I got to thinking recently and I arrived at a couple of conclusions (1) The gangs doing the killings are still operating with impunity. (2) The number of gangs seems to be on the increase. And (3) just how easy it was for the people to be influenced that good no-nonsense policing attitude toward dangerous criminals was bad for them and the country. And so I want to have a little talk with you my readers, rather than just talk at you.
HOW DID WE GET HERE?
It is important to remember where we are coming from and where we are so that we may make informed decisions which will impact where we are going in the way we want to.
Because as the cliché goes, “if you don’t know where you are going you are already there”.
Now it is important to remember that Jamaica has always been a high crime country.
This is so because of the way political interference by the two political parties (a) cerated garrison communities, rendering them no go for law enforcement and havens for murderers and other criminals. (b)Lack of resources for law enforcement and lack of proper training also played a role. © The revolving door for criminals created by the courts resulted in apathy and in some cases criminal complicity by law enforcement.
I will attempt to show you the trajectory of murders over the years in order to demonstrate how certain factors both internally and externally have helped to shape the trajectory of the most serious crimes in our country.
Jamaica recorded the following number of homicides over the following years.
| Year | # of Murders |
| 1970 | 152 |
| 1971 | 145 |
| 1972 | 170 |
| 1973 | 227 |
| 1974 | 195 |
| 1975 | 266 |
| 1976 | 367 |
| 1977 | 409 |
| 1978 | 381 |
| 1979 | 351 |
| 1980 | 899 |
| 1981 | 490 |
| 1982 | 405 |
| 1983 | 424 |
| 1984 | 484 |
| 1986 | 449 |
| 1987 | 442 |
| 1988 | 414 |
| 1989 | 439 |
| 1990 | 543 |
| 1991 | 561 |
| 1992 | 629 |
| 1994 | 690 |
| 1995 | 780 |
| 1998 | 953 |
| 1999 | 849 |
| 2000 | 887 |
| 2002 | 1045 |
| 2003 | 975 |
| 2004 | 1471 |
| 2005 | 1674 |
| 2006 | 1340 |
| 2007 | 1574 |
| 2008 | 1601 |
| 2009 | 1680 |
| 2010 | 1428 |
| 2011 | 1125 |
| 2012 | 1097 |
| 2013 | 1200 |
| 2014 | 1005 |
| 2015 | 1192 |
| 2016 | 1350 |
In the year 2017, 1,616 murders were reported to the authorities. And 2018 resulted in around 1455 homicides, give or take a couple either way.
Now, though these homicide numbers are stark, I believe they are fundamentally flawed, because they only represent killings in which victims of gunshot wounds, stabbings, and other violent assaults die immediately.
Not all victims of violent attacks die immediately and so there may be another 10, 20, or even 30% more deaths which can reasonably be attached to those annual homicide numbers.
At the risk of making myself part of the narrative which is absolutely not my intent, I wish to point out that between the start of the statistics above and when I left the force in 1991 murders were far too many but not overly astronomical.
When we juxtapose the numbers which existed between 1982 when I joined the department (405) and 1989 (439) and the facts I laid out about political interference and lack of resources hamstringing the police you will also notice that homicides remained generally steady.
We may go back and look at the years 1980 to 1981, and we will notice that those years represented the election year 1980 and 1981 the year a new administration took office and so those numbers were anomalies as far as the homicide numbers went.
Older Jamaicans will recall the 1980 elections in which an estimated 899 Jamaicans lost their lives, largely as a result of political violence and 1981 although the numbers had dropped precipitously to 490, those 1981 numbers still represented a high, for a good seven (7) year period and never again reached or exceeded [490] until 1990 when the numbers jumped drastically considering the previous seven-year stability to 543 homicides.
By 1991 the year I exited the force all bets were off homicides had moved up to 561.
Gone were the good old days in which murderers knew that it was not their streets.
So what happened you ask, why is it that between the time you served and the time you left murders got out of control Mike?
Was it you keeping all those shottas under control?
