Violent Crimes Cannot Be Wished Away, We Must Eviscerate The Violence Producers…

Over the years, as crime con­tin­ues to take cen­ter stage in Jamaica, calls have gone out from var­i­ous quar­ters about what to do about it.
Some of those sug­ges­tions have ranged from the inane to the down­right ridicu­lous.
Suggestions include becom­ing the 51^st state of the United States.
That inane sug­ges­tion missed the point that Washington DC, which is large­ly Black, and Puerto Rico, which is over­whelm­ing­ly Hispanic, are still unable to receive state­hood exact­ly because of their eth­nic com­po­si­tions.
Other sug­ges­tions include Divine Intervention.
Sure, let us drop our hands and wait for God to come down and fix this crime prob­lem we have.…… let us see how that will turn out!

The actu­al truth is that Jamaica has a prob­lem of lead­er­ship. Arrogance and igno­rance are the two char­ac­ter­is­tics most present in the mix; this brew is result­ing in the crime lev­els the coun­try is expe­ri­enc­ing.
Don’t expect that this prog­no­sis will make a lick of dif­fer­ence in the hyper-polar­ized swamp that our coun­try has become.
For one, we have lead­ers who have nev­er done a ride-along with the police, first because they would shit their pants at the inher­ent dan­ger; sec­ond­ly, they are too shit scared to risk their lives, so they can­not for a moment under­stand the polices point of view, par­tic­u­lar­ly for the pal­try remu­ner­a­tions the police receive any­way.
The total­i­ty of the Island’s crime prob­lem may be summed up in a sin­gle sen­tence. On the one hand, we have the arro­gant pricks in both polit­i­cal par­ties who are unwill­ing to sup­port tough anti-crime mea­sures because they are mixed up with the crim­i­nal gangs. On the oth­er, some have no idea about what they are leg­is­lat­ing out­side their myopic, parochial world­view. God for­bid they would say, “I need to be edu­cat­ed on this.”

If you don’t know where you are going, you may very well already be there. If you want to end up east, it would be good not to head west.
Jamaica’s law enforce­ment efforts may be described as head­ing east though it wants to end up west.
For years, admin­is­tra­tions in Kingston have rou­tine­ly starved the police depart­ment of sup­port as a means of estab­lish­ing bona fides with the crim­i­nals inside their bases of sup­port (gar­risons).
Not nec­es­sar­i­ly because all of the polit­i­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tives who rep­re­sent­ed gar­risons were nec­es­sar­i­ly crim­i­nals, but because they want­ed the perks and trap­pings of polit­i­cal office, and stay­ing in pow­er was the way to have those perks.
Due to their rapa­cious and craven desires to hold onto pow­er, many start­ed as decent peo­ple but giv­en enough time, through omis­sion and com­mis­sion, they became just as dirty as the guys who pulled the trigger.

If the police clear­ly see that their polit­i­cal boss­es are sup­port­ing the peo­ple, they are sup­posed to be arrest­ing; not pay­ing them a liv­able wage, not giv­ing them the tools to do their jobs, active­ly and demon­stra­bly exact­ing puni­tive con­se­quences on them when they do their sworn duties in arrest­ing gang­sters from the gar­risons; why would they stay true to their oath?
If oth­er branch­es of the same gov­ern­ment are social­ized to hate the police because the politi­cians have so polar­ized the coun­try against the rule of law, how can the coun­try rea­son­ably expect to have a pro­fes­sion­al and com­pe­tent police force?
In a coun­try in which get­ting a gov­ern­ment job is impor­tant because the pri­vate sec­tor is too small, and there­fore unable to assim­i­late the avail­able tal­ent effec­tive­ly, the five to six hun­dred police offi­cers who leave the force each year is a telling sign that they do not like what they see with­in the department.

