Jamaica Is A Country Which Refuses To Punish It’s Worst Offenders

It real­ly does­n’t mat­ter who the chef is, or who is stir­ring the pot. If the ingre­di­ents in the stew are not the right ones the out­come can­not be good. 

The essay I am about to write, whether con­densed or expan­sive will be well rep­re­sent­ed and encap­su­lat­ed in the above para­graph.
I will be rather brief nev­er­the­less, as I once again try to lay out rea­sons why the path we are on as it relates to crime and inse­cu­ri­ty in our coun­try is the wrong path.
There are two calls which gen­er­al­ly suc­ceed a killing or set of killings in our coun­try.
(1) What is the Commissioner of Police doing about it?
(2) What about a new crime Plan?

The fact of the mat­ter is that even if we were to appoint the best per­son imag­in­able, and even if we were to co-opt the best pos­si­ble crime plan any­one could devise for our unique sit­u­a­tion, sin­gu­lar­ly or togeth­er, these ini­tia­tives would have a neg­li­gi­ble, or no real pos­i­tive mea­sur­able effect.
Here’s why!
The police can only arrest peo­ple for crimes which are on the books.
I hard­ly think there is any­one who would dis­agree with the idea that our laws have not kept pace with the sophis­ti­ca­tion of the coun­try’s local crim­i­nals, much less those who are being deport­ed back to the Island.

And so we rec­og­nize that good laws which are well-inten­tioned, con­struct­ed and cod­i­fied, are an inte­gral part of what ought to be in the mix in order to have opti­mum results.
We do not have laws which ade­quate­ly and sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly tar­gets those who plan, facil­i­tate, finance, and exe­cute crim­i­nal behav­ior. Subsequently, even if we have the best Commissioner of police in place, the absence of good laws makes it impos­si­ble for a mean­ing­ful dent to be made in crime.

The struc­tur­al inad­e­qua­cies and entrenched bul­warks which have been insti­tu­tion­al­ized and entrenched in the laws and pub­lic bod­ies make it vir­tu­al­ly impos­si­ble for bet­ter out­comes on the crime front.
The entire gov­ern­men­tal struc­ture is a giant incu­ba­tor for crime to hatch and flour­ish.
Unless we method­i­cal­ly tear down and rebuild the gov­ern­men­tal struc­ture which wit­ting­ly and in some cas­es unwit­ting­ly sup­ports crim­i­nal con­duct, all of the efforts sup­pos­ed­ly geared at the elim­i­na­tion of crime will be for naught. In the mean­time, lives con­tin­ue to be lost needlessly.

In order to under­stand why vio­lent crimes are so entrenched in our cul­ture, we have to face our own short­com­ings and pro­cliv­i­ties.
We are a vio­lent peo­ple which is neg­a­tive. Secondly, we are a peo­ple high­ly tol­er­ant of crim­i­nal con­duct.
Thirdly we are a cul­ture which reveres and is high­ly def­er­en­tial to infa­mous crim­i­nals regard­less of the deprav­i­ty with which they went about com­mit­ting the mur­ders and oth­er acts of crim­i­nal­i­ty attrib­uted to them.
For the most part, soci­ety has mort­gaged away the future sta­bil­i­ty of the nation on what can be derived now.
This is prob­a­bly most evi­dent in the inner sanc­tums of the gar­ri­son com­mu­ni­ties in which mur­der­ous thugs are giv­en def­er­en­tial treat­ment for a few dol­lars.
Young girls and boys are sur­ren­dered to the lust of local thugs because they hand out a few scraps from the ill-got­ten gains they have acquired, usu­al­ly at the expense of some­one’s life.

