Holness One Year Old Government Already A Dismal Failure On Crime…

A mere day after I wrote that the Government is doing jack shit to stem the tide of murders which has enveloped the country the private sector in the western parishes of the Island have excoriated the Government for not doing enough on crime.
Now granted that the private sector is only speaking out because their bottom line is being affected, it still brings to the fore the seriousness of what’s happening on the Island.

According to the Jamaicaobserver​.com, Up to Tuesday of this week there were 51 mur­ders record­ed in St James, two more than the 49 that were tal­lied over the cor­re­spond­ing peri­od last year.
Westmoreland has seen 39 mur­ders, com­pared to 20 over the cor­re­spond­ing peri­od last year.
The once peace­ful serene parish of Hanover record­ed its sec­ond triple mur­der since the start of the year bring­ing the mur­der tal­ly in the parish to 21 since January.

In typ­i­cal busi­ness speak, the rapa­cious, self­ish, busi­ness sec­tor proved what I always believed,“crimes com­mit­ted against vis­i­tors are “for­tu­nate­ly low,” President of the Jamaica Hotel and Tourism Association (JHTA) Omar Robinson, said.
It could eas­i­ly be con­strued that the JHTA’s pres­i­dent only cares about tourists , not local lives, but I do not think that is the mes­sage he wished to convey.

President of the Westmoreland Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Oral Heaven, argued that crim­i­nals are on the loose because not enough is been done by the gov­ern­ment to pun­ish them.
Well you don’t say, really?
“My think­ing is that if we enforce the laws that we have on the books and take this crime mon­ster seri­ous­ly by real­ly doing the inves­tiga­tive work to find out who these crim­i­nals are, and throw the full book at the crim­i­nals, then they will think twice before com­mit­ting these acts,” Heaven argued.
Seem log­i­cal to me, in fact that has been my posi­tion for decades.

But it still leaves me to won­der why the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty did not see fit to form an effec­tive lob­by to make sure that the polit­i­cal lead­er­ship of the coun­try sit up and take notice?
Surely Andrew Holness and the JLP could not pos­si­bly thumb their noses at the entire busi­ness community.
The prob­lem is that the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty, unlike the pri­vate sec­tor in oth­er coun­tries, is sin­gu­lar­ly focused on mak­ing mon­ey with­out rec­og­niz­ing that insta­bil­i­ty seri­ous­ly under­mines their abil­i­ty to extract max­i­mum returns on their investments.
The crim­i­nal rights fra­ter­ni­ty cer­tain­ly has . Carolyn Gomes has caused immense dam­age , she even got a National hon­or and now Horace Levy , Terrence Williams and oth­ers are cer­tain­ly look­ing to get theirs.

Heaven went on to say “I feel that gov­ern­ment should do more than just lip ser­vice and put sys­tems in place that will catch these crim­i­nals and bring them to jus­tice.”
Just yes­ter­day I opined that the Government’s lat­est piece of pro­posed leg­is­la­tion which it says will empow­er the police and sub­se­quent­ly reduce crime was a shit sand­wich designed to give polit­i­cal cov­er to the JLP while ensnar­ing the secu­ri­ty forces as they did to them in 2010 after the Tivoli Gardens incident.

The Jamaican Government , regard­less of which par­ty forms the Administration, has as it’s most pri­ma­ry duty the respon­si­bil­i­ty to pro­tect the citizenry.
This respon­si­bil­i­ty far out­weighs the desire the gov­ern­ing par­ty may have to hold onto power.
Politics is a vehi­cle toward the bet­ter­ment of peo­ple’s lives. People’s lives are not dis­pos­able so that polit­i­cal par­ties can hold power.
That is the rea­son I am utter­ly infu­ri­at­ed at the lack of effort that the Andrew Holness Administration has brought to this issue.
Instead, and more infu­ri­at­ing­ly , the Prime Minister has gone to lengths to cre­ate a whole lot of smoke and intro­duced mir­rors to con­fuse the peo­ple that his admin­is­tra­tion is doing something.

I sup­port­ed this Prime Minister and this par­ty through­out the years it has been in oppo­si­tion . I did so because I under­stand fun­da­men­tal­ly that the People’s National Party (a pop­ulist party)cannot be count­ed on to do the right thing.
I am extreme­ly angry and dis­ap­point­ed to hear Andrew Holness say quote “we are not going to use any law­less­ness to fight crime”.
Who asked him to do that?
Then he went fur­ther ” The days of kick­ing down peo­ple door and infring­ing on their civ­il rights are over”.
Is this a Prime Minister whose job it is to secure the nation , or is this a mouth­piece of the crim­i­nal rights lobby?

I have said that the peo­ple must decide when enough is enough .
The pri­vate sec­tor has not pro­vid­ed the lead­er­ship on crime it is capa­ble of giving.
Maybe now it will begin to take a stern­er stance forc­ing the Government to pay atten­tion to the demands of the coun­try rather than line up mir­rors and blow­ing smoke up our col­lec­tive asses.
Failing which we the peo­ple must begin the cam­paign to remove this admin­is­tra­tion from office.
The Government’s pri­ma­ry job is to pro­vide secu­ri­ty it isn’t doing that.

The coun­try can ill afford to have a leader and a gov­ern­ment which is more con­cerned about the rights of dan­ger­ous killers than of stop­ping the killings.
We can­not allow Andrew Holness and his bunch of lieu­tenants and the oth­ers from the oth­er side to con­tin­ue to turn our coun­try into a mas­sive desert with tiny lit­tle Oasis of respite and calm.
Oasis where they and their friends are seclud­ed and protected.