The Cartoonish Caricature The JCF Has Become And The Results, (video Inside)

“Crime deh ever weh,” says the peo­ple, when we talk about the high mur­der rate.
“Why weren’t you talk­ing about it dur­ing the PNP’s reign”? The infer­ence being if I talk about an issue which needs address­ing, I am auto­mat­i­cal­ly a mem­ber of what­ev­er par­ty is in oppo­si­tion at the moment.
Our polit­i­cal dis­cus­sions have become that bina­ry.
It has become increas­ing­ly dif­fi­cult to argue against the entrenched nar­ra­tive that crime is every­where these days, but those who see things through polit­i­cal lens do not care that there is ample evi­dence that I have been talk­ing about crime across mul­ti­ple admin­is­tra­tions of both polit­i­cal par­ties.
“The police have the appro­pri­ate train­ing”: Says the police and their apol­o­gists, when we say “police train­ing is not com­men­su­rate with what’s need­ed today”.
Even when the inci­dents we see play­ing out in front of our eyes indi­cate that the train­ing is spec­tac­u­lar­ly lack­ing.
Others con­tend that offi­cers receive the prop­er train­ing but they are not uti­liz­ing the train­ing they received.
How can one argue that offi­cers are trained in the cor­rect tech­niques if [the brain], the very part of the body, which should kick in, does not auto­mat­i­cal­ly default to the train­ing when the need aris­es?
So we are back to where we start­ed, [the inad­e­quate nature of the train­ing]. However, talk­ing about that issue is tan­ta­mount to flog­ging a dead horse.

Over the years I have become more and more skep­ti­cal of the police abil­i­ty to be effec­tive in crime reduc­tion in Jamaica. It goes with­out say­ing that there are forces work­ing against the police doing the job they should be doing under nor­mal circumstances.

For exam­ple, the very [Government] com­pris­ing both polit­i­cal par­ties which ought to give the police the tools they need leg­isla­tive­ly and phys­i­cal­ly, have spent more time and effort draft­ing laws which enhance the esca­la­tion of crime on the Island.
On the oth­er hand, the police have demon­stra­bly shown that they are woe­ful­ly inca­pable of doing even the sim­plest task pro­fes­sion­al­ly and with­out look­ing like car­toon char­ac­ters, as demon­strat­ed above.
In fair­ness to these two con­sta­bles, or should I say one and one-half offi­cers, this incom­pe­tence runs the gamut?
The media glee­ful­ly piled onto ACP Welsh for his attempt at for­give­ness, after all, poor Bishop Welsh had not tak­en into con­sid­er­a­tion that the very peo­ple who said “Hosannah, Hosannah, glo­ry to God in the high­est “, to Yeshua, days lat­er said “cru­ci­fy him, cru­ci­fy” him to Pontious Pilate.
Every sin­gle per­son who berat­ed Gary Welsh for try­ing a new approach with the motorist, (wrong or right) would have loved to have received a reprieve as the BMW dri­ver did were they in his posi­tion.
Because it was­n’t them on the receiv­ing end of Welsh’s largess, they want­ed his head on a platter.

And when Welsh shift­ed gears to show the iron hand of the law, the very same peo­ple said: “Off with his head”. There was much to debate in the actions CP Welsh took, but the flash mob which came out with carv­ing knives and pitch­forks was more vis­cer­al than even Welsh must have imag­ined.
Curiously, the anger, deri­sion, and ven­omous stench unleashed against ACP Welsh, seemed to have com­plete­ly missed Commissioner of Police Antony Anderson, who was the one respon­si­ble for the place­ment of ACP Welsh.
But ACP Gary Welsh must have thought that his lit­tle media event with that motorist would endear him fur­ther with the media which the upper ech­e­lon of the JCF seems to believe are their friends.
Gary Welsh had no idea that that lit­tle media event would have been turned into the faux pas of the decade by the same vul­tures in the media.
After all, the hier­ar­chy of the JCF has tra­di­tion­al­ly allowed the media to dri­ve a wedge between the gazetted and rank and file of the force. As such the gazetted ranks have no com­punc­tion about throw­ing their sub­or­di­nates to the very same vul­tures in the media just to cur­ry favor.
I real­ly had to smirk at the non­sen­si­cal gib­ber­ish of those who argue that Commissioner Anderson shares no part of the blame.
Antony Anderson is the cap­tain of the team, he makes per­son­nel deci­sions, how can he be held blame­less, to the extent there is blame to go around?
Antony Anderson placed Gary Welsh in the posi­tion he fired him from.
Before Gary Welsh messed up to the extent that he is per­ceived to have done so, Antony Anderson messed up by choos­ing a total [com­mand novice] to head a high­ly oper­a­tional divi­sion.
For that Antony Anderson, Commissioner of Police failed the coun­try and the JCF.
But the larg­er prob­lem here is some­thing to which I have spo­ken for a long time. It is the whole bunch of peo­ple run­ning around with all kinds of lau­rel wreaths, stars, and crowns all over their stu­pid look­ing uni­forms and they have zero polic­ing expe­ri­ence.
UWI police I call them, the JCF has now co-opt­ed the fak­ery, lock stock and bar­rel from Mona, even the accents are fake as well. 

The trans­for­ma­tion of the JCF from an effec­tive force against crime, to the cour­tesy corps desired by the Jamaican polit­i­cal and crim­i­nal class, to the extent there is a dif­fer­ence, is all but com­plete.
What exists today are high flung con­cepts and showy depart­ments and sub-depart­ments with long names.
In the end, the JCF has become the Barney Fyffe of police depart­ments across the region and indeed the rest of the west­ern world.
As a con­se­quence, ZOSO’s and areas des­ig­nat­ed under the States Of Emergency, con­tin­ue to expe­ri­ence vary­ing degrees of blood­let­ting, despite the large amounts of secu­ri­ty per­son­nel in the areas in which they are des­ig­nat­ed.
As I have main­tained for years these strate­gies, SOE’s, and now ZOSO’s are band-aid approach­es to crime. What is need­ed is a sys­temic, ded­i­cat­ed and deter­mined anti-crime process which sends a clear mes­sage that vio­lent crimes of all nature will be dealt with in the harsh­est pos­si­ble way under the law.
Instead, what we have is a crim­i­nal cen­tered approach which [first] takes into con­sid­er­a­tion the rights and feel­ings of the crim­i­nal with­out even a thought for crime vic­tims.
In the mean­time, the police are inca­pable of mak­ing a sim­ple arrest.