The Power Of Propoganda

I write about the val­ue of truth from time to time, I do so because I believe fun­da­men­tal­ly in the impor­tance of truth as a moral prin­ci­ple on which we must build our societies.
As a kid, I prid­ed myself on speak­ing the truth to the best of my abil­i­ty. My guardians knew well, that what­ev­er my answer was to their ques­tions they could rely on it. I strove nev­er to let them down on that front.
As a par­ent now, I impress upon my own chil­dren the impor­tance of being hon­est with their answers so that when trou­ble comes I may count on their answers to guide me in my defense of them.

I recent­ly wrote about the times we are liv­ing in and in that arti­cle, I won­dered whether or not we have entered a post-fac­tu­al stage as some experts sur­mise. What is evi­dent is the fact that those who con­trol infor­ma­tion medi­ums do have the abil­i­ty to shape nar­ra­tives. Those peo­ple are not always hon­est players.
Does that mean we have entered a post-fac­tu­al world or have we sim­ply entered a phase in our his­to­ry in which those who pro­mul­gate infor­ma­tion under­stand the val­ue of shap­ing the nar­ra­tive to suit their own agendas?

EXTRAJUDICIAL KILLINGS AND THOSE WHO CRY WOLF

Take for instance the fact that there are now few­er police shoot­ings in Jamaica since the Bruce Golding Administration passed the INDECOM act into law.
Does that fact mean that there were uni­ver­sal extra­ju­di­cial killings by the police?
Or rather does it mean that police offi­cers have cho­sen to be less proac­tive in going after crim­i­nals and there­fore vio­lent law-enforce­ment encoun­ters with crim­i­nals have gone down?
More impor­tant­ly, as a result, crim­i­nals have been vast­ly embold­ened and the nation has seen a sub­se­quent increase in homi­cides and oth­er vio­lent crimes includ­ing assaults on police offi­cers themselves.

In order to under­stand this ques­tion, one has to look at the def­i­n­i­tion of extra­ju­di­cial killings.
[Extrajudicial killings are char­ac­ter­ized as is the killing of a per­son by gov­ern­men­tal author­i­ties with­out the sanc­tion of any judi­cial pro­ceed­ing or legal process].

In this char­ac­ter­i­za­tion, there is noth­ing which speaks to the dan­gers police face when they are forced to use lethal force to save their own lives or the lives of oth­ers in the law­ful exe­cu­tion of their duties. And for good reason.
The fact that police are forced to shoot vio­lent crim­i­nals though regret­table, may be viewed three ways depend­ing on what nar­ra­tive a per­son choos­es to convey.
(a) vio­lent police officers.(b) vio­lent soci­ety.© both.
If a police offi­cer kills a per­son who pos­es no threat to him­self or the life of oth­ers that action would con­sti­tute an extra­ju­di­cial killing.
What is wrong and decep­tive is that there are those who take large swaths of data and use that data to make their argu­ments that police are killing large amounts of inno­cent peo­ple extrajudicially.

Carolynn Gomes did that and no one except myself chal­lenged her, instead, they gave her a nation­al hon­or for dis­tort­ing data, not just at home but in front of International Human rights agencies.
Terrence Williams learned the val­ue of that les­son to make his points. Of course, that kind of decep­tion could only fly in a soci­ety intent on sup­port­ing crim­i­nal­i­ty, a soci­ety igno­rant as hell or both.

DATA MANIPULATION

The Commissioner of INDECOM must sub­mit quar­ter­ly reports on its func­tions to the parliament.
Those reports indi­cate the nuances of how the agency is pro­gress­ing as per its man­date. Withing those reports are numer­i­cal data of peo­ple charged with crimes, files sub­mit­ted to the Director of Public Prosecution for action, files sub­mit­ted to the three agen­cies over which INDECOM has over­sight for action by those depart­ment heads among oth­er things.

Despite the fact that INDECOM is the agency tasked with inves­ti­gat­ing alle­ga­tions and arrest­ing errant offi­cers of the [3]departments, and despite hav­ing done it’s very best to do so, INDECOM’s prin­ci­pal offi­cers con­tin­ue to smear the police that its use of force is a cause for con­cern even though it[the chief inves­tiga­tive agency] have no evi­dence of wrong­do­ing by offi­cers involved in these use of force instances.

Gone are the days when there were cries and out­cries that the police are a law unto themselves.
There is an over­sight agency, a con­fronta­tion­al, inef­fec­tive one that pro­duces noth­ing over and above what the CCRB was doing but one nonetheless.
In fact, every Tom Dick and Henry[sic] is now an author­i­ty on police use of force protocols.
Truth can­not be what Terrence Williams or his sup­port­ers say it is or what the con­niv­ing duplic­i­tous media allows him to proffer.
Truth must super­sede rhetoric and dem­a­gog­ic smear.

We live in vio­lent times, we must hold our law enforce­ment agen­cies account­able, no one wants to live in an unac­count­able police state.
On the oth­er hand, it is disin­gen­u­ous and wrong to con­tin­ue to use the term extra­ju­di­cial killings when there is no evi­dence to sup­port those claims.
A lie is a lie no mat­ter how many times it is retold. As such, it is impor­tant that the nation under­stand that no mat­ter how many times Terrence Williams and his sup­port­ers lie about ques­tion­able killings it does not make them so, guns includ­ed or not.

It is very dis­turb­ing that Terrence Williams can con­tin­ue to give the false impres­sion to a gullible pub­lic that the police has no legal right to use lethal force if they are attacked with weapons oth­er than a gun.
In fact, the Police has the right to use lethal force to defend his life even if an assailant does not have a weapon of any kind, as long as the assault on his per­son con­vinces him/​her that his/​her life is in danger.

No police offi­cer has an oblig­a­tion to absorb assault in the pur­suit of his duty. When you attack an offi­cer of the law you must know that you by your actions have placed your life in danger.
What is even more despi­ca­ble is that those who ought to know bet­ter have gob­bled up fake news and embarked on the process of spread­ing it against the nation’s law enforce­ment Agencies.
If the tra­di­tion­al media is unable or unwill­ing to push back against this kind of mis­in­for­ma­tion maybe it’s a sig­nal to the rest of us that its time has come and gone.