton lat­er direct­ed films such as action film “2 Fast 2 Furious” and his­tor­i­cal dra­ma “Rosewood.” He also direct­ed episodes of TV shows includ­ing “Empire” and “Billions.“Most recent­ly, Singleton was the co-cre­ator and exec­u­tive pro­duc­er of FX net­work TV series “Snowfall” about the start of the cocaine epi­dem­ic in Los Angeles. 

His fam­i­ly said Singleton was “a pro­lif­ic, ground-break­ing direc­tor who changed the game and opened doors in Hollywood, a world that was just a few miles away, yet worlds away, from the neigh­bor­hood in which he grew up.“He also “loved noth­ing more than giv­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties to new tal­ent” includ­ing Tupac Shakur, Regina King, Ice Cube and Taraji P. Henson, the fam­i­ly said. 

Hollywood celebri­ties paid trib­ute to Singleton on Monday.“John was a brave artist and a true inspi­ra­tion. His vision changed every­thing,” film­mak­er Jordan Peele wrote on Twitter. 

(Reporting by Lisa Richwine;
https://news.yahoo.com/u‑film-director-john-singleton-taken-off-life-184123922.html;_ylt=AwrC3O94tsdcXXoA9QAPxQt.;_ylu=X3oDMTByMjB0aG5zBGNvbG8DYmYxBHBvcwMxBHZ0aWQDBHNlYwNzYw–

THE GOVERNMENT’S SUPPOSED 5‑BILLION PLAN HAS NO OFFICER ‑SAFETY/WELFARE,COMPONENT.
Mike Beckles.……

In a (JIS)Jamaica Information Service release, the Jamaican Government announced recent­ly that it intends to spend $5 bil­lion in the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF) to bet­ter com­bat crime, while mak­ing it the best police force in the region.
According to the release, the mon­ey will be spent on five(5) key areas.
Opening the ²⁰¹⁹⁄₂₀ Sectoral Debate in the House of Representatives on April 16, Dr. Chang said the mon­ey will be spent on five key areas.
These include rebuild­ing and retro­fitting of police sta­tions into mod­ern cit­i­zen-friend­ly spaces; upgrad­ing of police com­mu­ni­ca­tion sys­tems; intro­duc­ing tech­nol­o­gy as a force mul­ti­pli­er; improv­ing police mobil­i­ty; and inter­nal restruc­tur­ing and expand­ed train­ing of police offi­cers.
In a 
He said the Government is work­ing to ensure that all police sta­tions will be brought up to “min­i­mum stan­dards” over the next two years.

At the risk of being imme­di­ate­ly lam­pooned as a Debbie-down­er by the hyper-par­ti­sans who can­not under­stand any­thing out­side orange and green, I must say that I am dis­ap­point­ed that I haven’t seen any­thing in the allo­ca­tion which rec­og­nizes the need for cops to be paid a liv­able wage.
But I get that, this is Jamaica we are talk­ing about, there is no respect for law enforce­ment offi­cers, truth­ful­ly, there is scant respect for the rule of law, but I digress.
I want to go on record here and make some dire pre­dic­tions regard­ing the specifics of a few of the plan as laid out by Horace Chang the Minister of National Security.
If this does not shock you into a recog­ni­tion that the pol­i­cy­mak­ers are going back­ward I have no idea what will.
Without going into the speci­fici­ty of where the fund­ing is com­ing from, here is the prob­lem with the decision-making.

Part of Horace Chang’s statements.

“Not only are we rebuild­ing and retro­fitting par­tic­u­lar police sta­tions but all sta­tions will be redesigned to look like mod­ern office space,” Dr. Chang said.
He informed that sta­tions will be equipped with appro­pri­ate recep­tion areas for all per­sons who need to access police ser­vices through this medi­um.
“Interview rooms will be designed to ensure pri­va­cy yet trans­paren­cy of the offi­cers record­ing state­ments and the cit­i­zens who come in to file sen­si­tive com­plaints, espe­cial­ly per­sons who come to make reports con­cern­ing inti­mate part­ner vio­lence, domes­tic vio­lence, and sex­u­al abuse,” he said.
He fur­ther not­ed that offi­cers will be enlist­ed in the req­ui­site pub­lic engage­ment pro­grammes, as good cus­tomer ser­vice is as essen­tial as prop­er infra­struc­ture. “All per­sons seek­ing the assis­tance of the police are clients of the Government and we must treat them with the dig­ni­ty they deserve,” he said.

Jamaica is going deep­er and deep­er into a state of no return as it relates to armed gangs. The Island’s Gangs have demon­strat­ed the capac­i­ty and will to tran­si­tion into one pow­er­ful Militia if the moti­va­tion is strong and lucra­tive enough.
Surely this Government and the one it suc­ceed­ed, have learned noth­ing from the events of 2010.
I am lit­er­al­ly cer­tain that they did not con­sult with a sin­gle senior per­son in the Police Department, to get their input or ideas and or con­cerns regard­ing how these sta­tions are to be con­fig­ured and retro­fit­ted. You know, since they are the ones who have the lived expe­ri­ences?
Apart from the fact that there seems to be noth­ing in that large allo­ca­tion for the offi­cers them­selves, the Government seems hell-bent on in its desire to avoid real­i­ty and con­tin­ue on a break­neck pace to do every­thing oppo­site of whats required.

Just two days ago, dur­ing Easter, on the Island of Sri Lanka mil­i­tants attacked hotels and places of wor­ship with bombs. Over 300 peo­ple were mur­dered.
Over the years Jamaica’s police sta­tions have been attacked and pep­pered with auto­mat­ic weapons fire. Police sta­tions have been burned and offi­cers killed in the process.
These attacks came after threats against the lives of the police but more sin­is­ter, after heav­i­ly armed thugs have made the deci­sion to take up arms against the state.
It is against this back­ground that the Government has decid­ed to embark on a process of cre­at­ing police sta­tions which will fur­ther place the lives of the nation’s police offi­cers in grave dan­ger under the guise of cre­at­ing cit­i­zen friend­ly spaces.
No deci­sion is made with the best inter­est of the peo­ple tasked in secur­ing the nation in mind.
The arro­gance of Horace Chang, and the oth­er pol­i­cy­mak­ers is pal­pa­ble. The bla­tant dis­re­gard for best prac­tices and for­ward think­ing is astounding.

