Striking a balance between ensuring victims’ rights, the rule of law, and the rights of the accused to due process and a fair trial is no easy task. It is premised on the fundamental ideal that Judges, Prosecutors, Defense Attorneys, and Police will adhere strictly with fidelity to their oaths.
This is no easy task because humans are prone to mistakes and abusing their authority. The abuse of authority is not confined to any region or country; for example, in New York City, Police were granted the power to stop and search people they suspected of carrying illegal weapons. The process was called stop and frisk.
Admittedly, this was not a bad strategy that the police would have the power to stop someone they believe may have an illegal weapon on their person or in an automobile.
A person with bad intentions will certainly think twice about tucking a gun in his waistband or car if he believes there is a strong possibility of getting caught.
For the record, the penalty in New York State for possessing an illegal weapon behind bars depends on the nature of the offense, the specific charge and degree of which a person is convicted, and past criminal history.
Penalties for a felony conviction of Criminal Possession of a Firearm include one to four years in prison and a fine of up to $5,000. (The maximum penalties for a misdemeanor are one year in jail and a fine of $1,000.) These days, first-time offenders are usually the only people fortunate enough to face a misdemeanor charge for gun possession instead of a felony charge. (Explained newyorkcriminallawyer.com).
Mayor Bill de Blasio discontinued stop and frisk after much outcry from the minority communities living in the city’s five Boroughs. Their complaint centered on their perception that the statistics showed that police were disproportionately stopping young men of color and searching them. Only a small minority of those stops resulted in a weapon or any contraband being found.
One could argue that the stops, including young Black and Latino men, are grossly disproportionate. Still, realistically and truthfully, those are the people who largely commit gun crimes in the city, so the police would naturally focus on them.
But it was not that people protested about the statistics alone; they complained about the treatment meted out to innocent young Black and Brown men at the hands of the police.
And therein lies the problem, over-zealous cops with bad attitudes and Rambo mentalities tried to live out their fantasies by being rude, disrespectful, and abusive to young men of color whom they disliked.
As the statistics and abuse piled up, so was the anger of the people kindled, and stop and frisk was discontinued; the result is that young men are now carrying their illegal weapons unperturbed about being stooped and frisked.
The inability of some police officers to do their jobs right put the city in peril, and that’s the bottom line.
Under the suppression of crimes Act in Jamaica during the 1980s, there was the usual honk-honk from the hogpen; we know them well; they are the bottom-feeders who position themselves as Human Rights advocates. The trouble with their advocacy is that it never quite gets to empathy for the crime victims.
During the Reagan Years, the same as the Seaga years, Crime in Jamaica was controlled. Let me be the first to say that crime was not where this writer wanted it to be during those years, as I believed then that if we had better leadership of the Constabulary at all levels, we could have been exponentially more successful.
Full disclosure, I served most of my truncated police service during the 1980s before leaving abruptly in search of better opportunities.
During the 80s, the police had a better grasp of who the criminals were and where they were hiding; as I said before, with better leadership, we could have done a way better job of decapitating criminal networks if we had leadership that had the ability to think.
I am first to say that there were abuses by the police and military during those years, as could have been expected where there is poor leadership up the chain of command, poor training, and inadequate accountability mechanisms; police, like every category of workers, will abuse their authority.
Nevertheless, the indisputable fact is that during the 1980s, fewer Jamaicans were being murdered. Since then, Jamaica, an outpost of British Colonialist imperialism, was forced to do away with capital punishment, which emboldened people to be brazen. Additionally, the period after the Seaga administration was followed by an unprecedented 221⁄2 years unbroken run of doing as you please in Jamaica that saw Jamaica becoming the murder capital of the world and a place where criminals go to chill and act out their criminalistic fantasies.
After the Seaga years, Human Rights Watch, a group that has influenced many other such groups on the Island, wrote the following.
https://www.hrw.org/reports/1989/WR89/Jamaica.htm
In the link provided above, one can see that there is no mention of the innocent Jamaicans who lost their lives to marauding terroristic killers. There is no mention of the broken families the victims left behind. Instead, the report details numbers that tell only a small part of the story but do not consider the cost-benefit analysis that must go into the reporting so readers would better understand the complexity of Jamaica’s crime pandemic.
As we see today, when the Opposition People’s National Party’s spokespeople open their mouths, they talk about the rights of individual citizens as if the security forces are acting against law-abiding citizens and not in their interest.
It is the same playbook that the so-called human rights advocates use to confound and confuse the Jamaican people with great effect but to their detriment. If you are dead no right that you had matters. The most important right a person has is the right to life. This fundamental fact eludes the parasites who say they are advocating for the rights of poor Jamaicans.
Today Jamaica is steadfastly stuck in the same mindset, influenced by a backward human rights advocacy that is steadfastly focused on the rights of criminals. For those who survive the ravages of criminal conduct and those who died, .…..well, for Jamaica’s human rights community, it’s …oh well.
The Judiciary itself came up under this misguided thinking that the rights of murderous criminals trump the rights of law-abiding citizens.
The Chief Justice position is a highly regarded position of trust, maybe naively so, but in our system of justice, we need to have trust in our arms of government for our democracy to work.
Alas, over the years, the judiciary has been called into question in ways we have never seen before. Witnesses brag about their high-priced attorneys working on their behalf, corrupting judges to get the outcomes they want in court.
Sentences given to violent offenders, repeat violent offenders even, are jaw-dropping in their leniency, while the judges lecture the public about the rules they must consider when handing down sentences.
The undeniable truth, however, is that even though the laws are not nearly as stringent as they ought to be, thanks to the powerful trial lawyer and human rights lobby on the Island, unelected judges violate the trust placed in them by releasing onto the streets violent repeat offenders on bail, and even when they are convicted the sentences given to them makes no reasonable sense.
Still, some Jamaicans bury their heads in the sand, fingers in their ears, and yell to drown out the reality of this corruption.
As I have said in previous articles, judicial corruption is not confined to situations where a judge is paid off for a certain outcome but may be better characterized as the following.
(Judicial corruption means ‘all forms of inappropriate influence that may damage the impartiality of justice and may involve any actor within the justice system, including, but not limited to, judges, lawyers, administrative Court support staff, parties, and public servants.) Those considerations may include political activism.
Steeped culturally to hero-worship people in positions of authority, the average Jamaican is blinded to what’s happening to our country. As a consequence, dangerous criminals are returned to the streets as soon as they are arrested and even when they are convicted.
We watch the trials of dangerous murderous gangsters and see a judge disrespect the police and prosecutor while giving deference to their defense attorneys. We watch speechless as a single judge arguably acts as a defense lawyer to violent killers.
This is shocking to observers looking on yet it is par for the course in Jamaica.
This practice is to be found nowhere else in the world, so Jamaicans should look at the record of the violence producers and ask themselves, ‘why was this person back on the streets? For decades they scapegoated the police department laying the crime issue squarely at the feet of what they characterized as the incompetent police department populated with dunces.
Now the police force has more PhDs than a University, more lawyers than a law firm, and more degrees than a thermometer, yet still, crime is higher than when the force was perceived their way.
Our country is corrupt to the core, and the corruption is eating away at the ability of those in power to effectuate change.
The sooner we realize this, the earlier we can begin to turn this sinking ship around.
We await the verdict in the Clansman trial!!!
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Mike Beckles is a former Police Detective, businessman, freelance writer, black achiever honoree, and creator of the blog mikebeckles.com.
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