For Each Family It Is Not Mere Statistics, These Were Living Breathing Family Members And Friends…

I wrote about this well over a year ago; still today, the scum who took this inno­cent man’s life has not been brought to jus­tice, to my knowl­edge, nei­ther has jus­tice been brought to him /​them. Hundreds of mur­der­ers are walk­ing around in Jamaica today, “kill and col­lect, drink and for­get,” they say. Even though he spoke to some­one on the phone, some­one who may have orches­trat­ed or known who orches­trat­ed rob­bing and mur­der­ing him, it is a near cer­tain­ty that no one sought to get his tele­phone records to see who the per­son was. Last year my own queries led me to a so-called detec­tive who acknowl­edged that he was han­dling the case.
So at best, there is a state­ment in a file cab­i­net some­where which con­sti­tutes the inves­ti­ga­tions into the heinous mur­der. This was months after Elvis Richards was mur­dered; he con­ced­ed then that he had still not spo­ken to the mur­dered man’s sig­nif­i­cant oth­er. A state­ment in a rink-ding file cab­i­net now con­sti­tutes this good man’s life.
Neither Miss Alcie, Elvis’s mom, nor Eliese, his lov­ing daugh­ter, has had any clo­sure; like hun­dreds of fam­i­lies each year who lose loved ones, the police are either over­whelmed, ill-equipped, don’t care, or incompetent.

An Admission That Crime Is Out Of Their Control, Now What?

June 3^rd, 2020

There is absolute­ly no one in our coun­try that has not been touched one way or anoth­er by vio­lent crime.
That speaks vol­umes about the emo­tion­al toll it takes on indi­vid­u­als and the nation as a col­lec­tive. This is par­tic­u­lar­ly trau­mat­ic to those not con­tribut­ing to the wave of law­less­ness that has tak­en over our streets and our schools. As I sat to write this arti­cle, I am also hum­bled that I was hon­ored by the beau­ti­ful daugh­ter and moth­er of my life­long friend Elvis Richards, or ( Dozi), who offered me the oppor­tu­ni­ty to say a few words in trib­ute to his life.
Elvis, a lov­ing kind (Rastaman), became a vic­tim of the rabid crim­i­nal­i­ty that has now char­ac­ter­ized our country.
Elvis loved his coun­try, so much so that he would ask me (suh wen yu a cum bak cum liv Inna di place bredrin)?

Here was a man work­ing to take care of his fam­i­ly, tak­en away by rabid degen­er­ates, and for what.….. a few thou­sand dol­lars in his pock­et? His life was tak­en from him, leav­ing his fam­i­ly to grieve, includ­ing his minor child, left to grow up with­out her lov­ing dad.
This sto­ry is of hun­dreds of fam­i­lies each year who do not have lav­ish police pro­tec­tion or cas­tles in the hills. Across the length and breadth of the tiny Island and all across the dias­po­ra, the con­se­quences of these killings res­onate and impact the psy­che of those left behind.
The dai­ly killings have now been baked into the cul­ture; they no longer evoke alarm, nei­ther do they gar­ner grass­roots resis­tance against them.
Rather than lis­ten to what works from peo­ple who have actu­al­ly worked at this, the nation’s lead­ers embarked on cos­met­ic ini­tia­tives designed to pla­cate the nation, designed to give a false sense of com­fort, that just around the cor­ner a respite awaits, with­out doing the hard work to guar­an­tee it.
Because of this administration’s mis­guid­ed stance on crime, we have seen a rapid and sus­tained rise in vio­lent crimes, but that is not all, the police are lit­er­al­ly unable to enforce the nation’s road traf­fic Act, as they are being attacked even as they try to write tick­ets to the law­less motorist who plies the road­ways as taxi-oper­a­tors. In the schools, the stu­dents now fight their teachers.
No laborites, I don’t want to hear your shit that the PNP is to blame; your par­ty is in pow­er now; save it.
This is big­ger than nar­row par­ti­san politics.

And now we hear the top-most leader admit that the lev­el of vio­lent crimes across the coun­try is out­side of the country’s abil­i­ty to deal with.
The coun­try is at the mer­cy of the killers.
On tak­ing office, this Prime Minister decid­ed that he want­ed a pol­i­cy of hug­ging up and cod­dling the most vio­lent crim­i­nals in the country.
No, he did not actu­al­ly say he want­ed to hug them, but his attacks on polic­ing prac­tices and pro­ce­dures, some­thing he knows noth­ing about, all but told the crim­i­nals they had a friend in Jamaica house. They already knew they had one in INDECOM.
When the prime min­is­ter was embark­ing on this path, I wrote sev­er­al arti­cles warn­ing that he was open­ing up a pan­do­ra box, that the nation would not be able to con­tain what comes out of it.
Talk about police kick­ing in doors to people’s hous­es, talk about not on my watch will they, (the police), con­tin­ue to shoot peo­ple, was Holness’s call­ing card, as he embraced the anti-police activist Terrence Williams.
In the streets, the mur­der­ers were laugh­ing; they knew they had a friend in this guy.
Instead of hir­ing a police com­mis­sion­er who knew about polic­ing, Holness hired his friend Antony Anderson, an army man, and made him com­mis­sion­er of police. Not that a com­mis­sion­er who came up with­in the ranks is a panacea to what’s going on, but at least he would be able to speak to the nation defin­i­tive­ly on the issue.
Instead of insti­tut­ing train­ing for the police that gives them the edge they need to fight the crim­i­nals, he insist­ed on human rights train­ing, not just for the police but for the mil­i­tary, and placed them in some­thing cre­at­ed and named Zones Of Special Operations or (ZOSOS’s).