It is not the most ide­al sit­u­a­tion but it is nec­es­sary, police sta­tions must be con­fig­ured with offi­cer safe­ty in mind over all else.
It is incom­pre­hen­si­ble that these politi­cians could be so brain-dead and utter­ly dis­re­spect­ful of the rights and secu­ri­ty of the police, that they would embark on such a project of this mag­ni­tude with­out first estab­lish­ing what will be the needs of the police going into the future.
This is not just an issue of dis­re­spect of the police. It tran­scends that. Not only will it place the lives of offi­cers in grave dan­ger it fur­ther com­pli­cates the nation’s del­i­cate eco­nom­ic sit­u­a­tion as changes will need to be made lat­er after attacks and killings occur in their own sta­tion­hous­es, as it is sure to hap­pen.
The state­ments attrib­uted to Horace Chang above sounds real­ly good but those sen­ti­ments are rep­re­sen­ta­tive of a time past, half a cen­tu­ry ago.
The idea of state of the art facil­i­ties designed as mod­ern office spaces, are reflec­tive a more tran­quil time when peo­ple were not enter­ing police sta­tions and shoot­ing police offi­cers and burn­ing police sta­tions.
This is not state of the art idea, it is, state of the past débâ­cle.
Creating appro­pri­ate accom­mo­da­tions for the pub­lic is noble, but it is clear that none of the delib­er­a­tions (if any) or con­sid­er­a­tions are done with the most impor­tant peo­ple, the human ele­ment in mind.

In the United States when you walk into most police sta­tions you have to inter­act with an offi­cer using an inter­com sys­tem. After they are sat­is­fied that you are not there to mur­der them, they decide on how you enter the facil­i­ty and is ush­ered to where you need to get to.
Say what you want but this is not where we are com­ing from it is where we are going.
Except in Jamaica, it seems where the tail always wags the Dog.

These are not inci­dents of abstrac­tion, they are real and present inci­dents which are reflec­tive of a chang­ing envi­ron­ment.
In 2016 shots were fired at two police sta­tions in the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department’s North District. Indiana is not known as a state in which there a hotbed of resent­ment against police.
Nevertheless, that did not pre­vent assailants from open­ing fire at two sep­a­rate facilities. 

After the shoot­ings, a large group of pub­lic offi­cials gath­ered in sup­port of the police. Officials sug­gest­ed then that the shoot­ings could be in retal­i­a­tion for a recent crack­down on drug deal­ers.
When police sta­tions are attacked in Jamaica, no pub­lic offi­cial turn up in sup­port of the police, even in cas­es where offi­cers are shot and killed.
No respect is paid to their sac­ri­fice and the despi­ca­ble frauds who pose as lead­ers dis­hon­or them by not even show­ing up to pay respects to their honor.

It is not too much to ask that the nation’s lead­ers begin to show respect to law enforce­ment offi­cers. The pol­i­cy­mak­ers are not above the laws and they deserve not one ounce of def­er­ence not giv­en to the police.
The coun­try will be embark­ing on a process of build­ing a new Parliament build­ing soon, every pre­cau­tion will be made to secure it so that the 63 bums who sit in the low­er house and those in the upper cham­ber, of both polit­i­cal gangs, are secure.
If the police can­not be secure in their places of work the par­lia­ment build­ing should be no more secure than a police sta­tion is.
Politicians of both polit­i­cal gangs should be exposed to the very same degree of dan­ger, so that gun­shots can burn their skins as it does the aver­age Jamaican.
This is an outrage.….

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Let me just come out and say it, though not a fan of the PNP, Portia Simpson Miller, the not so edu­cat­ed, but savvy for­mer par­ty President and two times Prime Minister of Jamaica has demon­strat­ed that her polit­i­cal savvy is vast­ly supe­ri­or to [Peter Phillips’] Ph.D.
Portia was a pop­ulist, those char­ac­ter­is­tics are not easy to repli­cate. In fact, some sug­gest either you have it or you don’t.
So, it is small won­der that Damion Crawford can­not win a seat in the low­er cham­ber of the House of Representatives but he is sec­ond only to Simpson Miller in that par­ty. Popularity is some­thing you have or you don’t.
On the oth­er hand, Peter Phillips, a Ph.D. has stum­bled along mak­ing mis­take after mis­take since tak­ing the reins of the PNP.
Clearly, Phillips’ edu­ca­tion is not being man­i­fest­ed in the strate­gies he has embarked on, or the hills he has cho­sen to die on.
Does Peter Phillips not under­stand that the role of a respon­si­ble oppo­si­tion is not just to oppose but to be a part of a respon­si­ble Government?

If Peter Phillips was attuned to his role in the gov­ern­ment not mere­ly to oppose, he would know that his role is to help the gov­ern­ing par­ty to fine-tune leg­is­la­tion and offer advice for effec­tive gov­er­nance of the peo­ple.
Why would Peter Phillips oppose the con­tin­u­a­tion of the Zones Of Special Operation (ZOSO) in the Parish of St James which was sav­ing lives?
Why would Mister Phillips oppose the ini­tia­tive, which though not sus­tain­able, was sav­ing lives?
In Greek Mythology, the myth­i­cal King Midas had a wish that what­ev­er he touched would turn to Gold. The fic­ti­tious nar­ra­tive indi­cat­ed that King Midas got his wish but it turned out it was not all it cracked up to be.
On that score, Dr. Phillips is turn­ing to be the anti-Midas, the oppo­site of King Midas.
It appears that every­thing that Mister Phillips touch­es turns to dust, and maybe that was the rea­son that he found him­self at a work site on Hagley Park Road where unprece­dent­ed devel­op­ment is hap­pen­ing which will pro­pel Jamaica far into the 21^st cen­tu­ry.
After meet­ing with one busi­ness­woman in the area and cre­at­ing a video of her com­plaints Mister Phillips post­ed the fol­low­ing on social media.

[Quote] After being in busi­ness for 24 years, Charmaine Lee was about to throw in the tow­el’ because of the effects of the bad­ly admin­is­tered road­works on Hagley Park Road on her busi­ness. There are many more sto­ries like this. We are com­mit­ted to fight­ing for the peo­ple.# PNPforthePeople#PNPatwork.

Most of the com­ments in response to Mister Phillips’ post were less than com­pli­men­ta­ry.
I asked the Opposition leader: Mister Phillips, How exact­ly is the new infra­struc­ture sup­posed to be put in place with­out the incon­ve­niences?
Why is Peter Phillips there?
If you were in pow­er what would you have done dif­fer­ent­ly?
Mister Phillips was gra­cious by respond­ing to my inquiries, respond­ing thus.

