Mob Justice Endangers Everyone, Authorities Do Nothing About It …

As res­i­dents assist­ed police in their search for a man the police alleged abduct­ed two small girls in a sec­tion of Saint Thomas, an egre­gious injus­tice occurred that not near­ly enough atten­tion is being paid to. It is impor­tant to note that the two girls were found alive; how­ev­er, an inno­cent human being lost his life to mob jus­tice. His life can nev­er be restored, and nobody is speak­ing to the hor­rif­ic nature of that incident.
Members of a com­mu­ni­ty who would set upon an indi­vid­ual and sum­mar­i­ly com­mit mob mur­der because they are incensed about some per­ceived crime the per­son alleged­ly com­mit­ted are crim­i­nals and should be treat­ed as such.
The police, for its part, has bet­ter be damn sure that when they name a per­son of inter­est, they are sure that the per­son is who they want as we see that peo­ple resem­bling the accused are now in mor­tal danger.
No one is safe when mob jus­tice is allowed to go unpun­ished. We are no bet­ter than those we seek out to be pun­ished when we our­selves turn to brutish mur­der using out­rage as justification.

Residents of Llandewey, St Thomas, who mur­dered an inno­cent man, should be arrest­ed and treat­ed as any oth­er mur­der­er. Murder is the most seri­ous offense a per­son can com­mit! How is it accept­able that an inno­cent per­son is mur­dered because he is sus­pect­ed of abduc­tion and no one is inves­ti­gat­ing his death?
This mob jus­tice is a dan­ger­ous game that Jamaicans have played for decades now that has caused many inno­cent peo­ple their lives. The author­i­ties con­tin­ue to encour­age its con­tin­u­a­tion tacitly.
Many years ago, as a young detec­tive, I accom­pa­nied my friend Neville who owned a bus to a remote area of Saint Mary. He car­ried a group of mourn­ers to a funer­al. He came to my home, woke me from my sleep on my day off, and begged me to accom­pa­ny him to the parish because he knew no one there. Sleepy, I told him no.
He begged and begged, and I relent­ed. I had no idea who died, much less what the deca­dent looked like.
After we arrived at the place in Saint Mary, the mourn­ers left and went up a hill. Neville, and I hun­gry by then stopped at a lit­tle restau­rant and bar and ordered some lunch.
As we ate, a crowd began to gath­er, and the peo­ple seemed rather hos­tile. When we enquired about what was going on, one man told me that the peo­ple were about to kill me because they were told that I was the per­son who poi­soned the man who died.

Imagine leav­ing your home to die in some remote god-for­sak­en com­mu­ni­ty for some­thing you have no god­dam idea about at the hands of a bunch of blood­thirsty idiots?
I was not about to die, and nei­ther would I allow my friend to die at the hands of that small mob. I got up from where I sat and told them who I was, and encour­aged them to go back to their homes as nei­ther Neville nor I had any idea what they were talk­ing about.
They apol­o­gized and grad­u­al­ly began to peel off one by one. We were both relieved, but I was com­fort­ed know­ing that my Browning 9mm hand­gun and two loaded extend­ed clips were enough to get us out of that sit­u­a­tion if it came to that.
The poor man who was set upon and mur­dered in Llandewey St Thomas had no such assurance.
What dis­tressed me the most was the atti­tude of the com­mand­ing offi­cer for the Parish, Superintendent Allison Byfield, telling the media, “We have not yet estab­lished the motive for the killing. My infor­ma­tion is that a man was attacked by res­i­dents and injured. I think wounds were inflict­ed on him using a knife. We have noth­ing on record to say why he was killed, but we are hear­ing from per­sons out on the street that he was mis­tak­en for Davian Bryan. Residents are say­ing that he is the sus­pect that they were look­ing for; how­ev­er, it is not the suspect.”

You can­not make this shit up. The poor guy was mur­dered because the mob mis­tak­en­ly killed him believ­ing he was the sus­pect Davian Bryan, whom the police them­selves named a sus­pect in the abduc­tions, but she has no motive for the killing. (So much for affir­ma­tive action in Jamaican policing).
But she was far from done, “So, we want to say the res­i­dents of the area would’ve tak­en out an inno­cent man’s life.”
Right after she said she had no motive for his killing, this lev­el of stu­pid­i­ty is palpable.
Byfield then urged res­i­dents to desist from car­ry­ing out “mob killings” because it is a crim­i­nal offense for which they can be arrest­ed and charged.
The word can in her state­ment tells us all we need to know about how the killing of the inno­cent man is being treated.
Nothing is being done about it. In place of the word ‘can’ should have been the word “will,” but clear­ly, they have no inten­tion of pur­su­ing a mur­der charge because their sin­gu­lar atten­tion is to focus on the abductions.
They are unable to walk and chew gum simul­ta­ne­ous­ly, so they step over dol­lars in search of pennies.
No human being deserves to die in that way while those tasked with bring­ing their killers to jus­tice are sim­ply too stu­pid to under­stand the seri­ous­ness of what tran­spired, much less to get up off their back­sides and go arrest the murderers.
Jamaica is in a seri­ous decline, it will con­tin­ue on that path because the peo­ple sim­ply do not know that they deserve better.

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