Holness Pandered To Criminal Rights Lobby: Resulting In Over 1600 Murdered Last Year..

What is the number?
What is the num­ber of dead peo­ple which will get the Jamaican Government and the full polit­i­cal oppo­si­tion to real­ize that the sta­tus quo is untenable?
I pose this ques­tion to Prime Minister Andrew Holness and his col­leagues as well as to Dr.Peter Phillips and his col­leagues on the oppo­si­tion benches.
What is crit­i­cal mass for you?

Our coun­try’s pop­u­la­tion hov­ers some­where around 2.7 mil­lion. Last year alone there was a report­ed 1600 plus killings. Many Jamaicans includ­ing some police offi­cers believe that the num­bers are much higher.

With a pop­u­la­tion of 2.7 mil­lion and over 1600 dead, the chances of get­ting killed on an aver­age day in Jamaica is one in under 17,000.
Those are shock­ing num­bers which are prob­a­bly much worse when we remove the polit­i­cal class and the wealthy elites who have secu­ri­ty details, live in gat­ed com­mu­ni­ties with heavy secu­ri­ty and have the option of arm­ing themselves.

When they are removed from the equa­tion it leaves a much small­er pool of Jamaicans who are actu­al­ly exposed to the will of the mind­less mur­der­ers who kill at will.

Bunch Of Smoke On Crime, No Fire: Cops Must Get A Clue As Well…

The cri­sis of vio­lent crime fac­ing the coun­try is not a phe­nom­e­non unto itself, it is rep­re­sen­ta­tive of a much larg­er rot of dis­re­spect and dis­re­gard which took over the coun­try in the ear­ly 90’s and has devel­oped now into a soci­ety which can only be char­ac­ter­ized as lawless.

I ask our coun­try’s lead­ers this ques­tion with a heavy heart. It is dif­fi­cult for me to envis­age the bod­ies of one thou­sand six hun­dred once liv­ing breath­ing viva­cious humans laid out side by side, dead.
I can­not men­tal­ly rec­on­cile all that inno­cent dead in a sit­u­a­tion in which there is no nation on nation conflict.

The way our lead­er­ship is look­ing at this issue is demon­stra­bly not work­ing. Personally speak­ing, I am tired of talk­ing about this, I am tired of writ­ing about it. I’m sure this is true of most Jamaicans as well, who knows what needs to be done but are not in posi­tions to change it.

If You Believe The ZOSO Will Have An Impact On Murders You Deserve To Be Conned .…

The not so dis­tant pas­sage of the (ZOSO) Zones Of Special Operations Act in the Island’s leg­is­la­ture gave many peo­ple hope that final­ly, the Government was doing some­thing about crime.
The Act, the brain­child of Prime Minister Andrew Holness, is tan­ta­mount to a drug fiend’s first high which dis­si­pates rather quick­ly and can nev­er be duplicated.

Many Jamaicans, includ­ing past and present police offi­cers, were, and have been high­ly sup­port­ive of the Act, hope­less­ly cling­ing to any­thing which is being sold as a solu­tion to the crime Monster.
This pub­li­ca­tion which is ded­i­cat­ed to jus­tice and the rule of law and this writer chose to look at the long ball. As a result, I said ZOSO was a dis­trac­tion which would have no real mea­sur­able effect on crime and in time would be proven to be a mere dis­trac­tion by the nation’s leadership.

If You Believe The ZOSO Will Have An Impact On Murders You Deserve To Be Conned .…

WHY ZOSO CANNOT WORK.

The Zones Of Special Operations Act. is sim­ply a sit­u­a­tion in which large amounts of police offi­cers and mem­bers of the Military are placed in a cer­tain geo­graph­ic area. )usu­al­ly, one deter­mined to be a high crime area).
Naturally, the author­i­ties which decide which area is to be des­ig­nat­ed a ZOSO say no one knows where the next ZOSO will be, except the Prime Minister and his tight group of nation­al secu­ri­ty advisers.

Unfortunately, that gives me no com­fort. As a cop who spent a whole week in the hills of Westmoreland wait­ing for air­planes to land at an ille­gal strip in Montpelier, only to be approached in the bush­es by one of the men we were sup­posed to be arrest­ing as soon as the plane land­ed, and told we were wast­ing our time because his boss received word that we would be com­ing before we reached there.
That infor­ma­tion giv­en to politi­cians was leaked to crim­i­nals effec­tive­ly plac­ing our lives at risk and mak­ing a mock­ery of crime fighting.

ZOSO is the state of affair which ought to exist across the Island. It is the sense of free­dom and secu­ri­ty cit­i­zens should feel liv­ing and par­tic­i­pat­ing in their com­mu­ni­ties. However, in order to build that out, it would require an extra­or­di­nary amount of human resources which Jamaica sim­ply does not have.