I am there in my capac­i­ty as MP and ser­vant and advo­cate of the peo­ple. I have expe­ri­ence in this area being a for­mer Minister of Transport and Works. One of the basic prin­ci­ples of road­works is to secure all the lands that you need before start­ing. This was not done. Therefore, pro­long­ing the dis­rup­tions and incon­ve­niences expe­ri­enced by the busi­ness own­ers and res­i­dents. [Peter Phillips]

I respect­ed the fact that the Opposition Leader respond­ed to our ques­tions and we respect his point of view as well, but my response to the esteemed Opposition leader was the same as my response when I start­ed this arti­cle.
“Minister Phillips, as leader of the PNP, and a mem­ber of Parliament, I would rather see you and your par­ty in a role in which you under­stand that you are a part of the Government. By those mea­sures, explain to the peo­ple, and help the gov­ern­ment to fine-tune this young democ­ra­cy. [Michael Beckles]

It isn’t that the con­cerns of that busi­ness­woman Charmaine Lee are mer­it-less. Surely, the (Jamaican Government) PNP & JLP can come togeth­er to ensure there is leg­is­la­tion which ade­quate­ly takes care of prop­er­ty own­ers before build­ing out Infrastructure.
The Americans have ( Imminent Domain Laws) to pro­tect prop­er­ty own­ers from Government abuse. It is less than per­fect.
Surely the two par­ties can come togeth­er for the good of the peo­ple to ensure that busi­ness own­ers like Ms. Lee and oth­ers ‚are not dri­ven into bank­rupt­cy, when the gov­ern­ment is putting infra­struc­ture in place.Phillips a dinosaur of the pro­fes­sion has a role in this.
In America, they show up and start dig­ging and there is noth­ing that busi­ness own­ers can do about it.
But even though it is hard­ly per­fect in the most pow­er­ful coun­try in the world, we do expect that the (3) ‑year-old JLP Government is sup­posed to have the answers for all of those prob­lems.
I implore the good­ly Mister Phillips, to see him­self as a part of the Government.
In our coun­try, it is com­mon for the oppo­si­tion par­ty to see itself as divorced from the Government, it should not be so.
The Opposition par­ty is a part of the gov­ern­ment and should start act­ing as if it knows it.

In the Parliament two days ago the Prime Minister of Jamaica said that no one would suc­cess­ful­ly accuse nei­ther he nor his Administration of abus­ing the rights of the Jamaican peo­ple.
A noble com­ment to come from a politi­cian, con­sid­er­ing that politi­cians can hard­ly be trust­ed to be judi­cious with the pow­er they are giv­en.
Before you cel­e­brate the Prime Minister, how­ev­er, I urge you to pause just for a sec­ond as I out­line the con­text under which he made the state­ment and out­line the imprac­ti­cal­i­ty of that state­ment when jux­ta­posed against the nation’s present crime reality. 

The hon­or­able Prime Minister was respond­ing to the infan­tile heck­ling in the peo­ple’s house from a mem­ber of the Opposition PNP regard­ing the recent court rul­ing on the National Identification and Registration Act 2017.
The tragedy inher­ent for Jamaica, is that the Opposition PNP in its glee to sab­o­tage the Administration and regain pow­er has no com­punc­tion about throw­ing the Jamaican peo­ple to the wolves, and cer­tain­ly is uncon­cerned about the ongo­ing loss of lives or the fact that the National Identification and Registration Act 2017 could poten­tial­ly be a tool for good.
Likewise, the Governing Administration of the JLP and Prime Minister Andrew Holness are not par­tic­u­lar­ly per­turbed about the dai­ly slaugh­ter of the Jamaican peo­ple.
What the Holness Administration is con­cerned about is perception.

Now, I would like to speak to the Prime Minister’s state­ment in response to the PNP’s glee­ful behav­ior regard­ing the court’s deci­sion.
Before I do I must point out to the Jamaican peo­ple who read these pages, to under­stand that the People’s National Party has one objec­tive and that is to regain state pow­er.
The PNP will sab­o­tage the gov­ern­ment you elect­ed and it will sub­vert the process under the guise that it cares about your rights when what it actu­al­ly wants is to keep the coun­try back­ward and in the dark ages, ripe for its own manipulation.

There is much that the present Administration has to be proud of. The Jamaican stock mar­ket is being cel­e­brat­ed as among the best if not the best in the world. As a con­se­quence, the Island’s bright young and artic­u­late Finance Minister Nigel Clarke has been mak­ing the rounds and tak­ing vic­to­ry laps on American Television recent­ly.
The mod­est 2% growth rate the Island’s econ­o­my is expe­ri­enc­ing is a far cry from the 0.02% under the PNP, and for that, the Administration must be cred­it­ed.
Additionally, for the first time in my life­time, there has been a bud­get pre­sen­ta­tion to the Jamaican peo­ple in which no new oner­ous tax­a­tion has been imposed on the over­bur­dened tax­pay­ers.
Accordingly, more Jamaicans are able to find employ­ment and the Tourism sec­tor is expe­ri­enc­ing unprece­dent­ed lev­els of vis­i­tors.
But like in the United States in which the stock mar­ket has been on a tear and more peo­ple are able to find work those indices, though good for the spread­sheets does not reflect what’s hap­pen­ing to the ordi­nary every­day citizen.

What the Prime Minister is miss­ing is that as focused as he is on the bal­ance sheet, there is anoth­er bal­ance sheet that he has ignored by which he will be judged, regard­less of what the eco­nom­ic num­bers end up say­ing.
What the Prime Minister has con­sis­tent­ly missed, is that we are liv­ing in a dif­fer­ent time.
A time which is far removed from the indoc­tri­na­tion he and oth­ers, includ­ing the bunch of frauds who pre­tend to be human rights activists, received from the (UWI).
Andrew Holness’ [Commissioner] who speaks on behalf of the Police, equal­ly mis­guid­ed, recent­ly declared that he believes he will see the day in which all police offi­cers will be human rights activists

As I out­lined in a pre­vi­ous Article, Antony Anderson lacks the most basic, yet fun­da­men­tal under­stand­ing of what con­sti­tutes a police offi­cer. Because he has nev­er been one, and the cir­cles in which he has oper­at­ed all his life has been hos­tile to those who actu­al­ly enforce the nation’s laws.
As such, his state­ment should be ignored, if it did not car­ry such dan­ger­ous sig­nif­i­cance for the Jamaican peo­ple.
Every per­son who steps forth with the right mind­set to becom­ing a police offi­cer is already a human rights activist.
There is no greater sac­ri­fice that any man could give than to lay down his life for his broth­er.
Every police offi­cer who dons a uni­form knows that he/​she may be killed sole­ly on the basis of being a police offi­cer.
That he/​she may become a sac­ri­fice for oth­ers they have nev­er met.
Tell me then which mouth­piece which par­rots [human rights] in our coun­try has made that sac­ri­fice?
Which one of the glo­ri­fied frauds who pon­tif­i­cate about human rights, has ever been killed defend­ing the rights of oth­ers?
And so I say shut your mouths about Human Rights.
No greater right has any­one man than the right to life. On that note, the Government, Opposition and the litany of frauds in that fra­ter­ni­ty have been exposed for what they are, liars and deceivers.