There are 63 so-called law­mak­ers in the low­er cham­ber of the leg­is­la­ture and appoint­ed sen­a­tors, and the oth­er ticky-ticky called parish coun­cilors and the oth­er hang­ers-on.
That is where Jamaica’s crime prob­lem lies.
The social­iza­tion of the Jamaican peo­ple to not hav­ing respect for the rule of law and those who enforce the laws did not hap­pen overnight.
It is a time-test­ed strat­e­gy designed, as I said pre­vi­ous­ly, to cur­ry favor with the mass­es.
Today, the dynam­ics are the same; even though there may be some desire to change the crime tra­jec­to­ry, hav­ing lost most of their con­trol over the gang­sters, today’s politi­cians car­ry a feel­ing of vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty.
Nevertheless, the desire to hold onto office is still para­mount. Politicians today have to cater to a wider vot­er base than their pre­de­ces­sors did a gen­er­a­tion ago.
This gen­er­a­tion was raised to have no respect for the rule of law.
No one wants to acknowl­edge that deal­ing harsh­ly and deci­sive­ly with the gang­sters is what’s need­ed; the trap­pings of pow­er are far too impor­tant.
No one wants to accept that deci­sive­ness must be cod­i­fied into laws and that it will be the deter­rent effect of those laws which will work toward chang­ing the matrix.
The Islands polit­i­cal lead­ers feel they have to appease this gen­er­a­tion of vot­ers, a gen­er­a­tion that has been schooled into believ­ing that cit­i­zen­ship is a right they have which comes with no respon­si­bil­i­ties.
A friend respond­ing to an arti­cle I wrote recent­ly about the taps on the wrist some cor­rupt judges were hand­ing out to gang­sters found with ille­gal guns asked me If I was aware that some of the judges might be scared them­selves to hand out appro­pri­ate­ly tough sen­tences?
I think remov­ing them from the streets through long sen­tences would be the way to go, but I under­stood the point he raised.

The range of sug­ges­tions con­tin­ues large­ly from the edi­to­r­i­al boards of the media hous­es — the very same media hous­es which told peo­ple to attack the police. The media hous­es told peo­ple to [throw stones] at police sta­tions. (Of course, they don’t stone the sta­tions any­more, they evolved into using auto­mat­ic weapons fire today).
And arguably most insid­i­ous of all, the media hous­es gave plat­forms to paid mourn­ers, and oth­ers sent out from the gar­risons to lie as they block roads and claim that police had mur­dered their loved ones in cold blood. These paid and forced sup­posed eye­wit­ness­es were always omnipresent at 3: 00 or 4:00 am when the police came call­ing on the mur­der­ous gang­sters.
Even though the unscrupu­lous media knew that the out­raged crowds were fakes and frauds, that they were lying, their lack of jour­nal­is­tic integri­ty was nowhere to be found. They allowed them to lie day in and day out, on radio and tele­vi­sion and in the print media. And now we have an almost ungovern­able country.

So, for exam­ple, when I was a mem­ber of the Ranger Squad in the mid-’80s, there were shoot­ings. Still, there is no way a sit­u­a­tion would exist on low­er moun­tain View Avenue where the “police” warn motorists not to enter the area because gang­sters with high-pow­ered weapons are in con­trol.
We would get them, and they know it; we weren’t play­ing around. But the Prime Minister of the coun­try, who is being mar­ket­ed as a one-man-know-it-all, will solve every prob­lem in the coun­try. He got him­self involved in the sym­me­try of law enforce­ment.
He tells the police what they can and can­not do, even though he nev­er did a ride-along and knows noth­ing about deal­ing with dan­ger­ous crim­i­nals.
He says the days of police offi­cers kick­ing down doors are over, and I am yet to fig­ure out where he gets the author­i­ty to make those dic­tates.
He even involves him­self in day-to-day polic­ing pro­to­cols by direct­ing the police com­mis­sion­er to inves­ti­gate things that clear­ly are not with­in his remit.

The idea that we can plant a field of corn and sit in antic­i­pa­tion of a har­vest of rice is the very def­i­n­i­tion of stu­pid­i­ty.
You and I know that the mea­sures employed will not have long-term pos­i­tive effects, and I have said so here for years. Applying aband-aid to a gun­shot wound can hard­ly stop the bleed­ing, much less repair the dam­age inter­nal­ly.
Jamaicans are dying from a cri­sis of will, a cri­sis of com­pe­tent and hon­est polit­i­cal lead­er­ship.
From the car­nage on the roads to the gang­ster par­adise that our coun­try has become, there is only one rem­e­dy, and it is not sweet and syrupy.

Mike Beckles is a for­mer Jamaican police Detective cor­po­ral, a busi­ness own­er, avid researcher, and blog­ger. 
He is a black achiev­er hon­oree and pub­lish­er of the blog Mike Beckles​.com
He’s also a con­trib­u­tor to sev­er­al websites.