Want To Stop The Killings In Jamaica/​Here’s How…

As it stands it is unsus­tain­able because it uses up large amounts of resources in small geo­graph­ic areas leav­ing oth­er areas without.
Finally, crim­i­nals would be stu­pid to stay[they aren’t] in an area know­ing it is high­ly like­ly their high crime area may be descend­ed on by swarms of police and soldiers.
I argued that crim­i­nals would sim­ply move to oth­er areas and con­tin­ue with their activities.
They have!
That is the rea­son you do not hear much talk about ZOSO any­more, mere months after it’s passage.

SOLUTION

Since we can now acknowl­edge that ZOSO was a mere dis­trac­tion which has no hope of trans­form­ing the crime land­scape it behooves us to begin the process of look­ing at real solu­tions which will have pos­i­tive effects.
I was hope­ful when it was deter­mined that Andrew Holness would be the next prime min­is­ter of our country.
https://​mike​beck​les​.com/​j​l​p​-​m​u​s​t​-​s​n​a​t​c​h​-​v​i​c​t​r​o​y​-​f​r​o​m​-​t​h​e​-​a​s​h​e​s​-​o​f​-​d​e​f​e​at/

After his loss to Portia Simpson Miller, I wrote an arti­cle chal­leng­ing him to go out into the fields and talk­ing to the peo­ple no mat­ter where they lived. I chal­lenged him to roll up his sleeves and sit with the peo­ple in every nook and cran­ny, eat with them and hear their con­cerns. Whether he read the arti­cle or not is nei­ther here nor there, Andrew Holness did exact­ly that.

However, after win­ning the last nation­al elec­tions I was stunned to hear the elit­ist rhetoric com­ing from Holness.
I have zero expec­ta­tion of any­thing pos­i­tive from the lead­er­ship of the PNP, that is the rea­son I cast my lot with Holness.
I got a rude awak­en­ing when I heard the new­ly mint­ed Prime Minister berat­ing the JCF, telling his friends that there would be no return to the days when police would kick in doors and sum­mar­i­ly kill people.

I was stunned at the sense of vit­ri­ol and the barefaced nature of the PrimeMinister’s defama­tion which was bereft of sub­stance and was at its core a self-serv­ing and gra­tu­itous state­ment born out of mal­ice and ignorance.
It was a state­ment designed to pla­cate and quite the crim­i­nal rights lob­by which has set up shop on the Island.
Ironically, the Prime Minister’s wife a new­ly mint­ed mem­ber of the leg­is­la­ture did not seem to share those sentiments.
At least her pub­lic utter­ances seem to dif­fer from those of her husband.

THE CONSEQUENCES

Andrew Holness did not need to cre­ate that chasm between him­self and the police depart­ment, they vot­ed en-masse for him allow­ing the labor par­ty to sweep the elec­tions gain­ing a one-seat major­i­ty in the legislature.
The Labor Party was able to keep its 21 incum­bents intact and gained 11 for­mer seats briefly held by the PNP in 2011.

The cal­cu­la­tion to throw the secu­ri­ty forces under the bus was an old one used by both polit­i­cal par­ties toward fur­ther­ing their polit­i­cal agendas.
Sadly, far too many mem­bers of the Island’s police force are intrin­si­cal­ly tied to the two polit­i­cal par­ties, and for no good reason.

The PNP has nev­er had any desire to deal with the nation’s crime crisis.
In fact, the pre­vi­ous unprece­dent­ed hold that the par­ty had on pow­er and the ensu­ing dete­ri­o­ra­tion of our nation­al cul­ture is a direct result of the par­ty’s hands-off approach to crime in some instances and it’s direct involve­ment in others.

The Government’s deci­sion to avoid tak­ing real and prac­ti­cal steps against crim­i­nals cou­pled with its dis­re­spect­ful pos­ture toward the police has not only destroyed the morale of the police, it has embold­ened crim­i­nals and placed the lives of cit­i­zens in peril.
The present brouha­ha between Minister Montague and Commissioner Quallo in which the Commissioner, we are told has been told he has to go, is anoth­er attempt by the Government to deflect from the con­se­quences of its own fail­ures on its most impor­tant respon­si­bil­i­ty to secure the nation.

The longer the admin­is­tra­tion takes to stop play­ing pol­i­tics with nation­al secu­ri­ty the hard­er it is for the secu­ri­ty forces to reverse the out­come of this policy.
The more this gov­ern­ment and the oppo­si­tion play pol­i­tics is the more Jamaicans will die.
It is a sad and shock­ing cri­sis, and lack of polit­i­cal lead­er­ship, the con­se­quences of which are tens of thou­sands of dead Jamaicans over the years as the polit­i­cal class pan­ders to for­eign groups much to the demise of our people.