The dai­ly slaugh­ter of the Jamaican peo­ple while the Opposition PNP tries to score polit­i­cal points, and the GOVERNMENT refus­es to do what it is con­sti­tu­tion­al­ly oblig­at­ed to do, is a sear­ing indict­ment of the cor­ro­sive com­plic­i­ty and moral deca­dence of the two polit­i­cal par­ties.
They know that what the Nation faces with the heav­i­ly armed gags have long passed just a crime prob­lem.
They know that this is exis­ten­tial, not just to the peo­ple but to the state itself.
Unfortunately, for the Jamaican peo­ple, both the JLP and PNP are more con­cerned with hold­ing and acquir­ing state pow­er and the poten­tial deriv­a­tives from the same, than they are about the dai­ly shed­ding of inno­cent blood.
They duplic­i­tous­ly con­spire to fool the peo­ple that police offi­cers ask­ing to enter their premis­es are abus­ing their rights are in essence abus­ing their rights.
In the same vein, they are con­spic­u­ous­ly silent when the gangs invade and mur­der entire fam­i­lies.
It is the most bla­tant exam­ple of hypocrisy and a barefaced assault on the dig­ni­ty and intel­li­gence of the peo­ple.
Andrew Holness, Peter Phillips, their min­ions, and their anti-Jamaican friends in the Human rights fra­ter­ni­ty has per­pe­trat­ed on the Jamaican peo­ple a dan­ger­ous fraud.
A fraud which is cost­ing the lives of more than (5)Jamaicans each day.

Regardless of the eco­nom­ic num­bers, imag­ine just how well Jamaica could be doing if these two major Political-gangs did not have the Island in the death throes of a stran­gle­hold.
Imagine if Jamaicans had the con­fi­dence to return home con­fi­dent in their safe­ty.
Imagine if investors were con­fi­dent enough to return and invest there­by pro­vid­ing our young peo­ple with employ­ment which offered a liv­ing wage.
Imagine that employ­ment oppor­tu­ni­ties were not just Chinese employ­ment, which is tak­ing us inex­orably back into anoth­er form of bond­ed servi­tude.
How in God’s name can a whole group of peo­ple who claim to be edu­cat­ed, be so blind, deaf, and dumb?

In response to the recent rul­ing of the nation’s high­est court that theNational Identification and Registration Act (NIRA) is uncon­sti­tu­tion­al, I wrote what I thought was sober­ing if not an intel­lec­tu­al response which sim­ply laid out some of what’s at stake now that the law is out.
Chief among the points I raised was the fact that, (a) this (NIDS) issue should not be seen as a par­ti­san issue. (b) The court’s deci­sion should not be viewed with par­ti­san lens­es, as the courts have a duty to rule based on what’s in the con­sti­tu­tion. © Those who peti­tioned the court and received the pos­i­tive rul­ing should not see them­selves as win­ners, nei­ther should the Government see itself as losers, as this is crit­i­cal to the nation’s devel­op­ment. (d) I artic­u­lat­ed a way for­ward which I thought could oper­ate on par­al­lel tracks, vis-a-vis an edu­ca­tion cam­paign which pre­cedes a rewrit­ing of the present leg­is­la­tion and or an amend­ment to the con­sti­tu­tion. (e) in clos­ing, I also laid out in brief, some of the con­se­quences of not hav­ing a nation­al data­base of our cit­i­zens in our present world.

As I pre­dict­ed, but had hoped would not be the case, the court’s rul­ing on this issue fell snug­ly into the crevass­es of our trib­al pol­i­tics. As was to be expect­ed, the conversation/​debate around the issue lacks the mer­it it deserves based on the authen­tic­i­ty of both points of view, replaced with parochial and out­dat­ed polit­i­cal fin­ger-point­ing.
Since the deci­sion was hand­ed down, a group of the Island’s major pri­vate sec­tor orga­ni­za­tions have lent their voic­es by call­ing for the com­mence­ment of the for­mer debate with a view to pass­ing a new piece of leg­is­la­tion which will give the nation a nation­al data­base of its cit­i­zens.
The group includes the Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica (PSOJ), Jamaica Chamber of Commerce (JCC) and Jamaica Exporters and Manufacturers Association (JMEA).
In a joint state­ment, the busi­ness lead­ers said “As it appears that there is polit­i­cal con­sen­sus as to the neces­si­ty for imple­ment­ing a nation­al iden­ti­fi­ca­tion law, we strong­ly urge both polit­i­cal par­ties to imme­di­ate­ly com­mence con­sul­ta­tions, with a view to set­tling the con­tentious dif­fer­ences in the leg­is­la­tion and avoid­ing the pro­vi­sions which offend our con­sti­tu­tion, so as to return a bill to the house and enable a smooth and ear­ly pas­sage.” 

That has been this writ­ers con­tention since the rul­ing. There is no ques­tion that Jamaica, like most oth­er coun­tries, MUST insti­tute a law in which all of her cit­i­zens are known by the state.
This is not lost on the Government, it is not lost on the Business lead­ers, it is not lost on this writer, and it should not be lost on the nation’s oppo­si­tion par­ty.
If the Opposition PNP has legit­i­mate con­cerns about poten­tial human rights abro­ga­tions as it relates to a National Identification Law, it should act respon­si­bly and air out those con­cerns com­men­su­rate with its oblig­a­tions to be a rea­son­able and respon­si­ble Opposition par­ty.
The posi­tion of the Opposition par­ty’s argu­ments should not be brushed aside, nei­ther should the rul­ing of the court be brand­ed polit­i­cal because it is the easy thing to do.
The court’s deci­sion should be viewed as an oppor­tu­ni­ty to sit down and address the parts of the leg­is­la­tion which the court ruled did not pass con­sti­tu­tion­al muster.
If the present con­sti­tu­tion is too archa­ic and inef­fec­tu­al to give cov­er to the (NIDS) leg­is­la­tion, then the nation’s lead­ers have a duty and a respon­si­bil­i­ty to amend the con­sti­tu­tion, or bet­ter yet throw out the whole darn thing.

