“You have to give ‘Tony’ Anderson time to settle in. If he doesn’t settle in, you are just going to appoint another commissioner, and you do the same traditional things all over again.” [Horace Chang, Minister of National Security.
Ha, yes, so there you have it, the problem with Jamaica’s crime problem is, and has always been, the traditional ways of doing things, as far as this Administration is concerned.
Consequently, They threw out the bathwater, baby and all, then they realized, that the water was not the problem, but not only did they throw out the water, they also discarded the baby in the process.
This shit is not funny; it is as asinine as George Bush telling his FEMA director, “good job, Brownie,” even as people were on rooftops in Louisiana threatened by floodwaters, begging to be rescued.
Let me not relitigate Andrew Honess’ BS; let me not give exposure to Delroy Chuck, and others who adopted Carolyn Gomes’ lies, (you remember her lies), about name brand cops!
Gomes built a name for herself on dead police officers’ blood and was awarded national honors on that blood.
Andrew Holness came out of that anti-police world view, and so no one should be surprised that he placed Anthony Anderson over the JCF. He and his minions are now moving the goalpost of accountability that was the barometer for previous Commissioners who came up through the ranks and told us that murder statistics are not a true metric of success and failure of crime management.
I cannot think of a more pressing measurement. .
How fucking stupid do they really think we are. Even if we ignore the obvious friendliness of,‘you have to give Tony Anderson time to settle in,’ bullshit, we are still left with a Commissioner of Police on whose watch murders have continued to escalate. In contrast, his friends in the political arena run protection for him by blowing smoke up our asses that escalating homicide numbers are not a true measurement of failure, because he is modernizing the force.
Chang to the media.
“That’s why you separate homicide from a lot of the realities. Homicides are a big problem. For every commissioner, we have put there and minister and Government, to deal effectively with the gangs will take us a little while. All I can say to the public is that the things that we are doing, I am confident that they can work, but it will not happen in three years. We should see some reduction in the numbers in the next 18 months, but three years is a short time to deal with many of the third-generation gangs.”
I wonder how this new narrative plays with people like George Quallo, and others who were pilloried for the rising crime even though they were not given half the resources that have been made available to Antony Anderson.
I find it interesting that this narrative is being pushed after our article on January 28th. We asked salient questions as to why Anderson still has a job even as violent crimes continue to increase?
In that article, linked above, we said the following.
It is no wonder then that since the start of 2021, the Parish of Saint James has seen an increase of 350 percent in murders against the previous year.
Saint James may be experiencing the largest increase in violent crime, but it is not the only Parish experiencing a surge in violence. The shocking uptick of murders in the Island’s tourism mecca has gone on unabated; it is a precise metric of the country’s failure to get its arms around this crime monster.
Pride and arrogance will cause us to lose this once pearl of the Caribbean; ignorance, and pretense are citadels of defense against the strategies that would inexorably begin to turn the hellish crime monster around.
Like pouring water into a basket, they continue to nibble around the edges. They continue to administer band-aids to gunshot wounds, while consoling the casualty with platitudes, even as he bleeds to death.
Braggadocio’s pre-written statements of resolve, a reactionary show of force, only to pull back because of its unsustainability, are nothing if not comical.
A week later, the Nation’s Deputy Prime Minister/Minister of National Security and his Deputy trots out a narrative supporting Anderson, one that distorts the killings’ reality while pointing to lower numbers in non-violent offences, as a shiny thing for the local media to chase. To the local media’s discredit, they did not have the courage to hold the government accountable based on the facts we laid out.
Horace Chang’s constituency sits smack dab in the middle of Saint James, which over the years has become Jamaica’s most violent parish.
It is reprehensible that Chang, who now holds the national security portfolio and should not have been appointed to head that ministry, much less continue with this level of failure, now finds himself making excuses and rationalizing away the administration’s failures on the issue of crime.
On the one hand, supplicants to the status quo argue that the Government and the Police commissioner cannot be held accountable for murders, and in particular, murders that emanate from domestic disputes.
If that is true, then Chang’s deputy Matthew Samuda’s statements are to be treated the same way we treat the rest of our garbage. Samuda argued; that under Major General Anderson’s stewardship, larceny cases have dropped by 70 percent, robbery 50 percent, break-ins 30 percent, rape over 40 percent, and aggravated assault cases have dropped by over 50 percent.
Notice that there is no talk about the escalating murder statistics? There is a reason for that, and as I have said in previous articles, and the video above, from time to time, events in Jamaica lead to sharp drops in certain categories of crimes, that the police cannot claim credit for.
In the Youtube video above done in 2019, I made the very same case against the deflections and distractions that the Government was engaging in, even as it pursued failing and failed strategies that were bearing no fruits, but were resulting in more and more Jamaicans being killed, some needlessly, others as a direct consequence of the government’s incompetence,stubbornness and arrogance.
As far as I know, those drops have never been studied, but world cup soccer has always been one such event when even heartless criminals take a break from their ghoulish practices.
This downturn in non-violent offenses, and rapes may be attributed to the COVID-19 outbreak that has significantly changed the way people operate.
For example, as a detective stationed at Constant Spring, I realized that housebreakings were rife in Havendale Saint Andrew for the simple reason that Havendale was a beautiful bedroom community of middle-class people who left their homes to go out to work.
These folks did not have helpers, so their homes were prime targets.
On the contrary, the more upscale communities of Norbrook and Cherry Gardens had robberies. Those homes had helpers, so the predators would pounce on household helpers when they ventured outside to complete a task.
I am not a criminologist; it is up to the experts to ferret the truth that lies deeply buried in the data. But let us not be fooled by bureaucrats and politicians who would try to use numbers to deceive and mislead.
If Horace Chang has a strategic plan that delivered those lower numbers in non-violent crimes, let us see them.
In fact, we will be making a formal request come Monday, February 8th to the Ministry of National Security and the Office of the Commissioner of Police for evidence of those strategies that led to those reductions.
All law-abiding Jamaicans want a crime-free society, but if it comes down to having fewer break-ins and robberies against fewer murders, I believe the majority of the people would prefer fewer killings.
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Mike Beckles is a former Police Detective, businessman, freelance writer, a black achiever honoree, and publisher of the blog mikebeckles.com.