Clovis’ Depiction Worth A Thousand Words.…

From time to time, Clovis makes an ass of himself when he ventures into American politics with his cartoons which usually fall short because Clovis lacks the historical and lived experiences of the American situation. Clovis is brilliant; however, his work critiquing the Jamaican experience hardly misses the mark; It exemplifies the adage, ‘a picture is worth a thousand words.’

Clovis’ work ref­er­enc­ing the Prime Minister’s announce­ment of more restric­tions to ordi­nary peo­ple due to new­ly approved states of emer­gen­cies in Parts of Kingston and Saint Andrew, Saint Catherine, Clarendon, St James, Hanover, and Westmoreland, is dead on correct.
Speaking as a for­mer Police Officer who was a part of that insan­i­ty for a decade before I real­ized that the way we were approach­ing crime was regres­sive, bone-head­ed, and some­what retard­ed, forc­ing me to even­tu­al­ly,‘tek weh mi self.’ my words will nev­er come close to Clovis’ easy depic­tion of reality.

Announce the State Of Emergency, or ZOSO, in spe­cif­ic loca­tions, crime pro­duc­ers pack up and move some­where else. Crime goes down in that area because the area is flood­ed with law enforce­ment and mil­i­tary bod­ies, and the Prime Minister and his team declare victory.
At the start of this cha­rade years ago, this writer argued it was a sleigh of hand that attempts to fool the gullible into believ­ing that this is a sus­tain­able strat­e­gy that would effec­tive­ly remove the scourge of vio­lent crimes from com­mu­ni­ties and, ulti­mate­ly, the entire Island.
Only that one has to look at the entire­ty of the data. It is crys­tal clear that though there may be a less­en­ing of crime in areas in which those spe­cial mea­sures are ini­ti­at­ed, crime sta­tis­tics remain high or grow high­er nation­al­ly. This means that the crim­i­nals move to oth­er areas and con­tin­ue their trade.
It is not a vic­to­ry; it is smoke and mir­rors because the men and women com­mit­ting vio­lent crimes in those areas will not stop; they sim­ply move their oper­a­tions elsewhere.
The net result is that when the data is ana­lyzed, there is no mean­ing­ful decrease in vio­lent crimes, just a redis­tri­b­u­tion of vio­lence by the admin­is­tra­tion’s policy.
It is bad law enforce­ment pol­i­cy, but it makes good polit­i­cal the­ater and even bet­ter-talk­ing points when the admin­is­tra­tion choos­es to deflect.

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