There is a mind­set in our coun­try that effec­tive­ly latch­es onto things like crus­taceans to a coral reef as the cur­rent bar­rels by, cling­ing ever so des­per­ate­ly even though it is clear that the posi­tion in which it finds itself is not the most ten­able posi­tion.
Now, there is no deny­ing the pri­va­cy con­cerns of many. Governments have not been known to be exact­ly the most hon­or­able stew­ards of the peo­ple’s trust. Additionally, there are reli­gious and con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries in the pub­lic domain about glob­al­ism that this writer is not about to pooh-pooh away.

The web­site (yourgenome​.org )argues The National DNA Database has proved to be a valu­able tool in the fight against crime. However, many peo­ple are con­cerned about how it has evolved from a data­base con­tain­ing genet­ic infor­ma­tion on con­vict­ed crim­i­nals to one that has infor­ma­tion from a much wider group of peo­ple.
The pub­li­ca­tion went on:
The UK National DNA Database holds the DNA^? pro­files and rel­e­vant DNA sam­ples from a select num­ber of UK indi­vid­u­als. It is the largest data­base of its kind in the world and is con­tin­u­ing to grow each year. Every pro­file in the UK National DNA Database is derived from a sam­ple of human mate­r­i­al, such as sali­va or hair, col­lect­ed from a crime scene or police sus­pects.
However, many peo­ple are against the idea of extend­ing the DNA data­base because of the poten­tial threat it has to our pri­va­cy. While a DNA pro­file pro­vides very lit­tle infor­ma­tion about some­one, their DNA sam­ple con­tains infor­ma­tion that can reveal their eth­nic­i­ty or how sus­cep­ti­ble they are to dis­ease. The risk of data abuse is there­fore poten­tial­ly high.

For those on either side of this issue, a look at some of the Information on this site may be pret­ty help­ful in arriv­ing at a more rea­soned and informed posi­tion.
Ultimately though, the trend of cre­at­ing nation­al data­bas­es seems to be the direc­tion the world is head­ing and not where it is mov­ing from.
Subsequently, though (yourgenome​.org ) con­tends that there is no data to sup­port the the­o­ry that hav­ing a nation­al data­base with peo­ple who are not known crim­i­nals helps with solv­ing more crimes, and that it presents a clear dan­ger of false match­es, it also argues the fol­low­ing.
The infor­ma­tion derived from each DNA pro­file can be a pow­er­ful tool in the fight against crime. If a match is made between a DNA pro­file at a crime scene and a DNA pro­file on the data­base, it can help police to iden­ti­fy a pos­si­ble sus­pect quick­ly. They can then use this infor­ma­tion as strong evi­dence to demon­strate an indi­vid­ual is guilty of a crime.
https://​www​.yourgenome​.org/​d​e​b​a​t​e​s​/​i​s​-​i​t​-​e​t​h​i​c​a​l​-​t​o​-​h​a​v​e​-​a​-​n​a​t​i​o​n​a​l​-​d​n​a​-​d​a​t​a​b​ase.

As I wrote in the pre­vi­ous Article on this sub­ject, this issue requires rea­soned lev­el-head­ed and mature dia­logue which takes into con­sid­er­a­tion all of the pros and cons as much is avail­able on the sub­ject.
The deci­sion of the court is a clear indi­ca­tion that the law lacked the foun­da­tion­al strength to with­stand a con­sti­tu­tion­al smell-test.
This law affects all Jamaicans and so the chal­lenge which came from the PNP was pre­dictable, though the peti­tion­ers were exclu­sive­ly PNP par­ti­sans.
That is the modus operan­di of the People’s National par­ty.
The INDECOM act writ­ten and con­struct­ed with the obvi­ous­ly same degree of alacrity as the NIDS act only affects the police so nei­ther Government nor Opposition felt a need or respon­si­bil­i­ty to be judi­cious in the word­ing or con­tent of the law.
They knew that the gullible and hap­less police would nev­er test its con­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty in the courts and so it stands.
This issue will not go away, this is just the begin­ning of what will be a pro­tract­ed process which inex­orably will con­clude with a dif­fer­ent ver­sion of NIDS.
Mark my words.….

In response to the Democrat Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and the Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib of Michigan did not mince words in clap­ping back at the silence of the Democrat par­ty regard­ing the assault on her col­league Ilhan Omar.
Tlaib was furi­ous at her par­ty’s silence despite Donald Trump’s and right-wing attack dogs assault on her col­league Ilhan Omar.
Recently a white ter­ror­ist was arrest­ed for threat­en­ing to put a bul­let in Representative Omar.
This did not stop the race baiter at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave from adding fuel to the fire of the right wing hate machine.

The whole thing start­ed after a piece of garbage Republican Texas mem­ber of Congress sought to inflame pas­sions by cher­ry-pick­ing a sen­tence from a speech Congresswoman Omar game to (CAIR).
In the speech at a fundrais­er for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in Los Angeles, Omar said, in part, that “CAIR was found­ed after ⁹⁄₁₁ because they rec­og­nized that some peo­ple did some­thing, and that all of us were start­ing to lose access to our civ­il lib­er­ties.”
The Rupert Murdoch [dishrag] the New York Post respond­ed with the above front-page, sar­cas­ti­cal­ly (HERE’S YOUR SOMETHING).
FOX, the main mouth­piece of America’s White Nationalism, through one of its brain-dead mouth­pieces, Brian Kilmeade ques­tioned whether the Congresswoman was even American.
Kind of an odd ques­tion, I guess she has to col­lude with Russia, obstruct jus­tice and com­mit a whole litany of crimes to be con­sid­ered an American.
Because the main Race-baiter in the coun­try was quick to join the fray by way of a tweet,(we will nev­er for­get).

“They put us in pho­tos when they want to show our par­ty is diverse,” Tlaib tweet­ed Saturday. “However, when we ask to be at the table, or speak up about issues that impact who we are, what we fight for & why we ran in the first place, we are ignored.”
“They put us in pho­tos when they want to show our par­ty is diverse,” Tlaib tweet­ed Saturday. “However, when we ask to be at the table, or speak up about issues that impact who we are, what we fight for & why we ran in the first place, we are ignored.”

Rashida Tlaib’s clap-back was par­tic­u­lar­ly res­o­nant, because both Nancy Pelosi and Charles Schumer were quick to con­demn Representative Omar for speak­ing freely about the apartheid state of Israel and how mon­ey is dri­ving some of the sup­port for the racist state.
Conversely, Schumer has been silent in the face of the assault and threats against Congresswoman Omar and Pelosi has been below luke­warm in push­ing back against the tor­rent of vit­ri­olic assault and threats lev­eled at Congresswoman Omar.
So too are the bunch of cow­ard­ly oppor­tunists in the Democrat par­ty, many of whom arrived in Washington with Ilahan Omar.

