Jamaica Needs Collective New Year’s Resolution For Change.…

Over the last three decades well over thir­ty thou­sand ( 30.000) peo­ple have been killed by crim­i­nals in Jamaica. It’s impor­tant to note that the coun­try is not engaged in a civ­il war. That guessti­mate was arrived at using sta­tis­tics from the Police report­ing on murders.
Additionally untold more have been shot and crit­i­cal­ly wound­ed lat­er result­ing in death. These are nev­er added into the mur­der totals, so by all accounts the num­ber of report­ed homi­cides are gen­er­al­ly con­ser­v­a­tive estimates.

As the killings con­tin­ue unabat­ed and arguably with increased feroc­i­ty there seem to be a sense of res­ig­na­tion with­in the pop­u­la­tion that noth­ing can be done to stop it.
The Police Department is plagued with myr­i­ad prob­lems which ren­ders it unable to cope effec­tive­ly as a force in pro­tect­ing the shrink­ing seg­ment of the pop­u­la­tion not involved in crim­i­nal conduct.
Corruption, incom­pe­tence, lack of struc­tur­al sup­port , low wages , and an over­all sense of demor­al­iza­tion are just a few of the issues which are ham­per­ing the police.
The polit­i­cal admin­is­tra­tion in Kingston is not about to help , from top down the admin­is­tra­tion is a tem­plate of cor­rup­tion and malfeasance .

Scandal after scan­dal which would have brought down admin­is­tra­tions in oth­er west­ern coun­tries have been swept aside result­ing in no con­se­quence for the thieves who are entrust­ed with run­ning the nation’s affairs.
This gives the aver­age per­son on the streets the sense that he too can com­mit breach­es of the law with­out con­se­quence. The crime sta­tis­tics in the Island Nation bears tes­ta­ment to that sense. By the con­clu­sion of the year 2015 the num­ber of Jamaicans killed at the hands of crim­i­nals is expect­ed to be in excess of 1200 . As I have argued repeat­ed­ly, these are huge amounts of killings for any coun­try but even more fright­en­ing for a small island with 2.7 mil­lion peo­ple and a land mass of 4,411 square miles.
During my brief decade in law enforce­ment I saw first-hand the dev­as­tat­ing con­se­quences crime has on fam­i­lies and on the psy­che of the nation overall.

In the 24 years since I left,crime has gone up expo­nen­tial­ly. Murders alone has increased between two hun­dred and fifty and three hun­dred per­cent­age points.
Those per­cent­age points are not mere sta­tis­tics they rep­re­sent once liv­ing breath­ing human beings whom were our broth­ers and sis­ters, aunts and uncles , moth­ers and fathers, our neigh­bors and friends.
Laws have not kept pace with the sit­u­a­tion on the ground, in fact Jamaica has dis­proved the old say­ing “crime does not pay”.
Crime does pay in Jamaica , it’s sim­ply a mat­ter of calculation.
A per­son want­i­ng to mur­der some­one for what­ev­er rea­son has pre­cious lit­tle to fear from the author­i­ties. Less than 50% of mur­der­ers are ever arrested,those arrest­ed are large­ly domes­tic homi­cides where every­one knows John killed his girl­friend Shauna-kaye .
More fright­en­ing is that even with those mea­ger homi­cide arrest num­bers only about 7% are con­vict­ed by the crim­i­nal friend­ly court system.
If you thought that the 7% con­vic­tion rate is bad it’s impor­tant that you know that even then the lib­er­al appeal courts over­turn con­vic­tions on the flim­si­est of tech­ni­cal­i­ties mak­ing it all but cer­tain the courts sys­tem has no agen­da to incar­cer­ate dan­ger­ous crim­i­nals but is more inter­est­ed in push­ing it’s rad­i­cal left­ist pro­gres­sive agen­da. By the time the appeal courts whit­tle the con­vic­tion rate down we are down to a shock­ing 1% actu­al­ly pay­ing for their crimes.

Poverty. Deportations . Government incom­pe­tence and com­plic­i­ty. A Weak inef­fec­tu­al crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem . Laws which ham­per effec­tive law enforce­ment are just a few of the fac­tors fuel­ing crime on the Island. The rough­ly 4 Jamaicans mur­dered dai­ly is a mere par for the course except when some­one of promi­nence becomes the vic­tim, in which case there is an out­pour­ing of out­rage and dis­gust and as my dear­ly depart­ed grand dad used to say , “like crème soda it fiz­zles and then it dies”.
Outrage done !
The Island’s archa­ic laws encour­ages crim­i­nal behav­ior , even when author­i­ties attempt to do some­thing in response to the bur­geon­ing rate of law­less­ness instead of tak­ing a stand against crim­i­nals they design laws to fur­ther impede and ham­per law enforcement.
In the end Jamaica is not a good place to raise a fam­i­ly or do busi­ness any more . Sad to say this will not change with the present lead­er­ship or should I say lack thereof.

I hope that with the com­ing new year Jamaicans will take a col­lec­tive intro­spec­tive look at the direc­tion our coun­try has been head­ing and ask them­selves are they bet­ter off than the year before, or the year before that?
If the answer is no as it should be then they must ask them­selves whether it’s okay to con­tin­ue sup­port­ing a Party and a Government which is gross­ly incom­pe­tent at best and worse case bla­tant­ly cor­rupt and crim­i­nal in nature?
Jamaicans have a col­lec­tive new year res­o­lu­tion to make and that should be to return the coun­try to a path of pros­per­i­ty and growth for their children.
That path is not to be found in the man­i­festo of the present administration.