JCF Gave Up The Streets To Hooligans…

From time to time, you have seen me talk about how crime and law­less­ness impov­er­ish­es every­one except those engaged in crim­i­nal acts. It is not a con­cept that the author­i­ties in Jamaica seem to get; in fact, they seem to have walled them­selves off from hear­ing things that are not com­pli­men­ta­ry of what they are doing.
Jamaica is burst­ing with poten­tial there is no ques­tion about that; clear­ly, the gov­ern­ment is doing some great things with the econ­o­my and tourism sector.
Of course, there is much more that could be added to the tourism prod­uct, aside from the idea that our coun­try is a beach with reg­gae music where peo­ple go to smoke weed.
The dynamism of the young peo­ple and the excite­ment they share when you inter­act with them is heart­warm­ing. However, the coun­try’s lead­ers still haven’t fig­ured out how to max­i­mize or unleash our nation’s full poten­tial, one which is not beset by vio­lent crime.
https://​mike​beck​les​.com/​j​a​m​a​i​c​a​-​a​-​c​u​l​t​u​r​a​l​l​y​-​u​n​t​a​p​p​e​d​-​g​o​l​d​-​m​i​ne/

On a recent trip to Jamaica, I could not help but notice that despite the hype and big talk about progress (don’t get me wrong, there is some progress), the stark real­i­ty is that as it relates to safe­ty and secu­ri­ty, the coun­try is less safe than 31 years ago when I left the JCF.
To begin with, the pre­em­i­nent law enforce­ment agency, the JCF, has all but ced­ed the streets to the hooli­gans oper­at­ing as taxi oper­a­tors and mini-bus dri­vers. There is hard­ly a cred­i­ble con­ver­sa­tion in oppo­si­tion to this asser­tion anymore.
Driving all over the cor­po­rate area day after day, I could have count­ed the num­ber of police vehi­cles on the one hand and had fin­gers left over.
It was the same as my pre­vi­ous vis­it in Ochi Rios and Montego Bay a year ear­li­er. I observed a sin­gle police vehi­cle in Ochi Rios square parked in the crush of human bod­ies, both offi­cers uncon­cerned, scrolling through their cell phones.

Decades ago in Kingston, there were seri­ous motor­cy­cle traf­fic cops; offi­cers who were feared and respect­ed, but it was­n’t just in Kingston but what was then the Ferry high­way and all across the Island. Traffic cops main­tained a strong pres­ence, and traf­fic fatal­i­ties were minimal.
There were expo­nen­tial­ly few­er auto­mo­biles on our hor­ri­ble local roads and thor­ough­fares, but the force was much smaller.
Today there are rough­ly 12,000 police offi­cers on the job as opposed to some­where around 8’000 offi­cers three decades again. Again, I under­stand that as the num­ber of cops has increased over the years, so too has the pop­u­la­tion grown from rough­ly 2.5 mil­lion in the ear­ly nineties to approx­i­mate­ly three mil­lion today.
Understandably, the force is still gross­ly under­staffed by inter­na­tion­al stan­dards, and the agency is beset with the ever-present prob­lem of attrition.
Additionally, offi­cers are forced to work with­out the tools they need to do their jobs. No one asks doc­tors, nurs­es, fire­men, or oth­er work­ers to do their jobs with­out the appro­pri­ate tools. Yet mem­bers of the JCF do not have life-sav­ing bal­lis­tic vests, no tasers, pep­per spray, and oth­er accou­ter­ments of the trade.

Ironically, offi­cers who act in the moment in defense of life and prop­er­ty with­out the req­ui­site tools are at per­il of prison by the same sys­tem that is unwill­ing to equip them.
The Commissioner of Police, Antony Anderson, seems to be oper­at­ing in a cocoon away from the real­i­ties on the ground. I was told that police sta­tions are oper­at­ing with­out a sin­gle ser­vice vehi­cle. How can police oper­ate with­out vehi­cles when they are required to answer dis­tress calls from the pub­lic at rapid speed?
Sources con­firmed that Antony Anderson’s response to why there are police sta­tions with­out ser­vice vehi­cles is that offi­cers are crash­ing the vehicles.
Police offi­cers must respond to calls with the utmost alacrity; they are asked to deal with the worst actors in our societies.
Unfortunately, giv­en the job we ask offi­cers to do, cars will crash. Officers place their lives on the line to answer those calls. I seri­ous­ly doubt that there is a sin­gle offi­cer who wants to be involved in a poten­tial­ly life-threat­en­ing auto crash.
But I am will­ing to for­give Antony Anderson’s naïveté and igno­rance because, as I have said in pre­vi­ous arti­cles, he was nev­er a police offi­cer, so he has no lived expe­ri­ence of what it is those police offi­cers do.
What utter nonsense!!!

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