After decades of mismanagement and meddling in law enforcement, there is now an epidemic of crime facing the Island.
Both Political parties bear responsibility for politicizing the process of law enforcement, both parties bear responsibility for the lawlessness in the country.
Yet decades after repeated instances of state-sanctioned lawlessness like the 1963 Coral Gardens Rasta uprising which resulted in the deaths of Police Officers, through to the events which necessitated the security forces incursion into Tivoli Gardens not much has been learned.
The undeniable fact is that the Police department is more learned than at any other time in the 185-year history of the Constabulary.
At the same time, the department has never been more inept at carrying out the most basic functions which police are required to do daily and as a matter of course.
Truthfully the Police can be let off the hook for some of its inadequacies, as a matter of fact, no police force is required to work with such second-guessing and criticisms from lawyers and experts some trained at the intellectual ghetto and others simply by the ghetto.
The constant criticism and second-guessing coupled with the specter of prison hanging over them has made officers tentative, unsure, and afraid to make even the simplest arrests.
The downside to this is that those who would break the laws are exponentially emboldened and are made increasingly aggressive, not just in the level of brutality they unleash on their victims but in their aggressive attitude against those who enforce the laws.
The lax, liberal attitude of the courts in what can only be construed as adversarial posturing against the people’s business in case after case, has only given the forces of lawlessness ammunition in its war against the rule of law.
Most of all, every Tom, Dick, and Harry who has never served in anything much less risked their lives a single day has grandiose opinions and have written theses on what needs to be done to return the country to a state of normalcy.
So now the University of the West Indies (Intellectual ghetto à la the late Wilmott Mutty Perkins) has offered to help train and in the process house police recruits. Other institutions of higher learning have also stepped forward to offer their services to train police officers.
The latest being the Montego Bay Community College in St James.
For the record, there is nothing wrong with having educated cops, in fact, the times demand that we have smarter cops.
However, at this present time outsourcing police training to people who are not police officers, people have no experience in law enforcement or law enforcement practices and procedures is stupid, ridiculous and will have disastrous consequences for the nation in the future.
Remember that the JCF is more educated now that it has ever been in its history, yet crime is at the highest it has ever been in our history.
So clearly having police officers with Assc, Bachelors, Masters and PhD’s is not going to solve the Island’s crime problem.
What the nation needs are police officers who know how to do the job of policing effectively and a political class which recognizes that it must get its grubby little fingers out of law enforcement.
The crime problem the nation faces now will be dwarfed going forward if law enforcement cannot get it’s collective act together.
Mass shootings, acts of terrorism and other transnational crimes have already shown their ugly heads on the Island, they will not go away because we wish them away.
Jamaica needs a competent police force trained by police officers who know policing.
That’s it!
Jamaica’s nonsensical posture which has been promulgated by the nit-wit elites who make policy have always been that simple solutions should be discarded and replaced with hifalutin alien concepts they read about happening in other parts of the world.
In many cases, those concepts and practices are as fake and unworkable as their fake upper Saint Andrew Accents.
There is an expansive campus out there in Twickenham Park which is quite enough to train the Island’s police officers efficiently and effectively.
What is in shortage is a lack of quality candidates, modern police training techniques and the support necessary for those young recruits to do the job they are asked to do.
More and more cops are announcing they have earned degrees, commendable indeed, yet despite these personal advancements crime continue to increase.
The nation is not being served in this regard, let’s be real if this was ever going to be solved by advanced degrees we would have hit that plateau with the elevation of Dr. Carl Williams to the rank of Commissioner of Police.
Those in power continue to apply fixes to problems which do not exist rather than apply the fixes necessary to alleviate those problems which do exist.