I wish I could take credit for it (smile) but we have to seriously look at what happened in our country which caused basically (8) eight years of stable homicide numbers?
THE SEAGA ADMINISTRATION
I generally get killed(no not literally) laugh, for daring to write about politics or the way I see it through my own eyes growing up and living thirty (30) years of my life in my country.
Many people are offended they say talk only about law enforcement.
I generally laugh at that because right here in this article we see just how politics impacts every other area of our lives.
Edward Phillip George Seaga won the 1980 general elections on a platform of conservatism.
It was easy for Seaga’s message to resonate against the Manley message of self-sufficiency and national pride.
Any message that was opposite to Manley’s would have resonated, people were hungry, store shelves were empty, crime and violence were everywhere.
Seaga’s victory was a devastating blow to Michael Manley and the (PNP), his Conservative Jamaica Labor Party won 51 of the then 60 seats in the parliament. Many laborites suspected Manley lost his seat but was allowed to keep it.
No evidence of that ever surfaced but the whispering continued for years.
Many Jamaicans who grew up during my time which is the 70’s and really came of age in the ’80s will quickly argue that all politicians in Jamaica are corrupt, dishonest, monsters.
I have no facts to counter those assertions but I will say that even if not totally true, whatever Jamaicans say does have some truth in there somewhere.
Edward Seaga created the satellite community of Tivoli Gardens. Those who know a little about Jamaica’s history will recall that Tivoli Gardens rose out of the God forgotten slums previously known as (Back-o-wall).
Tivoli Gardens was a modern apartment complex with amenities like a park, community center, a state of the art clinic etc.
[Full disclosure], my first child was born at that clinic because it was rumored to be the very best in the Island at the time.
Seaga was mightily proud of what he created in that community as he ought to be.
However, like an over-doting parent, he failed to see that the child he gave life to was turning bad.
And that was an egregious error in judgment, that baby became a monster. When a child becomes that it reflects badly on the parents.
Because of Seaga’s failure to rein in Tivoli Gardens, he will forever and for the remainder of his days be saddled with the infamy that that community came to represent.
And that is all too sad because when it came to law and order Edward Seaga never stood in the way of the police doing their jobs, save and except for his delinquent baby Tivoli Gardens.
The data demonstrates that it was under Edward Seaga’s tenure that homicides leveled off and remained constant.
Edward Seaga demitted office in (1988) and Michael Manley was back at the helm of our government.
By 1990, just one year into Manley’s tenure, homicides jumped from (439) into the new territory of (543.
Homicides continued at a merry clip under Michael Manley and continued so after he ceded power to his inept deputy Percival Patterson.
By (2002) still with the PNP in power, homicides had reached (1045).
In just over twelve(12) years under PNP leadership, homicides in Jamaica had increased by (238.041%).
We can argue along the margins politically, what we cannot deny is the data.
A NEW NARRATIVE
In 2007 Orett Bruce Golding a former minister of construction under Seaga who had left the JLP and helped to form the then third party the National Democratic Movement or (NDM) had returned to the JLP and was able to eke out a slim majority for the JLP.
The JLP victory seemed at the time to be voter malaise and exhaustion from the PNP’s 141⁄2 unbroken years in office and the backward direction of the country.
By (2011) Golding was forced to resign from entanglements with the Christopher Coke matter.
Andrew Holness took over the leadership of the party and the Government and soon sought his own mandate against the Portia Simpson Miller-led (PNP).
Holness was defeated at the polls on the 5th of January 2012 and Miller served as the Prime Minister until fresh elections were called on the 3rd of March 2016.
Andrew Holness’ party won the elections, albeit by a razor-thin one seat majority which was later strengthened by two by/elections in which the ruling (JLP) prevailed.
The moral of the story surrounding the period which included Simpson Miller, Bruce Golding and Andrew Holness is simply this.
Both political parties are responsible for the events as they occurred in that time period and so we are left to analyze what event or series of events caused both parties to become complicit or incompetent, or both, in dealing with violent crimes.
