Raining On The JCF Parade…

It is the start of a new year, and as always, we look back at what was accom­plished and where we can make some changes for bet­ter outcomes.
Of course, you all know that my top­ic has always been crime and will con­tin­ue to be so until we achieve a lev­el of crime that is not tol­er­a­ble but more manageable.
The Police report­ed that 1498 mur­ders were report­ed to them for 2022, rep­re­sent­ing an over­all 2% increase over the pre­vi­ous year.
In the same breath, Fitz Bailey, the Deputy Commissioner of police with respon­si­bil­i­ty for crime, claims that good polic­ing strate­gies are to be cred­it­ed with the decrease in major crimes in cer­tain areas while in the same breath allud­ing to the fact that crime went up in oth­er areas and over­all across the country.
“It’s just the polic­ing strat­e­gy that we have deployed, to put it blunt­ly, that cre­at­ed that lev­el of decrease. If you look at the begin­ning of the year, you saw where [crime fig­ures] were run­ning away, and we con­stant­ly, from an orga­ni­za­tion lev­el, at the strate­gic and oper­a­tional lev­el, sat down and looked at the strate­gies and imple­ment­ed vary­ing types of ini­tia­tives. There was addi­tion­al deploy­ment in terms of man­pow­er that assist­ed with that decline,” Bailey told local media.
So increased num­bers of man­pow­er in cer­tain areas is the equiv­a­lent of strate­gic and oper­a­tional machi­na­tions!
This made me laugh, and truth be told, I gen­er­al­ly give the police a lot of lat­i­tude, under­stand­ing that they need all the sup­port they can get fight­ing crime in an ungrate­ful crim­i­nal-sup­port­ing society.
However, I can­not in good con­science sup­port a bunch of malarky that makes no sense.
How can the crime chief claim any cred­it when over­all crime went up by two per­cent­age points?

It does not mat­ter that the vio­lence in par­tic­u­lar geo­graph­i­cal areas trends down when those areas are flood­ed with secu­ri­ty per­son­nel, à la ZOSOs, and SOEs if crime goes up expo­nen­tial­ly in oth­er areas.
This is exact­ly what occurred, as this writer has been warn­ing for years will con­tin­ue to be the out­come of this whack-a-mole strategy.
So let us sort through the facts and not spend a lot of time on this rather easy sub­ject. I have every respect for the work of the rank-and-file of the JCF.
They have always done the hard work with­out prop­er com­pen­sa­tion, lead­er­ship, train­ing, or sup­port and with inad­e­quate tools to do their jobs.
I also under­stand that some, not all, of the men and women of the rank and file con­tin­ue to work hard despite those defi­cien­cies; some, on the oth­er hand, are dead­wood as it has always been.

https://​mike​beck​les​.com/​w​h​a​c​k​-​a​-​m​o​l​e​-​c​r​i​m​e​-​s​t​r​a​t​e​gy/

So let us cut to the chase with all respect to the crime chief DCP Fitz Bailey that it was spe­cif­ic polic­ing strate­gies that brought down vio­lent homi­cides in cer­tain divi­sions; I beg to differ.
I have three words for mis­ter Bailey, WORLD CUP SOCCER.
That part!
The data clear­ly shows that crime trends down when­ev­er we have world cup soc­cer. I under­stand that the police would like to take cred­it for the low­er crime sta­tis­tics in parts of the coun­try due to ZOSOs and SOEs or a slow­ing over­all of killings com­pared to ear­li­er in the year. Still, pol­i­cy­mak­ers rely on data to for­mu­late poli­cies; if we con­tin­ue to mis­rep­re­sent the data in front of us, we wind up with bad policies.
So let us stop with the self-con­grat­u­la­tions because more Jamaicans were mur­dered in 2022 than in 2021, and more would have died if we did not have Jamaicans glued to their tele­vi­sions watch­ing football.
I hate to rain on any­one’s parade, but I can­not ignore the facts.

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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.