If Holness & Phillips Come Together On Crime It’s Win-win For Jamaica

THE POLITICS

JAMAICA is being read­ied for yet anoth­er gen­er­al elec­tion cam­paign sea­son, and yet, despite the maneu­ver­ing by both polit­i­cal par­ties, the lying, and the infan­tile brava­do, the sem­i­nal issue of vio­lent crime is ignored.
Just today one dai­ly pub­li­ca­tion had as one of its head­lines the words, “Bloody 24 Hours”.
The fact is, that kind of head­line could eas­i­ly be pre-writ­ten each day and it would be accu­rate every day.
What dif­fer­en­ti­ates this one or should I say what neces­si­tates it, is the num­ber of peo­ple killed or injured with­in a small win­dow of time.
In this case, it was Thirteen (13) peo­ple shot, nine (9) fatal­ly. Among the wound­ed, a two-year-old (2) baby boy.

THE GANGSTERS

As the gang­sters move away from the tra­di­tion­al mur­der zones of Saint James, parts of Saint Catherine and Clarendon as a result of the ZOSO’s and SOE’s, the homi­cide num­bers have decreased to some degree. In Saint James new police reports indi­cates that mur­ders have decreased expo­nen­tial­ly.
The unfor­tu­nate real­i­ty is that in oth­er areas crime has increased not just to the degree it has gone down in Saint James but across the board, vio­lent crimes includ­ing mur­ders, have increased by over 10% when com­pared to the cor­re­spond­ing peri­od last year.
The unof­fi­cial num­ber of mur­ders so far this year stands at 181 in just 51 days.
That is a rate of 3.54 per­sons dying vio­lent­ly at the hands of crim­i­nals, send­ing the Islands kill-rate high­er than the present 47 per 100,000, one of the high­est in the world.
The les­son inher­ent in this process of trans­plant­i­ng & prop­a­ga­tion of crime from areas with ZOSO’s and SOE’s to oth­er areas, is that the afore­men­tioned ini­tia­tives are not real solu­tions to the crime epi­dem­ic, they are mere organs for the growth of crime in dif­fer­ent areas.

THE POLICE

The Police force of today is far bet­ter equipped than when I served between the ear­ly ’80s to ear­ly 90s. Officers now have util­i­ty belts, pep­per spray, bal­lis­tic vests, etc.
The best we could man­age back then was pep­per spray in some Mobile Reserve units.
At the same time, offi­cers are lack­ing the train­ing they need and deserve in order to do a half-way decent job.
Absent from their util­i­ty belts are two com­po­nents, (a) Tasers, (b) a set of balls, to make it clear they are police offi­cers not to be tri­fled with.
Hesitancy when effect­ing arrests, is a clear invi­ta­tion for (a) a sus­pect to resist arrest (b) for bystanders to inter­vene.
Those opposed to a Jamaica in which the rule of law was the law of the land all but evis­cer­at­ed the idea of the no-non­sense cop.
Ironically, the vio­lence-pro­duc­ers always knew the no-non­sense cops and that in and of itself was a deter­rent and a vio­lence sup­pres­sant.
On the one hand, those who chose to be gang­sters were afraid they would get caught in the act and they also knew that as soon as we found out who did what it was game over. And find out we did.
Today between the Labor Party and the PNP the police is a shell of its for­mer self.
Blatantly trans­par­ent acts like dis­band­ing the Mobile Reserve (the Backbone of the Force) was a solu­tion seek­ing a prob­lem.
Andrew Holness and his cohorts long want­ed to ren­der the Unit impo­tent, one alleged inci­dent linked to the Unit was enough for him to move in and dis­band the Mobile Reserve under the guise of root­ing out cor­rup­tion.
Today the crim­i­nals rule the street and it seems that the peo­ple are resigned to the killings. They wait their turn to be mas­sa­cred like fish in a bar­rel, and that is exact­ly how the gang­sters treat them.

SOLUTION

This Administration has a three-tiered strat­e­gy (a) tie the hands of the police, (b) give the nation false hope that its strate­gies will pro­duce results just around the cor­ner, © give more sup­port to INDECOM to harass and per­se­cute law-enforce­ment offi­cers.
I am well aware that stat­ing the facts can be shock-induc­ing. The nation needs to be shocked by the truth.
At present this admin­is­tra­tion has stu­dent con­sta­bles work­ing for a pit­tance with­out ade­quate train­ing.
Yes, there is cred­i­ble evi­dence that stu­dent con­sta­bles are being deployed with­out the ben­e­fit of a full con­sta­ble’s salary.
Worse yet they are being required to do police work in haz­ardous con­di­tions in which their lives will be threat­ened.
We are reli­ably informed that many of these stu­dent offi­cers have not even received basic firearms or field­craft train­ing.
At the same time if these stu­dent con­sta­bles take action using lethal force with­out the train­ing this Government will walk away and leave them to the rabid dogs at INDECOM.
This is not right and we are ask­ing the Andrew Holness admin­is­tra­tion to cease and desist from endan­ger­ing the lives of these young peo­ple, the lives of their col­leagues and the lives of the gen­er­al pub­lic.
Speaking to these con­cerns recent­ly the police high com­mand said they were kept in the field basi­cal­ly because of the exi­gen­cies of the service(basically they are need­ed).
None of this mat­ters if they do their jobs and are accused of wrong­do­ing, this Government will not defend them, and so what the gov­ern­ment is doing is bla­tant­ly improp­er.
It is not out of the ordi­nary for stu­dent con­sta­bles to get some real-time expe­ri­ence before grad­u­at­ing from basic train­ing. Many police depart­ments do it includ­ing the NYPD.
What is wrong about it, is hav­ing them deployed as trained offi­cers, doing the job of ful­ly trained offi­cers, with­out the req­ui­site train­ing for pro­tract­ed peri­ods of time.
Putting those young peo­ple in such tenous no-win sit­u­a­tions is express­ly wrong and it should not be allowed to continue.

We are now clear that a mas­sive dis­play of police offi­cers and sol­diers does noth­ing to reduce crime over­all. Sure, some crimes with­in the space the secu­ri­ty forces occu­py will be reduced, notwith­stand­ing, the over­all crime sta­tis­tics will only change for the worse when vio­lence pro­duc­ers are forced into oth­er com­mu­ni­ties.
It is time to stop with this cha­rade and end the states of emer­gen­cies and zones of spe­cial oper­a­tions.
It is time for the Government and oppo­si­tion to get togeth­er like adults and work col­lab­o­ra­tive­ly on this issue. There is more than enough praise to go around for both par­ties.
Release the ties that bind the hands of the police, [stand INDECOM down], and to hell with the crit­ics.
This is the only way to attack the vio­lence pro­duc­ers, both par­ties must come togeth­er. That way there is no polit­i­cal mileage to be gained from hav­ing tak­en action.

Mike Beckles is a for­mer Jamaican police Detective cor­po­ral, busi­ness­man, researcher, and blog­ger. 
He is a black achiev­er hon­oree, and pub­lish­er of the blog chatt​-​a​-box​.com. 
He’s also a con­trib­u­tor to sev­er­al web­sites.
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