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.
.
.
.
.
Mike Beckles is a former Police Detective, businessman, freelance writer, black achiever honoree, and creator of the blog mikebeckles.com.