In a stunning yet totally precedented case of Déjà vu, Jamaica’s opposition, People’s National Party(PNP) have once again refused to support proactive measures taken by the Government to stem the Island’s violent crime wave and loss of life.
What makes this more consequential is the fact that they decided to pull support from the measure right before the Christmas season.
Even though the authorization does not expire until January 31, 2019, the signal to the Island’s criminals could not be more clear.
In seeking to straddle the fence by placating the criminal world while at the same time pretending to be a responsible political party, Opposition leader Peter Phillips said the following.
“Not one police officer or military personnel have to be moved from St James after the expiration of the SOE,” the Opposition party said on Twitter “Police can still curfew, cordon, search and arrest suspects. The only difference is they will not be able to detain indiscriminately and indefinitely.”
I find the use of the term [indiscriminate] slanderous, hyperbolic, inflammatory, ignorant, incendiary and grossly uninformed.
Let me be clear the PNP does not care about the officers in the field, neither does the party leadership care about the fact that Jamaicans are dying in alarming numbers and the SOE is intended to help stop the bleeding.
They did the very same thing in 2010 and they were not punished for it.
The PNP wants an issue on which to contest the next national elections, the economy is doing pretty good, unemployment is down and there are reports that as a result of the SOE and ZOSO initiated by the Government along with other initiatives the nation is moving in the right direction.
Murders are down 21.7 percent, shootings are down 21.4 percent, rape down 12.2 percent, aggravated assault down 11 percent. Additionally, there have been significant reductions in the year-to-date reports of murders across several police divisions, the most notable being St. James, where there has been more than a 70 percent reduction in murders. according to the police.”
These facts are not lost on Peter Phillips and the bunch of PNP thugs who double as parliamentarians.
A simple cost-benefit analysis shows that the inconveniences to a few people, who are caught up in a dragnet, (though undesirable ) are minuscule when compared to the fewer deaths which result from the SOE’s presence in the affected communities.
And most importantly the people in the area are begging the Police officers and soldiers not to leave.
So the irrefutable conclusion is that the party wants dead bodies to run on politically, and they are going to get those bodies one way or the other.
This party which did not take long to morph into a force antithetical to the good of Jamaica has been responsible for the degradation of the Jamaican culture for decades now.
A total destruction of the Island’s economy in the 1970s and evisceration of the middle ‑class has been the party’s claim to fame. The PNP has been the only political party to suspend the rights of citizens as it jailed all of the major players and politicians in the then opposition Jamaica Labor Party (JLP) during the ’70s.
Regardless of the sanitizing process being undertaken in leftist academic circles and by the myriad interest groups on behalf of the party, nothing has been able to explain or wash away the stench of the many scandals of theft, graft, and unabashed corruption the party has engaged in since it’s inception.
The fact that the PNP has decided to play politics once again with people’s lives means that they will be made to own the violence now.
If they decided that this is the strategy on which they want to hang their hats for the next general elections, fine.
But we will do everything in our power to make sure they own the results.
For too long this party has played fast and loose with the lives of the police and the nation for political gain.
We will make sure that people are reminded of their strategy.