The Killings Are Designed To Strike Fear, To Break The Will Of The Nation

Amidst the killings tak­ing place in Jamaica is a dark back­sto­ry which speaks to the seri­ous­ness of the mur­ders, it ought to send a shiv­er up the spine of every­one with an inter­est in our country.
Even as the Government pats itself on the back for the sta­t­ic sup­pres­sion mech­a­nism it has put in place, the blood­let­ting con­tin­ues unchecked.
All of this while sol­diers and police offi­cers are stand­ing around search­ing the back­packs of chil­dren going to school.

If you care about Jamaica it behoove you to care about what is hap­pen­ing to her, if you have a law enforce­ment back­ground you def­i­nite­ly under­stand that what has been insti­tut­ed as a crime sup­pres­sion mech­a­nism is a pub­lic rela­tions stunt designed to placate.
This is not about pol­i­tics it is about pro­fes­sion­al­ism and pro­duc­ing results. At some point in time, we have to shed the gang col­ors and think about the black gold and green.

For starters, there have been no few­er killings as a result of the cha­rade the Government has put in place. In fact look­ing at the imagery of the Zones of Special Operations it reeks of grade-school-ism, kids play­ing cops and rob­bers even.
Of course, this child’s play should have been expect­ed, I cer­tain­ly did all I could to draw atten­tion to its ridicu­lous nature. What else would any­one expect when we have rank ama­teurs and polit­i­cal hacks design­ing crime poli­cies and poor­ly trained feck­less and afraid ama­teurs exe­cut­ing those strategies?

Last July Richard Ramdial was mur­dered in broad day­light as he sat in his car in traf­fic, yes­ter­day October 23^rd his father Dennis Ramdial was mur­dered at his busi­ness place on Beechwood Avenue in Kingston.

Whenever these kinds of killings occur mem­bers of the pub­lic are left to spec­u­late as to the rea­sons they happen.
Because they were busi­ness­men, the ini­tial assump­tions in the absence of prop­er inves­ti­ga­tions and arrests, are that they were not giv­ing in to the demands of extortionists.
Fair assump­tions to make, which makes these killings even more ter­ri­fy­ing and the need to stop them more pressing.
Then there are those who jump to the con­clu­sion that maybe they were involved in some activ­i­ties which were unto­ward. As if that pos­si­bil­i­ty jus­ti­fies what­ev­er fate is met­ed out to them.
Those assump­tions unwit­ting­ly miss the deep tragedy of the killings them­selves, giv­ing thought instead to con­coct­ed maybe this and maybe that over the real and present dan­ger the killings indicate.

There is no short­age of experts in Jamaica, every­one has hifa­lutin ide­al­is­tic twen­ty-sec­ond-cen­tu­ry ideas [sic]on what to do to rein in this murder-monster.
In the ridicu­lous mud­dle of lawyers, philoso­phers, politi­cos and oth­ers who have no busi­ness shap­ing pol­i­cy but does any­way, amidst the omnipresent wannabes, they all miss a cru­cial fact.
We are liv­ing in the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry, our prob­lems require fix­es of now, not [super galac­ti­cal fix­es of the myth­i­cal star-trek type].
Our coun­try has become far too enam­ored with the ideals of the devel­oped world which we are not yet ready for. We have tak­en on a men­tal­i­ty befit­ting Scandinavia. Societies built on wealth accu­mu­lat­ed through cen­turies of African exploita­tion, racial homoge­nous soci­eties, soci­eties which first estab­lished the rule of law as the bul­wark of their foundations.

Most west­ern European soci­eties estab­lished the rule of law as their foun­da­tions, they are wealthy states which do not wel­come new and dif­fer­ent peo­ple into their societies.
Those soci­eties are bound to have low crime.
Jamaica has decid­ed to emu­late those coun­tries and is apt to point to their law enforce­ment meth­ods with­out under­stand­ing the fun­da­men­tals which are behind the low crime rates in west­ern Europe and par­tic­u­lar­ly in the Scandinavian region.

In a sen­tence, after 55 years Jamaica has demon­strat­ed an unwill­ing­ness to estab­lish the rule of law as the foun­da­tion for our par­lia­men­tary democ­ra­cy but wants to have the rel­a­tive tran­quil­i­ty of the states which have.
In essence, like most of the African nations still strug­gling to shake off the last ves­tiges of their colo­nial­ist past Jamaica’s polit­i­cal lead­ers too have failed mis­er­ably at fig­ur­ing out how to set the coun­try on a sus­tain­able path forward.

Our coun­try is at a cross­roads, now is the time, if ever at all we are going to arrest the decline we must do so now.
The coun­try is awash in high pow­ered weapons and a seem­ing­ly end­less sup­ply of ammu­ni­tion. In 2010 we wit­nessed that there were the desire and the capa­bil­i­ty among ele­ments of the soci­ety to chal­lenge the con­sti­tu­tion­al­ly elect­ed gov­ern­ment through force of arms.

Prior to that and since then admin­is­tra­tions of both polit­i­cal par­ties have been derelict in ful­fill­ing their respon­si­bil­i­ties and in many cas­es may be char­ac­ter­ized as co-con­spir­a­tors in the wave of crime which con­tin­ue to wash over the coun­try tak­ing the final under­pin­nings of the coun­try we once knew.