No, All Is Not Lost, We Just Need To Cut Our Losses…

Reality dic­tates that you can­not suc­cess­ful­ly build a sus­tain­able nar­ra­tive on a foun­da­tion of lies. It fol­lows also that you can­not expect a high-rise tow­er built on faulty foun­da­tions to sur­vive earth­quakes, hur­ri­canes, and the like.
And so, as we risk sound­ing like a bro­ken record, it is still worth that risk to men­tion that the gov­ern­men­t’s crime-fight­ing strate­gies were the equiv­a­lent of apply­ing a bandaid to a gun­shot wound;(sorry for the gun­shot metaphor).
We can­not help but notice the pan­ic in the Jamaican Prime Minister’s state­ments that any­one caught with a hand­gun should be put to death. (smile).
During a tele­phone con­ver­sa­tion with a for­mer col­league and friend recent­ly, we cracked up at the fact that the Prime Minister’s shrill utter­ances amount­ed to a far greater threat to indi­vid­ual human rights than any­thing police offi­cers ever did in their right­eous inten­tions to rid the streets of vio­lent criminals.

And so, I want Jamaicans to jux­ta­pose the Prime Minister’s jour­ney from the cam­paign trail to Jamaica House. “No police will be kick­ing down doors as long as I am Prime Minister.”
To, ‘look at what hap­pened in Haiti,’ in ref­er­ence to the mur­der of that nation’s pres­i­dent- and onto the pan­icked posi­tion of “death penal­ty for any­one caught with an ille­gal gun.” ( Buss ‑out-a-laff)
No, per­pet­u­al crit­ics, I am [not] mak­ing light of the coun­try’s crime prob­lem; I am amused at the con­se­quences for reck­less actions and words.
If I were a guy seek­ing elec­tive office who was raised in an anti-law enforce­ment envi­ron­ment, edu­cat­ed at a left­ist lib­er­al col­lege, sur­round­ed by anti-law enforce­ment bot­tom-feed­ers, and rep­re­sent­ed a con­stituen­cy in which crim­i­nal­i­ty abounds, I would prob­a­bly say some of the things Andrew Holness said and did to dis­tance him­self from the police.
(Actually, I would­n’t), I mere­ly want to show cau­sa­tion for his actions…

I won­der where the so-called human rights bot­tom-feed­ers are now? The Prime Minister’s pan­icked out­burst is exact­ly what the bot­tom-feed­ers would have a feed­ing fren­zy over were they uttered by the police. Like glut­to­nous pira­nhas, they would have torn the last shred of meat from the car­cass of any­one who dared to sug­gest such a trav­es­ty, all in fur­ther­ance of their agenda.
By the way, have you ever noticed that no mat­ter how many inno­cent Jamaicans are mur­dered each year, the so-called human rights frauds oper­at­ing in Jamaica are silent?
Ask your­selves then, ‘whose inter­est do they serve’? Certainly not the inter­est of inno­cent, law-abid­ing citizens.
However, these are the peo­ple Bruce Golding lis­tened to-these are the peo­ple his pro­tégée Andrew Holness takes coun­sel from.
No one is advo­cat­ing for a police state, cer­tain­ly not your hum­ble ser­vant. However, we must acknowl­edge that the same Jamaican peo­ple who are clam­or­ing for our coun­try to remain an iso­lat­ed crim­i­nal out­post are the same ones clam­or­ing to get visas to America where they would have to obey laws or face the full brunt of what it means to be black in the American jus­tice sys­tem. In fact, many of the present crime pro­duc­ers have actu­al­ly felt that hand and have been sent back home.

The idea of check­points in Zones of oper­a­tion as a long-term crime-fight­ing strat­e­gy speaks to the igno­rance inher­ent in those poli­cies, both in con­cept, and execution.
But the data does not lie. Regardless of what the Prime Minister and his lack­eys say (includ­ing the police) who held a pan­el dis­cus­sion trum­pet­ing the great­ness of Zones Of Special Operations (ZOSOs) and States Of Emergencies SOEs, the under­ly­ing fact is that mur­ders con­tin­ue to climb over­all.
They can lie all they want, but the math does­n’t; it mat­ters lit­tle if you sup­press mur­ders in a par­tic­u­lar geo­graph­i­cal area and crime goes up else­where; you do not get to crow about decreased murders.
By doing that, you are being disingenuous.

I expect noth­ing less from the police high com­mand, how­ev­er. The police high com­mand has nev­er been any good at any­thing, not on com­mand, not on per­son­nel man­age­ment, not on craft­ing and exe­cut­ing crime-fight­ing strate­gies, not on devel­op­ing a train­ing man­u­al that reflects the chal­lenges offi­cers face today, not on effec­tu­at­ing mean­ing­ful account­abil­i­ty in crim­i­nal investigations.
In fact, the police high com­mand has been noth­ing but a bunch of lap­dogs who walk behind politi­cians and serve as pho­to props for them.
The suc­cess­es of the JCF three decades ago when our annu­al mur­der num­bers were just over 500 could not be attrib­uted to the high command.
The suc­cess­es we cre­at­ed in the past by erad­i­cat­ing the killers and forc­ing oth­ers to flee the coun­try have nev­er been a top-down affair but rather a bot­tom-up endeavor.
Hard-nosed cops on the ground (name brand cops) doing the work, cor­rupt rum drink­ing pot-bel­lied dead­wood at the top tak­ing credit.
The JCF’s sol­ven­cy through the years was nev­er about who was at the top; it was about who was at the bot­tom. Bottoms up.

When they decid­ed to fol­low the dic­tates of Carolyn Gomes and lat­er cre­ate the troll, Terrence Willams, Jamaica, by default, signed the death war­rant for thou­sands of Jamaicans who oth­er­wise would have been alive today.
Let me be clear, (a)had Carolyn Gomes a Jamaica mulat­to, not become a [thing] in how our laws are enforced, and (b)Bruce Golding not foist­ed the lit­tle anti-police troll Terence Williams on the nation, thou­sands of mur­dered Jamaicans would still be alive today.
That same Bruce Golding who refused to send Duddus to face tri­al in the United States is [still] influ­enc­ing pol­i­cy today, even though he was forced to demit office in disgrace.
Do not act surprised.

Jamaica is reap­ing the bit­ter fruits of years of farm­ing crim­i­nals. No, my friends, all is not lost; we can turn this around quickly.
We need a set of new laws, a set of new cops, a dif­fer­ent nation­al mind­set; we can keep the shit­head judges just take away the pow­er they have to fur­ther cor­rupt our sys­tem by let­ting dou­ble mur­der­ers off the hook with 12-year sentences.

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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.