Yet the soci­ety sees noth­ing wrong with it, not the Media, not the Courts, not even the Government which has an oblig­a­tion to cre­ate sys­tems and prac­tices which secures the pop­u­la­tion. (Government par­ty-neu­tral)
In the decades fol­low­ing Independence, our nation has demon­strat­ed that we are capa­ble of com­pet­ing with any­one. In the areas of sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy, sports and what­ev­er else we put our heads to.
Even our much berat­ed and maligned police offi­cers are bea­cons of light when placed in the right envi­ron­ment. Nevertheless, we have also demon­strat­ed a fatal weak­ness for immoral­i­ty and myopia on the dev­as­tat­ing con­se­quences crime is hav­ing on society.

We have a soci­ety in which the entire sys­tem is flawed, yet the blame is placed on the seg­ment of the struc­ture which has the least pow­er, speak­ing of the police.
On the one hand, we have a Bench, Bar, and Prosecution which large­ly grad­u­at­ed from the Norman Manley Law School. This cre­ates a sit­u­a­tion which is almost a con­flict of inter­est just not in the tra­di­tion­al sense.
It is bad enough that all of the peo­ple who pop­u­late the Judgeships, the Prosecutor’s office, and the Private Bar almost all come from the same school. But when the School is a left­ist Institution like the University of the West Indies is, it becomes incred­i­bly dif­fi­cult to get pro­fes­sion­als to staff the dif­fer­ent areas of the jus­tice sys­tem who have a clear under­stand­ing of the dan­gers crime pos­es to society.

To add insult to injury the polit­i­cal class pret­ty much all come from the same left­ist insti­tu­tion, and so are the social work­ers, and oth­er peo­ple who staff the jus­tice sys­tem. So too are the legions who staff the var­i­ous gov­ern­ment agen­cies.
Essentially, but for a few cas­es, the entire work­force at the high­er lev­els of gov­ern­ment all came out of the gates of the UWI Mona Campus or the Cave Hill Campus in Trinidad to a less­er extent. Even so, it makes no dif­fer­ence, as the very same left-wing ide­ol­o­gy is the hall­mark of that insti­tu­tion in Trinidad as well.
It has always been so.
The straw which broke the prover­bial Camel’s back has been the push to edu­cate the lead­ers of the sin­gle police force which has the respon­si­bil­i­ty to pro­tect the Island’s 2.8 mil­lion inhab­i­tants.
And now the police depart­ment has become a lum­ber­ing behe­moth of over 10’000, top heavy with lead­ers who grad­u­at­ed from .….….…. you guessed it. The University of the West Indies.

Prior to the influx of peo­ple with degrees into the JCF, the Agency was derid­ed and ridiculed as a bunch of une­d­u­cat­ed or at best poor­ly edu­cat­ed losers who could­n’t find work else­where.
Today the force is prob­a­bly the most edu­cat­ed any­where in the world with many serv­ing mem­bers hav­ing grad­u­ate Degrees.
Unfortunately, for law-abid­ing Jamaicans, that amass­ing of knowl­edge has not trans­lat­ed into a bet­ter crime-fight­ing force.
In fact, there is a good argu­ment to be made that the force is worse than 30 years ago when we hard­ly had any­one in the depart­ment with degrees.
In actu­al­i­ty, it is a net pos­i­tive to have high­ly edu­cat­ed, high­ly moti­vat­ed peo­ple serv­ing in all areas of gov­ern­ment, includ­ing law enforce­ment.
Nevertheless, they have to want to be police offi­cers, not just wear the uni­form and col­lect a pay­check.
The gen­er­al con­sen­sus is that many of the peo­ple in lead­er­ship posi­tions today real­ly have no heart for polic­ing but the small econ­o­my in the coun­try does not offer many oppor­tu­ni­ties after grad­u­at­ing from — -the University.

