Reduced to begging motorists not to speed, the Jamaican Prime Minister demonstrated that his government is an abysmal failure on the seminal issue of law and order. Of course, there are blinkered hyper-partisans who will see this comment as a partisan attack on Mister Holness and his government instead of a truthful and objective analysis of the facts.
A record 488 people were killed in traffic crashes in Jamaica in 2022, according to the Ministry of Transport’s Road Safety Unit. The 488 people killed in 2022 exceeded the 487 who died in motor vehicle crashes in 2021.
The data from the Ministry of Transport should be from the police, whose job it should be to monitor and protect the motoring public from the carnage on the roads from the ignorant morons who jeopardize the lives of other road users.
Unfortunately, Jamaica is no longer a place where anyone can feel safe in any regard, not from the marauding morons driving on the roads, not from the brutish monsters that continue to murder at will without consequence.
Though shocking for such a small island, the exceptionally high number of road fatalities is only a tiny part of the true horror of the insanity of what obtains on Jamaica’s roads; the broken bodies they leave to suffer far exceed the fatalities.
Overtaking around blind corners, uphill, downhill, on the sidewalks, driving onto major thoroughfares from sidestreets without stopping, drinking and driving, excessive speeding, reckless and dangerous driving, welcome to Jamaica, where everyone does as they please.
Where are the police, you ask? That’s a good question; they long ceded the streets to the hoodlums.
The police force is nowhere near what it should be with staffing, equipment, training, pay, and support from the government & people, but it damn sure isn’t where it used to be.
Decades ago, the force was much smaller and less equipped; the pay was even more shitty, political interference was rampant, and there was no support from either political party, but the majority of the Jamaican people were behind their police force.
The standard of success was the data points, lower murder statistics, fewer rapes, fewer robberies, and break-ins, and on the nation’s streets, the traffic police made their presence felt.
In all of this, many traffic cops were accused of corruption, the force never figured out a way to fix that, but there was a police presence, and errant behavior on the roads had consequences.
Despite a much larger force, new and sophisticated equipment, and better pay, the force produces far less for the Jamaican people than it did decades earlier.
The Commissioner of police is allowed to skate by even as Rome burns; his political bosses make excuses for him even though there is no reasonable justification for his continued employment outside politics.
But Commissioner Antony Anderson is not the only problem with the Constabulary. God knows, only in Jamaica can a person be given the most senior job for a discipline in which he has absolutely no experience.
Most of the officers below Anderson are a bunch of posers with multiple degrees from the University of the West Indies who could not find jobs elsewhere, so they become police officers. They are given command without any knowledge of policing and, in most cases, never slapped a pair of handcuffs on a criminal.
The Jamaican taxpayers are left holding the bag for those misfits who are very good at talking but not much else.
In the meantime, the roads are a drag-racing hell, and your chance of getting murdered is 1 in over 47,000.
Those are not good odds!
The government could alleviate many issues plaguing the country by committing to a ticketing system that allows the police to arrest scofflaws and throw them in jail. A computerized system that lets the police know right away that a driver has a warrant for unpaid tickets. Passing a road traffic act that actually has teeth and is not a joke. These are not novel ideas, just ideas that other nations have used for years, sometimes decades.
Maintaining Jamaica as a paradise for criminals and lawbreakers seems to be the intent of both political parties and their functionaries. Why else would they not adopt what other nations have already done successfully?
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Mike Beckles is a former Police Detective, businessman, freelance writer, black achiever honoree, and creator of the blog mikebeckles.com.