Talking About Obeying The Law Is Not Sexy…

If you write to impact per­cep­tions it may be a good idea to write about things that peo­ple want to talk about or things that excite them. That is if you want to be lis­tened to by your tar­get audi­ence. If you are sell­ing books, for exam­ple, writ­ing to enter­tain may be the way to go.
If you cater to a social media audi­ence and care much about likes, com­ments & enter­tain­ment, smut & gos­sip is the way to go.
So if you are writ­ing about the way the rule of law pro­tects us all, while law- enforce­ment offi­cers are break­ing the laws they are sworn to uphold, it is only nor­mal that one would expect blow­back from the pub­lic who reads what you write.
In today’s world, politi­cians and pow­er­ful well-con­nect­ed peo­ple com­mit crimes and they often times escape the long arm of the law. It is extreme­ly dif­fi­cult to con­vince the aver­age per­son that play­ing by the rules is in his best inter­est. It is dou­bly dif­fi­cult when he sees those who break the laws seem­ing­ly grow­ing in leaps and bounds when he seems to be stuck in a rut.

If your tar­get audi­ence is in Jamaica, you can for­get pleas­antries when you talk about how impor­tant it is that peo­ple obey the nation’s laws.
Sometimes it appears that there are only a few of us Jamaicans who both­er, or even dare to put our­selves out there to defend the rule of law.
This is so because cor­rup­tion runs so ram­pant through­out so many cells of nation­al life. I par­tic­u­lar­ly admire Garth Rattarary a med­ical doc­tor who has con­sis­tent­ly writ­ten, not only about the rule of law, but in defense of the police when it prob­a­bly isn’t in his best inter­est to do so. So why do we always write about obey­ing laws and reduc­ing crime?
Well, for me it is rather sim­ple, a ris­ing tide rais­es all boats. If I could snap my fin­ger and get all Jamaicans to under­stand how crime makes every­one poor­er, I would.
In 2017 [ukessay​.com], wrote; The num­ber of mur­ders and oth­er vio­lence caus­es Jamaica to have one of the high­est crime rates in the world. Police sta­tis­tics in Jamaica have shown that since the year 1999 Jamaica’s crime rate has steadi­ly risen. In 2005, accord­ing to International sta­tis­tics, Jamaica was the “Murder Capital of the World”. There has been a tremen­dous increase in the rate of homi­cides and shoot­ings, ille­gal drugs, arms and ammu­ni­tion, rape and car­nal abuse which con­tin­ues to neg­a­tive­ly impact the country’s social and eco­nom­ic growth.




Simply put, when vio­lent crime sta­tis­tics are so high invest­ments head the oppo­site direc­tion. If there is no invest­ment the bulk of the hir­ing is left up to the gov­ern­ment. The gov­ern­ment can only hire so many peo­ple with­out a tax base to sup­port salaries and ben­e­fits.
A vibrant pri­vate sec­tor allows for the gov­ern­ment to put in place much-need­ed infra­struc­ture, a low-crime soci­ety is attrac­tive to peo­ple look­ing for safe places to invest and live.
In Jamaica’s case, there are hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars left in the US, UK, Canada belong­ing to Jamaicans who would like to return to their home­land with those resources but are afraid because of the excep­tion­al­ly high crime rate.
The idea that Jamaica’s future is lit­er­al­ly in its own hands is cer­tain­ly not a cliché. Fix the crime and you begin to see pros­per­i­ty.
Keep the crime and you slide deep­er & deep­er into pover­ty.
The fact that the Island’s lead­ers of both polit­i­cal par­ties con­tin­ue to pussy­foot with crim­i­nals is lost on no one.
The nation’s lead­ers live lav­ish lifestyles, fan­cy homes in exclu­sive areas, replete with police body­guards.
Violence hard­ly pen­e­trates their lit­tle bub­bles. The cor­rupt crim­i­nal friend­ly sys­tem that keeps them in pow­er is built on crime.
They have no inter­est in the whole­sale erad­i­ca­tion of crime, doing so removes the foun­da­tion of their existence.

So for those of us who both­er to talk this way about crime, we do so in spite of the poten­tial blow­back.
We do not do it for likes or for pop­u­lar­i­ty. We real­ly do so because we fun­da­men­tal­ly believe that with­out the rule of law and a fair, just and equi­table sys­tem of gov­ern­ment, we are all at risk and the qual­i­ty of our lives is both reduced and deval­ued. It is in the best inter­est of all when the best prac­tices are observed.
As Black peo­ple, we have a vest­ed stake in the equi­table and just dis­pen­sa­tion of jus­tice. After all, in the over four hun­dred years that our ances­tors have been forced to engage in servi­tude in the west­ern world, we have been vic­tims of the laws being used in a dis­crim­i­na­to­ry fash­ion against us.
It is impor­tant to also rec­on­cile that this par­lia­men­tary sys­tem, and the pre­sent­ing of evi­dence in order to appear at a just con­clu­sion, was also tak­en from Africa along with our ances­tors.
Unfortunately for us, we have not ben­e­fit­ted from the equi­table dis­pen­sa­tion of jus­tice when we are not in con­trol.
So when we have con­trol, it is imper­a­tive that we both observe our own laws and that we equi­tably dis­pense jus­tice to all our people.

Mike Beckles is a for­mer Jamaican police Detective cor­po­ral, busi­ness­man, researcher, and blog­ger. 
He is a black achiev­er hon­oree, and pub­lish­er of the blog chatt​-​a​-box​.com. 
He’s also a con­trib­u­tor to sev­er­al web­sites.
You may sub­scribe to his blogs free of charge, or sub­scribe to his Youtube chan­nel @chatt-a-box, for the lat­est pod­cast all free to you of course.