HUMAN RIGHTS
If I pretended that the Jamaican police have not engaged in atrocious behavior I would be lying.
If I pretended that politicians, judges, lawyers, prosecutors, and parsons and people in every discipline haven’s as well I would be lying.
And if I pretended that people in literally every discipline, in every nation across the globe haven’t done the same thing.…again I would be lying.
The reality of the foregone is that people, regardless of their jobs are only people who are prone to excesses and abusing their powers.
When that happens the societies in which they operate must take steps to remedy those transgressions and put in place safeguards to guard against recurrence.
So if you have bad Pastors you do not tear down the church.
With the multiple reports about Priest sexually assaulting little boys the powers that be hasn’t gotten rid of the Catholic Church, they are working to fix it.
When our police make mistakes we fix the problems and we support our police, we should not tear them down.
Unfortunately, that is not what we do in Jamaica, we tear down our police and that provides a wide opening to those who would benefit from the breakdown in the rule of law.
As ridiculous as the lack of support for the police is, the single greatest issue in my estimation is the influence the so-called human rights lobby has been able to wield in our country.
The faithful observance of and fidelity to human rights are fundamental templates of any democratic society.
Nevertheless, human rights and national security are two fundamentally different issues, neither of which are dispensable or mutually exclusive in a democratic society.
Given that human rights lobbies are not as visible or influential in the powerful democracies, and since there is a kind of default presumption that they are the template for good democratic societies, we tend to ignore the gross human rights transgressions which occur in these powerful nations.
Police abuse of people of color is the number one human rights issue which has affected people of color in the United States, Britain, and Canada today as it always has.
There is hardly any response or statements much less any meaningful steps taken on behalf of a single aggrieved party anywhere in any of the named powerful developed countries.
There has been zero advocacy on behalf of any killed or injured by police here in the United States to my knowledge.
SO WHY THE DEVELOPING WORLD?
The human rights lobby in the developing world in which Jamaica finds itself are generally funded by supporters or parent lobbies in the western power centers which are in turn funded by dark money.
A country which undermines its law-enforcement is a country with high crime statistics. Jamaica’s crime-fighting efforts are directed at its police officers, not at the violence producers.
Not that there cannot be an effective crime-fighting mechanism in place and vigilant police oversight simultaneously.
Why would larger countries want crime to increase in the developing world?
Larger western countries are lenders to poorer developing countries. They destabilize those nations because they need to keep them borrowing.
A country inundated with crime has next to zero chance of climbing its way out of poverty.
Jamaica has made many tactical mistakes, not the least of which has been allowing the international human rights lobbies to worm their influence into the body politic of the country.
It’s a veritable disaster at this point as literally every bit of legislation which is supposed to benefit the Jamaican people has to pass muster with human rights lobbies which take orders from either the United States, Canada, or Great Britain.
Why would either of these nations care about human-rights?
They don’t!
They understand full well that the question of human rights is something the general population will sign onto. What poor citizenry will not be enamored with the idea of a group of people who are protecting them from the power of the state?
Jamaica has long flirted with wannabe police watchdogs the likes of Flo O’Connor and others, but the country completely sold out to Carolyn Gomes and Jamaicans for Justice(JFJ).
If the safety and security of Jamaicans were attended to with the same diligence and fervor as the influence the criminal enhancement lobbies have had on the decision making of our country we would have a very good country.
THE END GAME
Ultimately, what will happen is that the state will completely lose control. We are not far from that point, we had a glimpse of that in 2010.
In Guatemala, Mexico, Colombia, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Brazil. and Venezuela, right here in our hemisphere we have seen the effects of their government’s complicity and cowardice in confronting the dangers posed by gangs which later metastasized into murderous drug cartels.
Unless the Jamaican people come out from the fog cast by the crime enhancement lobby Jamaica will see people leaving on old rickety rafts and old canoes trying to find safe harbor.
It can still be stopped but time is running out.