The impor­tant thing to con­sid­er about Congresswoman Omar’s state­ments about Israel is that they are absolute­ly cor­rect.
The Republicans and almost all of the Democrat par­ty had no prob­lem when the Republican-led House under John Boehner brought the Right-wing hate­mon­ger Benjamin Netanyahu through the back door as an insult to President Barack Obama, to address a joint sit­ting of the Racist Republican Congress.
The Democrats had the option to boy­cott that sit­ting, yet they all showed up like lit­tle whipped dogs and sat there to a for­eign leader who was brought in to dis­re­spect their president.

According to (The Times Of Israel) In his speech, Netanyahu assailed an emerg­ing nuclear deal with Iran and told Congress that the nego­ti­a­tions between the two coun­tries would “all but guar­an­tee” that Tehran gets nuclear weapons to the detri­ment of the entire world. The invi­ta­tion to Netanyahu to address Congress, extend­ed by House Speaker John Boehner, a Republican, has trig­gered a polit­i­cal furor in the United States. Meanwhile, Netanyahu’s oppo­nents in Israel accused him of stag­ing the speech as a cam­paign ploy. 

Those famil­iar with the mid­dle-east war­mon­ger Benjamin Netanyahu, knows how he plot­ted to have America neu­tral­ize Iraq under the guise that Iraq pos­sessed weapons of mass destruc­tion.
Bush and Cheyney were will­ing sheep and so an ille­git­i­mate war was waged on the nation of Iraq and of course, no weapons of mass destruc­tion were ever found.
Barack Obama, then a first-term Senator from Illinois, vot­ed against the Iraq war. Netanyahu knew that he could not move Barack Obama around as he was able to do Bush, or the present idiot-in-chief, so he was no fan of President Barack Obama.
Having had Iraq destroyed and seg­ment­ed in war­ring enclaves Netanyahu turned his dan­ger­ous­ly decep­tive atten­tion to the peo­ple’s repub­lic of Iran. His oppo­si­tion and dem­a­goguery of the Iran nuclear deal had noth­ing to do with any­thing that Iran may have done. The Iranians had con­sis­tent­ly said they did not intend to have a nuclear weapons pro­gram for mil­i­tary purposes. 

All of the ver­i­fi­ca­tion regimes which were put in place all said that Iran has com­plied with the terms of the deal.
So, Netanyahu’s oppo­si­tion to the arrange­ment and his address to the joint sit­ting of the American Congress was not [tru­ly] intend­ed to warn the world of impend­ing gloom and doom about Iran’s inten­tions.
But an Iran which is com­ply­ing with the terms of the deal, is an Iran that Netanyahu can­not con­vince America to attack.
What the Benjamin Netanyahu real­ly wants is total hege­mo­ny in the region, with Syria bro­ken up and destroyed, the only oth­er nations of any con­se­quence in the region are Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and both have already sold out to the Zionist state.
Netanyahu will form the next Government, hav­ing fin­ished less than he expect­ed but with the pha­lanx of right-wing par­ties in the Zionist state, he will be in charge once again. He will become the longest serv­ing Prime Minister in that nation’s his­to­ry.
Back In America, Donald Trump has uni­lat­er­al­ly declared that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard is a ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tion.
That ladies and gen­tle­men is the sec­ond drum­beat for war against the Iranian State.
The first being, the dec­la­ra­tion that Jerusalem is the Capital of Israel.
The war clouds are gath­er­ing and you will be pay­ing for it.

From our friends over at the Nation. And an in-depth look at the fal­la­cy of the American Drug war which has scooped up guilty and inno­cent alike, large­ly peo­ple of col­or while the real power­bro­kers behind the use and sale of dan­ger­ous drugs, white men gets off scot-free.

A half-century of Washington’s harsh drug prohibition policies has brought misery to millions across the globe. 

By Alfred McCoy

We live in a time of change, when peo­ple are ques­tion­ing old assump­tions and seek­ing new direc­tions. In the ongo­ing debate over health care, social jus­tice, and bor­der secu­ri­ty, there is, how­ev­er, one over­looked issue that should be at the top of everyone’s agen­da, from demo­c­ra­t­ic social­ists to lib­er­tar­i­an Republicans: America’s longest war. No, not the one in Afghanistan. I mean the drug war.

For more than a cen­tu­ry, the US has worked through the UN (and its pre­de­ces­sor, the League of Nations) to build a harsh glob­al drug-pro­hi­bi­tion régime — ground­ed in dra­con­ian laws, enforced by per­va­sive polic­ing, and pun­ished with mass incar­cer­a­tion. For the past half-cen­tu­ry, the United States has also waged its own “war on drugs” that has com­pli­cat­ed its for­eign pol­i­cy, com­pro­mised its elec­toral democ­ra­cy, and con­tributed to social inequal­i­ty. Perhaps the time has final­ly come to assess the dam­age that drug war has caused and con­sid­er alternatives.

Even though I first made my mark with a 1972 book that the CIA tried to sup­press on the hero­in trade in Southeast Asia, it’s tak­en me most of my life to grasp all the com­plex ways this country’s drug war, from Afghanistan to Colombia, the Mexican bor­der to inner-city Chicago, has shaped American soci­ety. Last sum­mer, a French direc­tor doing a doc­u­men­tary inter­viewed me for sev­en hours about the his­to­ry of illic­it nar­cotics. As we moved from the 17^th cen­tu­ry to the present and from Asia to America, I found myself try­ing to answer the same relent­less ques­tion: What had 50 years of obser­va­tion actu­al­ly drilled into me, beyond some ran­dom facts, about the char­ac­ter of the illic­it traf­fic in drugs?

At the broad­est lev­el, the past half-cen­tu­ry turns out to have taught me that drugs aren’t just drugs, drug deal­ers aren’t just “push­ers,” and drug users aren’t just “junkies” (that is, out­casts of no con­se­quence). Illicit drugs are major glob­al com­modi­ties that con­tin­ue to influ­ence US pol­i­tics, both nation­al and inter­na­tion­al. And our drug wars cre­ate prof­itable covert nether­worlds in which those very drugs flour­ish and become even more prof­itable. Indeed, the UN once esti­mat­ed that the transna­tion­al traf­fic, which sup­plied drugs to 4.2 per­cent of the world’s adult pop­u­la­tion, was a $400 bil­lion indus­try, the equiv­a­lent of 8 per­cent of glob­al trade.

In ways that few seem to under­stand, illic­it drugs have had a pro­found influ­ence on mod­ern America, shap­ing our inter­na­tion­al pol­i­tics, nation­al elec­tions, and domes­tic social rela­tions. Yet a feel­ing that illic­it drugs belong to a mar­gin­al­ized demi­monde has made US drug pol­i­cy the sole prop­er­ty of law enforce­ment and not health care, edu­ca­tion, or urban development.

