The Government Surrenders To Criminals, Still, All Is Not Lost…

The Prime Minister’s con­ces­sion that, quote: ‘The country’s crime prob­lem has “evolved cur­rent­ly, over and above our estab­lished capac­i­ty to address it”, should be a mon­u­men­tal­ly pro­found state­ment polit­i­cal­ly and pol­i­cy-wise, but in a coun­try like ours, it will spark bare­ly a rip­ple except for polit­i­cal mileage.
An inane quote from a dance­hall artiste would gar­ner more inter­est than the Prime Minister’s pro­found con­ces­sion of fail­ure, which he has arrived at way too late.
In 2016 I wrote the arti­cle below in which I implored the Prime Minister to fire Terrence Williams from INDECOM.
My thought process was that since the admin­is­tra­tion would not table leg­is­la­tion in the par­lia­ment to repeal the INDECOM law that was cre­at­ed by a pre­vi­ous JLP admin­is­tra­tion, hope­ful­ly, remov­ing the can­cer­ous growth, Terrence Williams, would help to min­i­mize some of the dam­age being done, until anoth­er admin­is­tra­tion took office that was not blink­ered by myopia.

Until The Prime Minister Fires Terrence Williams He Is Responsible For Every Innocent Life Lost To Marauding Criminals ..

The above arti­cle has been one of the most wide­ly read that I have writ­ten to-date, gar­ner­ing tens of thou­sands of read­ers, accord­ing to Google ana­lyt­ics.
There is hard­ly a chance that the Prime Minister did not read it, or was told about it, accord­ing to one well-placed source with close ties to the admin­is­tra­tion.
Nevertheless, the Prime Minister did not heed my warn­ings to him to remove the con­tentious, and self ‑serv­ing Terrence Williams from the equa­tion, even if he did not want to remove the (Trojan horse) we have come to know as INDECOM.

Rather than take my unso­licit­ed coun­sel, the Prime Minister dou­bled down on the strat­e­gy which brought him to where we are today, forc­ing him to con­cede defeat to the killers roam­ing our coun­try.
Every Jamaican who is not ben­e­fit­ting from crime should today be extreme­ly agi­tat­ed and up in arms at their Government at the state­ments of defeat com­ing from the nation’s chief exec­u­tive.
We were bound to get here, just days ago I wrote that a Saint Andrew Member of Parliament Fayval Williams extolled the val­ues of peace march­es on her social media page.
I con­tend­ed then, that peo­ple with­out polit­i­cal pow­er can march all they want, but the peo­ple with the pow­er to effec­tu­ate change on behalf of their con­stituents should not be talk­ing about polit­i­cal march­es as a solu­tion to the wave of vio­lent crimes sweep­ing the coun­try.
When politi­cians do that I argued, it is an act of capit­u­la­tion. It says “we are out of options”.

The instances of the Prime Minister throw­ing his sup­port to Terrence Williams and INDECOM and berat­ing the brave offi­cers in our coun­try, which allows him to have a coun­try to gov­ern are many.
In June of 2017, while address­ing a so-called use of force con­fer­ence con­vened at the Jamaica Conference Center by, you guessed it.….….….….INDECOM, Andrew Holness said the fol­low­ing.

Quote: The use of force to main­tain law and order has not achieved any­thing ben­e­fi­cial.
“The soci­ety that we are try­ing to cre­ate can­not rely on the use of force to get the preser­va­tion of law and order. For too long, since our inde­pen­dence, since our colo­nial past, we have relied on force, in order to get law and order.”

The truth of the mat­ter is that there is no fac­tu­al data that sup­port­ed the Prime Minister’s asser­tion that there has been a reliance on force to main­tain law and order.
The real­i­ty is that when cit­i­zens break the laws and law-enforce­ment inter­venes to enforce the laws and those cit­i­zens decide to resist, force becomes a neces­si­ty.
It is because of that why the laws were writ­ten decades and decades ago, long before Andrew Holness or myself were born to give the police the right to use force in the exe­cu­tion of their duties should the need arise.
Nowhere in the world has it been demon­stra­bly more nec­es­sary to use force to enforce the laws than in Jamaica.
Instead of hob­nob­bing with INDECOM, Holness would have been bet­ter served by using his ele­vat­ed plat­form as Prime Minister, to edu­cate the large mass of illit­er­ate and law­less peo­ple who fun­da­men­tal­ly believe it is their God-giv­en right, not just to resist their own arrest, but also to inter­vene in try­ing to pre­vent­ing every oth­er arrest. 

The Prime Minister made no attempt to bal­ance his asser­tions at that con­fer­ence with facts. Surely as the leader of the coun­try, he could have called up the com­mis­sion­er of police and ask for police use of force guide­lines.
He could have asked them to give him data on the num­ber of times force was used against the police, which is crit­i­cal­ly impor­tant data to have when one is writ­ing a speech or is about to deliv­er one on police use of force.
He has a staff of peo­ple who ask “how high” when he says jump.
But he could not be both­ered hav­ing facts, what he cared about was mak­ing the case for INDECOM, it’s bloat­ed bud­get and fine offices and ameni­ties, while police offi­cers were lit­er­al­ly liv­ing and work­ing in bird feces in some police sta­tions.
Since the Prime Minister could not both­er to tell the truth, I decid­ed to pub­lish the truth.

A report from the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF) showed that, in 2014, the police were shot at 470 times, 425 times in 2015, and 502 in 2016. During those inci­dents, two police­men were mur­dered and eight injured in 2014, eight were mur­dered and 19 injured in 2015, while six were killed and 22 injured in 2016. At the same time, in 2014 some 112 civil­ians were killed by the police, 92 in 2005, and 102 the fol­low­ing year.

In addi­tion to the vio­lence against the police for those years here is a list of the num­ber of Jamaicans who were report­ed mur­dered to the police.

2014	1005
2015	1192
2016	1350

This infor­ma­tion was eas­i­ly sourced, but Prime Minister Holness did not both­er to source it.
It did not jive with his pre-con­ceived world-view of law enforce­ment, despite his many police body­guards.
What was impor­tant to him was to make the case against the police. His pre­con­ceived ideas are hav­ing con­se­quences now.
Police offi­cers are not allowed to touch the mur­der­ers so they are free to kill at will.
The Police have right­ly shoul­dered arms. 

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.