It Is Past Time For The Jamaican Government To Act Decisively On Crime…

There is a gra­tu­itous default nar­ra­tive that many low-infor­ma­tion Jamaicans use when­ev­er the ques­tion of vio­lence on the Island is broached. That is that there is crime every­where. Even those who ought to know bet­ter and had the good for­tune of trav­el­ing to oth­er coun­tries still make non­sen­si­cal ‘what-about’ statements.
Chicago, Illinois, is one of the American cities with an inor­di­nate num­ber of shoot­ings; the city report­ed a pop­u­la­tion of 2.699 mil­lion (2020). According to the Chicago police depart­ment, 2021 end­ed with 797 homicides.
Jamaica has a pop­u­la­tion of 2.961 mil­lion (2020) and a slight­ly larg­er pop­u­la­tion of over two hun­dred thou­sand residents.
Despite hav­ing almost the same pop­u­la­tion, the jamaica con­stab­u­lary force report­ed that the Island Nation record­ed 1,463 killings in 2021. Jamaicans killed 666 more of their fel­low Jamaicans than res­i­dents of Chicago did their own.
Additionally, for the sec­ond year in a row, Jamaica had the high­est mur­der rate in the Caribbean and Latin American region, sur­pass­ing such nations as Venezuela, Mexico, Ecuador, and Chile, known as vio­lent hotspots of homicide.
Jamaica has the dubi­ous dis­tinc­tion of hav­ing the high­est kill rate of any nation in the Caribbean-Latin-American region, with a kill rate of 49.4 per 100,000 residents.
The sit­u­a­tion in Chicago does not per­turb res­i­dents of near­by Evanston, Illinois; they do not live in fear as res­i­dents all across the Island are because they are always so close to the ground zero of the violence.
Mass shoot­ings in America pose a sig­nif­i­cant risk to all Americans; there is no deny­ing that, nev­er­the­less, because of the size of the United States, it is impos­si­ble to com­pare report­ed inci­dents of vio­lence in the United States and vio­lence in tiny Jamaica.
If you do not under­stand the dif­fer­ence, I can­not help you.

I am past the stage where I believe that most Jamaicans want a crime-free soci­ety. There is a prac­ti­cal argu­ment to be made that most Jamaicans have nev­er seen the peace­ful and serene Jamaica of the 1960s. It is, there­fore, rea­son­able to con­clude that since they do not know what a peace­ful Jamaica looks like, they are unable to imag­ine liv­ing in a safe and peace­ful country.
Prime Minister Andrew Holness spoke to the upsurge in vio­lence in Spanish Town, St Catherine, label­ing it a nation­al emer­gency and the need to get civ­il soci­ety to ‘come along with stronger mea­sures to pro­tect the country.
“The lev­el of orga­nized crim­i­nal activ­i­ty there is a nation­al emer­gency. I do not have the lux­u­ry to be dither­ing on these mat­ters any­more; we have to act on it. We have to act to pro­tect inno­cent, law-abid­ing cit­i­zens.”
I must pause to make the point that the word ‘any­more’ in the prime min­is­ter’s state­ments, which in his own words, is an admis­sion that he has been dither­ing on the issue of crime.
Touché to my detrac­tors who con­tin­ued to argue that the prime min­is­ter has been doing all he can on this exis­ten­tial issue of vio­lent crime; he has­n’t; he just acknowl­edged it.
I wish I had a dol­lar for all the times I wrote that the gov­ern­ment is [not] doing all it could to cau­ter­ize this issue.
Addressing the National Disaster Risk Management Council, Holness said. In our lib­er­al democ­ra­cy”, there are cer­tain changes that require the coöper­a­tion of the Parliamentary Opposition.
Let us stop there, mis­ter prime min­is­ter, do what you can with­out them. If you can edu­cate the peo­ple, use what­ev­er tools you have but leave the polit­i­cal oppo­si­tion out.
There are no cir­cum­stances under which the (People’s National Party (PNP) would side with the Jamaican peo­ple or the coun­try over their own rapa­cious and craven desire to attain power.
This par­ty and all of its func­tionar­ies are inher­ent­ly pro-crim­i­nals, which goes for the PNP moles in the pub­lic sec­tor, includ­ing the courts.
The PNP has opposed and fought tooth and nail to oppose every bit of leg­is­la­tion that would put a seri­ous dent in vio­lent crime. The par­ty has con­sis­tent­ly placed itself square­ly in the camp of the killers while talk­ing out of the side of its mouth about crime, only as a means to gain state power.
For all intents and pur­pos­es, it is dif­fi­cult to dif­fer­en­ti­ate between the People’s National Party and the mur­der­ous scum destroy­ing the coun­try. That par­ty has always been a crim­i­nal sup­port­ing par­ty; it will not change under the present leadership.
Personally, I have seen no dif­fer­ence between PNP and the killers run­ning the streets.

Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, black achiev­er hon­oree, and cre­ator of the blog mike​beck​les​.com.