During this process of reflec­tion, I’ve returned to three con­ver­sa­tions I had back in 1971 when I was a 26-year-old grad­u­ate stu­dent research­ing that first book of mine,The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade. In the course of an 18-month odyssey around the globe, I met three men, deeply involved in the drug wars, whose words I was then too young to ful­ly absorb.

The first was Lucien Conein, a “leg­endary” CIA oper­a­tive whose covert career ranged from para­chut­ing into North Vietnam in 1945 to train com­mu­nist guer­ril­las with Ho Chi Minh to orga­niz­ing the CIA coup that killed South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963. In the course of our inter­view at his mod­est home near CIA head­quar­ters in Langley, Virginia, he laid out just how the Agency’s oper­a­tives, like so many Corsican gang­sters, prac­ticed the “clan­des­tine arts” of con­duct­ing com­plex oper­a­tions beyond the bounds of civ­il soci­ety and how such “arts” were, in fact, the heart and soul of both covert oper­a­tions and the drug trade.

Second came Colonel Roger Trinquier, whose life in a French drug nether­world extend­ed from com­mand­ing para­troop­ers in the opi­um-grow­ing high­lands of Vietnam dur­ing the First Indochina War of the ear­ly 1950s to serv­ing as deputy to General Jacques Massu in his cam­paign of mur­der and tor­ture in the Battle of Algiers in 1957. During an inter­view in his ele­gant Paris apart­ment, Trinquier explained how he helped fund his own para­troop oper­a­tions through Indochina’s illic­it opi­um traf­fic. Emerging from that inter­view, I felt almost over­whelmed by the aura of Nietzschean omnipo­tence that Trinquier had clear­ly gained from his many years in this shad­owy realm of drugs and death.

My last men­tor on the sub­ject of drugs was Tom Tripodi, a covert oper­a­tive who had trained Cuban exiles in Florida for the CIA’s 1961 Bay of Pigs inva­sion and then, in the late 1970s, pen­e­trat­ed mafia net­works in Sicily for the US Drug Enforcement Administration. In 1971, he appeared at my front door in New Haven, Connecticut, iden­ti­fied him­self as a senior agent for the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Narcotics, and insist­ed that the bureau was wor­ried about my future book. Rather ten­ta­tive­ly, I showed him just a few draft pages of my man­u­script for The Politics of Heroin, and he prompt­ly offered to help me make it as accu­rate as pos­si­ble. During lat­er vis­its, I would hand him chap­ters and he would sit in a rock­ing chair, shirt sleeves rolled up, revolver in his shoul­der hol­ster, scrib­bling cor­rec­tions and telling remark­able sto­ries about the drug trade — like the time his bureau found that French intel­li­gence was pro­tect­ing the Corsican syn­di­cates smug­gling hero­in into New York City. Far more impor­tant, though, through him I grasped how ad hoc alliances between crim­i­nal traf­fick­ers and the CIA reg­u­lar­ly helped both the Agency and the drug trade prosper.

Looking back, I can now see how those vet­er­an oper­a­tives were each describ­ing to me a clan­des­tine polit­i­cal domain, a covert nether­world in which gov­ern­ment agents, mil­i­tary men, and drug traders were freed from the shack­les of civ­il soci­ety and empow­ered to form secret armies, over­throw gov­ern­ments, and even, per­haps, kill a for­eign president.

At its core, this nether­world was then and remains today an invis­i­ble polit­i­cal realm inhab­it­ed by crim­i­nal actors and prac­ti­tion­ers of Conein’s “clan­des­tine arts.” Offering some sense of the scale of this social milieu, in 1997 the United Nations report­ed that transna­tion­al crime syn­di­cates had 3.3 mil­lion mem­bers world­wide who traf­ficked in drugs, arms, humans, and endan­gered species. Meanwhile, dur­ing the Cold War, all the major pow­ers — Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States — deployed expand­ed clan­des­tine ser­vices world­wide, mak­ing covert oper­a­tions a cen­tral facet of geopo­lit­i­cal pow­er. The end of the Cold War has in no way changed this real­i­ty.

http://​then​ation​.com/​a​r​t​i​c​l​e​/​a​l​f​r​e​d​-​m​c​c​o​y​-​w​a​s​h​i​n​g​t​o​n​-​d​r​u​g​-​w​a​r​-​r​u​i​n​i​n​g​-​w​o​r​ld/

Andrew Holness took office talk­ing thrash about police kick­ing off peo­ple’s doors. To date, he has empow­ered polit­i­cal oper­a­tive Terrence Williams to per­se­cute the police but has done noth­ing about the gangs which have tak­en over entire parish­es.
In the mean­time, the police have become an inef­fec­tu­al laugh­ing­stock while the gangs rule the streets, leav­ing those not yet dead cow­er­ing in fear, won­der­ing whether one of the bar­rages of bul­lets they hear has their name on it.

One of the most renowned quotes attrib­uted to Jamaica’s first nation­al hero, Marcus Mosiah Garvey, is: “Jamaicans will not know them­selves until their backs are against the wall.“
I do not pre­tend to know just how far up against the wall the small nation of 2.8 mil­lion is will­ing to be pushed?
Neither do I know just how much small­er they can “small up dem self.“
And so, as I have pre­dict­ed time and again, sim­ply putting grill for­ti­fi­ca­tions around one’s home will not be enough giv­en time.
That time is here; grill for­ti­fi­ca­tions do noth­ing to deter the killers any­more.
If they decide to kill, noth­ing stops them. They trav­el in large groups, heav­i­ly armed, total­ly uncon­cerned about police or mil­i­tary pres­ence.
They sim­ply law down huge and sus­tained vol­leys of auto­mat­ic weapons fire on who­ev­er dare approach them.
The trag­ic irony in that overused Garvey quote is that the very peo­ple who recite it unfail­ing­ly fail to grasp that they them­selves are unwit­ting pawns on that chessboard.

Jamaica has one of the world’s high­est mur­der rates. For an Island/​nation with the size of 4,411 square miles or less than a third of the American state of Connecticut, the 48^th small­est of that nation’s 50 states, Jamaica’s mur­der rate is stag­ger­ing.
Unfortunately for the law-abid­ing cit­i­zens still left in Jamaica, there will be no respite or let up any­time soon.
The Island’s polit­i­cal lead­er­ship has no con­cern for the blood­let­ting out­side of using it for mileage politically.

