Holness Should Support The Security Forces Stop Pandering To Rights Lobby.…

Prime Minister Andrew Holness told mem­bers of the secu­ri­ty forces that there are ele­ments in the coun­try work­ing to dri­ve a wedge between the Police and Military.
I laugh at this because if what he says is true, that infor­ma­tion would most like­ly have come from .….….… well the mem­bers of the secu­ri­ty forces themselves.
If the Prime Minister has cred­i­ble infor­ma­tion as he asserts, he should make that infor­ma­tion pub­lic as soon as possible.

Holness main­tained that there was a con­spir­a­cy involv­ing both mem­bers of the secu­ri­ty forces and crim­i­nals, who are threat­ened by the oper­a­tions and who fear the lev­el of coöper­a­tion between both arms of the secu­ri­ty forces — the Jamaica Constabulary Force and the Jamaica Defence Force.

What non­sense, the police, and mil­i­tary have been work­ing togeth­er from as far back as I can remem­ber and beyond. There is noth­ing new about this so I would guess that if there are any plans to cre­ate dis­rup­tion between the forces it is not because they are collaborating.
The Prime Minister would be bet­ter served by look­ing at his friends in the Media and over at INDECOM there he will see the vile demoguges who are fight­ing valiant­ly to dri­ve a wedge between the two forces.
It is the vile divi­sive enti­ty which pass­es for Media which is and has been doing the dam­age cut­ting the police out of pic­tures and sow­ing dis­cord, no one else.

A friend asked me recent­ly why I thought peo­ple hat­ed the police?
First of all Soldiers are not on the streets dai­ly lock­ing up peo­ple for the crimes they com­mit, so nat­u­ral­ly when a joint force par­ty of police and sol­diers attempt to arrest an offend­er, of course, that offend­er will appeal to the sol­dier whom they see as the last line of help before they are cart­ed off to jail.
But I also thought the ques­tion required a deep­er look and a more com­pre­hen­sive response.

My response to him.
Police offi­cers are the peo­ple autho­rized to take people’s free­dom away.
Even when those actions are car­ried out by the mil­i­tary as in some total­i­tar­i­an states, those actions are gen­er­al­ly char­ac­ter­ized as secret police actions.

For the most part in the con­text of Jamaica over the decades since inde­pen­dence, we have had an inter­est­ing paradox.
After gov­er­nance of the coun­try was hand­ed over to the natives, both polit­i­cal par­ties saw an oppor­tu­ni­ty to enrich them­selves at the expense of the poor.
This was not con­fined to Jamaica or the wider Caribbean region alone.

It was also the norm in post-Colonial Africa, Latin and South America where cor­rup­tion after col­o­niza­tion became a seri­ous problem.
In Jamaica, the strat­e­gy was to keep the peo­ple igno­rant and inex­orably loy­al to the two polit­i­cal par­ties with the police as the scape­goat in the middle.
They had to have the police, but their sup­port was with their bases of oper­a­tions, the areas we call con­stituen­cies. O/​C [GARRISONS]
That is the rea­son politi­cians always show up to their bases of oper­a­tions when­ev­er the police take action against crim­i­nals in those areas.
As such the police are seen as vil­lains and the politi­cians are seen as saviors.

My friend dis­agrees, he argues that the fact that the JCF was formed as a response to the Morant Bay Rebellion and was seen inevitably as a force in sup­port of the Powerful monied elites against the peas­antry are the rea­sons behind the hatred.
I don’t deny him the his­to­ry of the for­ma­tion of the JCF but the 11^th of October 1865 and the Morant Bay rebel­lion is a long way away.

There is a non­sen­si­cal nar­ra­tive preva­lent in Jamaica that if some­how you were to place sol­diers to patrol the streets there would be few­er shoot­ings and more coöper­a­tion between the peo­ple and mem­bers of the military.
I would laugh if that asser­tion was­n’t so incred­i­bly sophomoric.
First of all, tell that to the fam­i­ly of Mister Keith Clarke who was gunned down in his home by mem­bers of the JDF.

My state­ments are not designed to impugn the integri­ty or the efforts of mem­bers of the military.They are the com­ments of some­one con­ver­sant with the dif­fer­ences between the roles the two agen­cies serve.
It is incred­i­bly dif­fi­cult to con­vince Jamaicans that peo­ple are peo­ple and not police offi­cers or sol­diers. Police offi­cers are not from Mars and sol­diers from Pluto.
Most, if not all of the young peo­ple who step for­ward to serve, do so out of love for their agency of choice and a sense of how they want to be seen when they vol­un­teer for either force.
What dif­fer­en­ti­ates them is their dis­ci­pline of choice.

The Prime Minister and his Minister of National Security would be bet­ter served by using their air­time to edu­cate the peo­ple on their respon­si­bil­i­ties as citizens.
The Prime Minister speaks with forked tongue about cit­i­zens rights while he igno­rant­ly and duplic­i­tous­ly ignores their respon­si­bil­i­ty to obey the laws and respect of our law enforce­ment officers.

He should be ashamed to keep talk­ing about mon­i­tor­ing reports for alle­ga­tions of abuse while he has already con­vened a pan­el [as I warned he would do] of his elit­ist friends, to sit in judg­ment of the secu­ri­ty forces.[remem­ber Tivoli Gardens].
He should be ashamed to keep talk­ing about rights with­out a sin­gle word of charge to the vira­gos and hood­lums who tear off their cloth­ing, reveal­ing their most pri­vate parts when the forces attempt to do their jobs.

This is the embar­rass­ment and dis­gust­ing affront to their dig­ni­ty that Andrew Holness wants mem­bers of the secu­ri­ty forces to endure while car­ry­ing out their duties with­out upset­ting the sen­si­bil­i­ties of these hoodlums.
In oth­er words, he wants them to place their lives on the line to save his polit­i­cal back­side with­out cre­at­ing a stir, with­out mak­ing waves, and that should include stop­ping the high­ly doped-up and hal­lu­ci­nat­ed killers and bring them in with their weapon­ry with­out fir­ing a shot.

What Andrew needs to do is to ask the Rights lob­by he so obe­di­ent­ly fol­lows and Terrence Willams and tell them to go do that job. Jamaica will indeed owe them a great debt of grat­i­tude if they can pull that off.
Failing which Andrew Holness should take sev­er­al seats and shut up. Clearly, he has no idea what it takes to stop these grue­some killings and his lack of sup­port for the secu­ri­ty forces is caus­ing more harm than good.

Jamaica needs a state of emer­gency not a par­tial state of emer­gency or a lim­it­ed state of emer­gency. There needs to be a sense of awak­en­ing. An awak­en­ing which rec­og­nizes that the coun­try is rapid­ly slid­ing into anarchy.
Talk and plat­i­tudes will not stop the slide.
Most impor­tant­ly keep­ing up appear­ances instead of doing the dirty work is apply­ing paint to a bro­ken down and dilap­i­dat­ed struc­ture which inevitably will collapse.