One of the fatal flaws in Jamaica’s collective mentality is the continued desire to attach ourselves to the notion that all things foreign are better than that which we create ourselves.
But for a few exceptions, we know that when Jamaica had vibrant manufacturing and agri-sectors, our products were vastly superior and safer than many foreign foods and products.
We also have a distorted perception of Jamaica’s size and importance in the world, not to mention the precipitous state of Jamaica’s financial situation related to meeting its fiduciary obligations.
Nevertheless, the opinion shapers on the media editorial boards have continued to push hifalutin demands on the government, without the slightest consideration of the cost and consequences on our tiny Island.
For decades newspapers, television, and radio have been willing participants and cheerleaders in the degradation of our culture. They enable and facilitate the irresponsible dancehall culture that celebrates gun violence and [badmanism].
Murder lyrics are celebrated as art. Misogynistic lyrics are overlooked, even as physical and mental abuse of women and children continues to grow.
Violent reggae artistes are held up as icons and are even invited to the premier institution of higher learning as a kind of celebrity to be emulated, rather than a sick sociopath to be ostracized and shunned.
Nevertheless, the Observer is now hand-wringing as if it had nothing to do with this crassness that has changed our country exponentially for the worse. Spare me the crocodile tears, please.
Even as the Prime Minister has launched a [gofund me] account to help to offset the cost of flooding, these same charlatans in the editorial board bubbles they create for themselves, are calling for the Government to find resources to expand the scope of (INDECOM), the Independent Commission Of Investigations, that is tasked with investigating wrongdoing on the part of police officers, soldiers, and correctional officers.
It is as if these miscreants who influence decision-making in the country are unaware of the Island’s murder rate.
On November 15th, the Gleaner Editorial board demanded that the government speak to Justice Bryan Sykes’s report and INDECOM.
The demand came out of the recent questions posed to the Jamaican contingent at the United Nations in New York.
The questions posed to the Jamaican contingent and the response it gave in return, was nauseating and insulting.
The questions were presumptuous and preposterous, and the responses were that of a chastened child caught with its hand in the Cookie Jar.
I saw the report, and I wondered aloud whether or not Jamaican was a sovereign nation or a supplicant sycophant to outside bosses?
The idea that American-based Human Rights Agencies would have the temerity and gall to question any country about their human rights records is beyond stunning.
American police murder and otherwise brutalize people, particularly people of color, in ways that no police department in the western world would dare do.
That local media houses would be giving credence to these hypocrites is stunningly elitists and intellectually dishonest.
It is difficult for anyone to disagree that the police should not lock away the mentally ill.
It is also important to reconcile that when the police are called, and an offender is a person of unsound mind, the police have a duty to arrest, and remove the person from the streets for the public’s safety.
It is not up to the police to find places to house and care for the mentally ill they are forced to arrest. In a perfect world, the police should not have any interaction with the mentally disabled.
The most disturbing thing about the INDECOM act is that despite the harm that the law has done to crime-fighting on the Island, the forces that encourage, cheer-leads, and nurture the gun culture, (the media), wants to give more powers to INDECOM, to arrest and charge police officers themselves, then do its own prosecution.
Throughout its existence INDECOM, the agency has been unable to mount a decent investigation much less to prosecute its owns cases.
INDECOM was not authorized to prosecute its own investigations for good reasons and that is how it should remain.
Prosecution of criminal cases is within the remit of the Director Of Public Prosecutions and that is where it should remain.
The fact that no investigative agency in the western world does its own prosecution does not matter to these media houses that are becoming enemies of the state.
When an agency investigates, arrest, and prosecute, it opens up a can of corrupt worms; it does not matter to these enemies of the state.
The fact that the first Commissioner of INDECOM, Terrence Williams, used the then neophyte agency as a weapon to persecute police officers and, consequently, aided in the mass escalation of crime as police dropped their hands does not matter.
Terrence Williams was only to investigate, yet he craved arrest powers, and more than anything else he craved prosecutorial powers. Ask yourselves what is with the rapacious desire to arrest and prosecute, if the evidence of wrongdoing is solid?
Given the Islands’ precipitous perch on the ledge of becoming a failed state based on its violent crime statistics, the question arises as to whose interest is served when our police are further shackled. At the same time, dangerous criminals run free, killing and terrorizing whomever they please?
No American has either legal or moral authority to lecture any nation about human rights, considering America’ss history of police suppression of its own citizens of color; neither is Canada nor Britain.
It is time for the little gods in the peanut gallery to get a clue and stop aiding in our country’s destruction.
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Mike Beckles is a former Police Detective, businessman, freelance writer, a black achiever honoree, and publisher of the blog mikebeckles.com.
He’s contributed to several websites.
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