Still, it would be a mis­take to blame the hap­less police depart­ment and its top-heavy cabal of lead­ers with Doctorates and Masters Degrees for the Nation’s woes.
The truth is that the nation is an anom­aly. It is one of the few places any­where where peo­ple gen­uine­ly bend over back­ward to accom­mo­date crim­i­nals and to make excus­es and ratio­nal­ize away vio­lent crim­i­nal acts as nor­mal.
The entire Governing struc­ture is built around the enhance­ment of crime.
Many argue and dis­agree with my assess­ment but can­not come up with a cred­i­ble expla­na­tion for the rea­sons behind the coun­try’s inabil­i­ty to inves­ti­gate and put away know crim­i­nals like Christopher (Duddus)Coke or his father before him.
No one can explain why on the rare occa­sion that a mur­der­er like Vybz Kartel is found guilty of Murder and appro­pri­ate­ly sen­tenced to prison the Appellate Court is almost cer­tain to release him on some incon­se­quen­tial tech­ni­cal­i­ty.
Who is pay­ing off these Judges?
Why is it that there is no one of promi­nence locked away at the Tower-street or the Horizon cor­rec­tion­al facility/​
The answer is clear, the sys­tem is cor­rupt and slant­ed to keep con­nect­ed crim­i­nals out of prison.
Now the ghet­to youths know it and they refuse to be treat­ed dif­fer­ent­ly than the light-skinned upper class peo­ple from upper Saint Andrew.

So how do you fix all this you ask?
I do not pre­tend to have all of the answers, but we need a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent atti­tude on crime nation­al­ly.
The so-called Conservative Prime Minister now occu­py­ing Jamaica House is a prod­uct of the left­ist UWI.
It is a con­tra­dic­tion in actu­al terms. There can be no Conservatism com­ing out of an insti­tu­tion which has, through its entire exis­tence been a caul­dron of left­ist, com­mu­nist dog­ma.
There is not a sin­gle insti­tu­tion of high­er learn­ing which is geared at prepar­ing the work­force based on Conservative prin­ci­ples of God, Family, coun­try.
None geared at teach­ing about small­er Government, root­ing out cor­rup­tion, and build­ing a pri­vate sec­tor in which the entre­pre­neur­ial spir­it can thrive and achieve its full poten­tial.
There is no Institution which teach­es peo­ple not to depend on Government but to depend on themselves.

In so much as Socialism ‑or more specif­i­cal­ly Democratic-Socialism has been an abject fail­ure to Jamaica, so too must the UWI take respon­si­bil­i­ty.
As the Institution which had a vir­tu­al monop­oly on high­er learn­ing, the University of the West Indies has failed the peo­ple and coun­try through the mis­guid­ed poli­cies and peo­ple which came out of its doors.
To this day the cor­rup­tion in the var­i­ous Government agen­cies may be placed square­ly at the feet of the grad­u­ates of that insti­tu­tion who seem­ing­ly are self-absorbed Autocrats, in it for them­selves.
We can­not get mean­ing­ful laws because the peo­ple whose job it is to cre­ate those laws and to cre­ate an envi­ron­ment in which law-abid­ing peo­ple can have con­fi­dence came from a sys­tem in which the rule of law is just a pass­ing thought.

In the mean­time, America will have to con­tin­ue to take away our transna­tion­al crim­i­nals when­ev­er its inter­est is affect­ed.
Murderers, Drug Dealers, Lotto-Scammers all. But it is not America’s job to pun­ish Jamaica’s crim­i­nal scum.
It is for Jamaica to get its act togeth­er and stop play­ing games with this crit­i­cal issue.
Failure by the two polit­i­cal par­ties leg­isla­tive­ly and behav­ioral­ly. Failure by the Judiciary which likes to claim inde­pen­dence for itself.
Failure by the pub­lic sec­tor and pub­lic bod­ies to demand account­abil­i­ty and action on crime have brought us to where we are today.
A coun­try in an unde­clared cold civ­il war. A small nation of 2.8 mil­lion and a crime rate in the top five most vio­lent nations on the plan­et.
Yet that evokes no out­rage, it elic­its no sense of shock or alarm. The cry right now is to free (wurl boss) a con­vict­ed mur­der­er whose claim to fame is to cre­ate dement­ed, degen­er­a­tive lyrics.
May God help us.