The sit­ting Prime Minister came to office with a decid­ed atti­tude against the police, or more appro­pri­ate­ly against the police depart­men­t’s tac­tics in keep­ing crim­i­nals in check.
Tactics are used on urban and oth­er crim­i­nals and mili­tias around the world. Those are tough, no-non­sense, hard-nosed polic­ing tac­tics that cre­ate space around the pop­u­la­tion and pause those who would com­mit mur­ders.
Without stip­u­la­tion or con­text, he repeat­ed­ly stat­ed that ” the days of police kick­ing off peo­ple’s doors are over” closed quote.
Now tech­ni­cal­ly, Holness has no pow­er to direct­ly stop the police from going after crim­i­nals, includ­ing kick­ing down doors to get them.
Nevertheless, he has the pow­er to make it increas­ing­ly dif­fi­cult by increas­ing the bureau­crat­ic process after such police actions, there­by ren­der­ing the police unin­ter­est­ed in going after crim­i­nals.
This he did by ramp­ing up the pow­er with stat­ed sup­port for the oner­ous, over­bear­ing and coun­ter­pro­duc­tive police watch­dog INDECOM.
This essen­tial­ly iced police enthu­si­asm for fight­ing crime.
Under this kind of sys­tem, offi­cer’s inter­est is best served by sim­ply run­ning out the clock on their shifts and going home to their fam­i­lies, rather than risk being per­se­cut­ed by an overzeal­ous INDECOM. Usually on false affi­davits pro­vid­ed them by man­u­fac­tured witnesses.

Day after day, I watch uncut video clips of the dead, at oth­er times the bul­let-rid­dled bod­ies, some­times still writhing as the lifeblood drains from their rup­tured bod­ies. Meandering like a lazy pud­dle on the dusty side­walks.
Simultaneously, I see the Prime Minister mis­lead the Jamaican peo­ple that he brings pros­per­i­ty to their lives.
Fundamentally ignor­ing the exis­ten­tial cri­sis the coun­try faces as he makes those promis­es.
Repeating over and over again, the dis­cred­it­ed refrain, know­ing full well, [or does he], that there can be no pros­per­i­ty in an envi­ron­ment of wan­ton unchecked violence.

How stu­pid are these polit­i­cal lead­ers real­ly? They ignore the peo­ple’s cry, in Saint James, Westmoreland, and Clarendon, in Saint Thomas and Saint Catherine and Hanover and Manchester, in Saint Elizabeth and Kingston, in Portland and Trelawny, in Saint Andrew and Saint Mary and Saint Ann.
There is no haven from the gun in Jamaica, guns are every­where, and the gang­sters don’t care who knows that they are armed and dan­ger­ous.
The peo­ple are beg­ging for an end to law­less­ness to live their lives as nor­mal peo­ple do.
Yet the uncon­scionable Administration in Jamaica House, like the one before it, refus­es to release the agents of the state to go after the ter­ror­is­tic thugs who are killing peo­ple at will.
Choosing instead to focus on the sup­posed human rights oblig­a­tions of police offi­cers.
If the lead­ers refuse to plug the dike, then the water will wash over them. Somehow change will come either with their help or to their per­il.
I call upon inno­cent, law-abid­ing Jamaicans to mobi­lize against this threat. If your lead­ers refuse to act, then you must act.
Do not be a sta­tis­tic; stand up and fight and throw out the bums.

Asked about the PNP’s back­lash against him for speak­ing out about his par­ty’s recent loss, for­mer gen­er­al sec­re­tary of the People’s National Party (PNP) Paul Burke said: 

“I don’t know what back­lash is. You mean the paid social media mer­ce­nar­ies? [They] have very lit­tle impact on the ground. It’s going to get worse, not bet­ter. I’m going to become Mr Unpopular. It’s water off the duck­’s back, trust me.” 
“They can’t do any­thing to me. I’m not wor­ried about them. I don’t need them; they don’t need me. The only thing I have is the truth, which I can back up. I don’t know what direc­tion the par­ty will go in, but I real­ly believe that the par­ty has to get its mes­sage clear. It has to be clear. It has to be con­sis­tent. It has to be cred­i­ble and you must find mes­sen­gers, what­ev­er that mes­sage ends up being, who can car­ry that mes­sage. In oth­er words, I can’t car­ry a mes­sage to tell peo­ple go to church because I don’t go to church,” 

Say what you want about Paul Burke’ s brash brava­do, and seem­ing lack of humil­i­ty, but Burke knows what he is talk­ing about. Paul Burke has been in the trench­es and has been instru­men­tal in the PNP’s polit­i­cal suc­cess­es for decades.
Burke under­stands what it takes to win elec­tions, even though his par­ty lacks the basic fun­da­men­tals of gov­er­nance.
It appears that it is to this very issue that Paul Burke is relat­ing.
Burke’s unper­turbed non­cha­lance may be a by-prod­uct of his knowl­edge that many who are now con­demn­ing him for speak­ing out and wants him oust­ed from the par­ty, also want­ed Peter Phillips out of the par­ty as well.
Many of those same peo­ple also at one time labeled Peter Phillips a trai­tor as well.
Phillips was almost [per­sona non gra­ta ]for sign­ing a Memorandum of Understanding with the United States with­out the knowl­edge or con­sent of the Party boss Portia Simpson Miller.
It is that cultish unde­mo­c­ra­t­ic men­tal­i­ty which has defined the PNP through­out its exis­tence.
A men­tal­i­ty which has kept the par­ty stuck sub­scrib­ing to a failed and dis­card­ed [form of Socialism] which has hurt our coun­try expo­nen­tial­ly before, and from which Jamaica has yet to recover. 

The great exis­ten­tial threat to the PNP is the PNP’s refusal to adapt and change. The JLP made the same mis­take after its loss in 88. As a con­se­quence, they were locked out of the process for over two decades. The brain-dead deci­sion to con­tin­ue on as a cult, instead of a 21^st-cen­tu­ry polit­i­cal par­ty is demon­strat­ed by the com­ments against Paul Burke who has been instru­men­tal in the PNP’s suc­cess­es long before many of his crit­ics were born.
Burke a smart polit­i­cal oper­a­tive is cog­nizant that the par­ty needs to change and sep­a­rate itself from the old failed social­ist poli­cies and affil­i­a­tions which ruined the coun­try in the 1970’s.
The Party’s string of loss­es will con­tin­ue as long as the JLP con­tin­ues to build out the nations infra­struc­ture and peo­ple sees pos­i­tive changes hap­pen­ing in the coun­try and in their own lives.
As long as the admin­is­tra­tion can eschew cor­rup­tion, the PNP will have a long time on the out­side look­ing in with clenched fists and beret’s, relics of a dis­tant past no one wants to revisit.