The Failed Strategy Of Retired Soldiers Heading The JCF, The Consequences For Jamaicans..

Prime Minister Andrew Holness is without doubt heads and shoulders above anyone that the People’s National Party (PNP) can present to the Jamaican people for leadership of the Island that most foreigners still view as representative of the Caribbean. But Mister Holness should not take much comfort in this; the bar is extremely low.
The Labor Party is still the last best hope for the country as the PNP is stuck in the cult of personality that has characterized its existence since the Manley days of the 70′.
Until the PNP can produce a bunch of new leaders that are not corrupted by the leftist gobbledygook that emanates out of that cesspool in Mona, or a new political movement emerges that understand the market economy and the need to position Jamaica for success through the rule of law, Holness remains the one-eyed King in a nation of blind men.

A prod­uct of my Parish of Saint Catherine, Andrew Holness is a young son of the soil who admirably rose to lead the Labor Party back to promi­nence. But though Holness is the head of Busta’s Conservative Party, he is taint­ed by the same left­ist pro­pa­gan­da, is from the same dirty pool from which the PNP draws water.
Holness does­n’t ful­ly under­stand the mar­ket econ­o­my dynam­ics or the effects crime has on economies.
As a con­se­quence, he arrived with pop­ulist utter­ances against Law enforce­ment befit­ting a PNP leader.
It is impor­tant to note that the suc­cess­ful Bustamante, Sangster, and the giant Hugh Lawson Shearer, were titans of law and order.
Even the taint­ed Edward Seaga, though unad­vis­ably teth­ered to the igno­ble Tivoli Gardens, ulti­mate­ly con­clud­ed that law and order were sacro­sanct; he gave up the Tivoli gang­sters to the police.
The PNP pan­ders to the lumpen­pro­lit­er­ate with promis­es of free­ness, and any­thing goes; Holness made a mis­take in believ­ing that crim­i­nals could be han­dled with white gloves, declar­ing, “police will not be kick­ing down doors if I’m elect­ed,” even as he sells a Utopian vision of pros­per­i­ty in the same breath.
Little did the brash neo­phyte know, the two were an oxymoron.
As he promised that Jamaicans would be sleep­ing with their win­dows open in a Holness admin­is­tra­tion, he was diss­ing the police by buy­ing into every­thing he heard grow­ing up in the crime-infest­ed Spanish Town environs.

Campaigning and gov­ern­ing are two sep­a­rate ani­mals, and no one is get­ting a dose of that med­i­cine more than Prime Minister Holness, whose stop-gap Zones Of Special Operations (ZOSO) & the (SOE’s)he pre­vi­ous­ly ridiculed are now the main­stays of his crime-fight­ing strategies.
Both mea­sures require huge deploy­ments of secu­ri­ty per­son­nel to affect­ed areas for extend­ed peri­ods of time. At the same time, they are [not] intel­li­gence-dri­ven oper­a­tions; they are mere­ly attempts at plug­ging the dike. However, stop­ping the leak in one area cre­ates pres­sure on anoth­er, so water begins gush­ing from anoth­er area.
When large amounts of secu­ri­ty per­son­nel are com­mit­ted to an area, crime pro­duc­ers run to oth­er areas and turn pre­vi­ous­ly pris­tine areas into havens of criminality.
In essence, crime sta­tis­tics are not dri­ven down; they go down in the areas of high police con­cen­tra­tion but go up in oth­er areas.
This hum­ble writer has rub­bished the Prime Minister’s crime ini­tia­tives, not because they do not have a pur­pose, but because they are the total­i­ty of his crime-fight­ing strate­gies. Criminals under­stand one lan­guage, and that is the lan­guage of tough laws.

The People’s National Party has nev­er seen a penal code that it does not hate. It was sup­posed to be the Labor Party that stood up for the aver­age Jamaican using the rule of law. This Labor Party of Andrew Holness and Delroy Chuck et al. is not the par­ty of Bustamante.
So Holness has been forced to con­cede that the crime sit­u­a­tion is out­side the scope of the JCF to han­dle, and worse, that the nation is now in the grips of a crime pandemic.
The finesse he and Delroy Chuck envi­sioned and tout­ed, the diss­ing of the police, the con­stant bull­shit com­ing from their mouths about how to deal with hard­ened mur­der­ers came to a big pile of shit. Because they had no idea what they were talk­ing about.
I am the first to put up my hand and say, “yes, the police high com­mand is not worth shit.” Whether or not the PM and the Services Commission act­ing on his advice, decid­ed on pur­su­ing the failed strat­e­gy of using retired sol­diers to head the JCF, or they seri­ous­ly need­ed to see if Anderson would be bet­ter than the morons at the top of the JCF, we may nev­er know.
What we know is that data mat­ters, and the data does not sup­port the con­tin­ued sup­port for Anderson from the Jamaican people.
We also know that qual­i­fied mod­ern-day police lead­ers applied for the top cop job, both from the FBI and from police depart­ments in devel­oped coun­tries. Jamaica has hired a slew of police trans­plants to the force before; the lead­er­ship decid­ed to for­go what those lead­ers had to offer and con­tin­ued with a tried and failed experiment.
I strong­ly believe that there are still a few Superintendents and Senior Superintendents who are far more capa­ble of low­er­ing the crime sta­tis­tics if they were allowed to lead.
Unfortunately, they have been side­lined for paper-push­ers who do not know their heads from their ass­es regard­ing prac­ti­cal polic­ing — prod­ucts of the same shit­ty pool.

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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.