They Killed The Scammers And We Said Nothing , They Killed The Thieves And We Said Nothing Then They Came For Us..

Once again ter­ror­ists killers have struck snuff­ing out the lives of 4 men in the Parish of Westmoreland.

According to Reporting four men on two motor­cy­cles rode up to a pop­u­lar cook-shop in the District of Bath Westmoreland at about 9.00pm where the four vic­tims were and opened fire.

Dead are 68-year-old tyre repair­man Glendon Nanan; 54-year-old ‘Duco man’ Carl Banhan; 24-year-old labour­er Timothy Bernard; and 19-year-old Dimario McIntosh, who is unem­ployed — all of Bath dis­trict, Westmoreland.
The police have yet to estab­lish a motive for the killings.

At this stage of the game it has to be clear to all con­cerned about Jamaica that the killings are ter­ror­is­tic in nature.

They are designed to sow fear. More than that how­ev­er, is the sense of com­fort those who kill have ‚which allows them to kill with such impunity.

Lets set aside our dif­fer­ences on how crime should be addressed for a minute.

Or whether it should even be addressed at all.
I say the lat­ter because hav­ing dealt with this issue for 35 years, I am con­vinced that many who are part of the debate does not want the Island’s crime prob­lem solved because of their vest­ed inter­ests in it’s continuance.

At some point in time we all must come to a con­sen­sus, that no mat­ter the rea­sons for the blood­shed it is un-sustainable.

We have to con­clude that whether these peo­ple were bad peo­ple or not, killing them in that man­ner can hard­ly be the way we treat our own people.

Assuming that these four men whose ages range from old­er to hard­ly hav­ing lived, are inno­cent, we must say enough is enough.
We sim­ply can­not con­tin­ue to exter­mi­nate ourselves.

We can­not con­tin­ue to say peo­ple are only being killed because they are involved in lot­to-scam­ming, or that they are mind­ing oth­er peo­ple’s busi­ness , or that they looked at some­one the wrong way.
Using that log­ic who will be left in the end?
At what point does the Government ditch the failed strat­e­gy which has been in effect,. and place a boot ‑heel on this men­ace once and for all?

Or bet­ter yet ‚when will the Government dis­card the lib­er­al dog­ma which emanat­ed out of the University Campus of the West Indies ?

This Liberal cor­ner­stone of our process since the ear­ly 1970’s has been a colos­sal failure.

This failed sys­tem gives/​gave the ben­e­fit of the doubt to crim­i­nals , nur­ture and abet the worst among us , while giv­ing lit­tle or no sup­port to the rule, of law or those who enforce the laws.

We can­not con­tin­ue to speak to the issue of police cor­rup­tion with­out first under­stand­ing why we end up with a less than ide­al police department.
In order to arrive at that under­stand­ing we have to first acknowl­edge that it was the polit­i­cal lead­er­ship which was first cor­rupt, lead­ing to the cor­rup­tion of the var­i­ous arms of Government.

Our polit­i­cal struc­ture is rot­ten from the core out­ward. The empha­sis on the Police or the Registrar General’s Department are at best hypocritical.

Everyone knew that peo­ple could not send mon­ey in let­ters from over­seas because peo­ple who work in the Postal ser­vice opened the let­ters took the mon­ey and resealed the letters.

We all knew that no mat­ter how great a dri­ver you are, if you did not pay the Examiners you would not get a dri­ver’s licence.

Same is true at the Registrar General’s Department , don’t both­er try­ing to get a birth cer­tifi­cate if you have no mon­ey to pay for it.
Passport , same deal.
Literally every­thing which is part of Government’s func­tion has to be paid for again despite the tax­es we already paid.

People com­plained for decades about the cor­rup­tion of the Prison Warders , the Government did noth­ing, because whether JLP or PNP the politi­cians were steal­ing bil­lions so they did not care.
Ordinary peo­ple won­dered how could Customs Officers afford the lux­u­ri­ous homes and the fan­cy cars they drove.
We knew, and the Politicians knew, but they did not care, because much of the tax­a­tion levied by these agents end­ed up in their pock­ets through one nefar­i­ous scheme or another.

Remarkable the most vis­i­ble Antagonists against the Police are death­ly silent no mat­ter the amount of inno­cent blood shed.
There are no press con­fer­ences to announce their con­cern at the sense­less killings.
There is no hand-wring­ing, no lament­ing the amount of chil­dren left with­out their parents.
Because the ulti­mate aim is nev­er the pro­tec­tion of the inno­cent but the con­tin­ued shield­ing of the rights of accused and con­vict­ed murderers.

May God help our coun­try as it strug­gles to pull it’s col­lec­tive head from the dirt and it’s psy­che from igno­rance, mis­in­for­ma­tion and brainwashing.