You The People Get What You Allow Them To Do…

The year was 1983 and I wait­ed with bat­ed breath with my col­leagues that after­noon. We were young con­sta­bles, who were to be trans­ferred from the Beat & Foot Patrol Division to sta­tions across the coun­try.
We were told that for the very first time in our Nation’s his­to­ry, offi­cers not trained specif­i­cal­ly for the Mobile Reserve, would be trans­ferred to that Division.
I want­ed no part of the Mobile Reserve, not because there was any­thing wrong with the Mobile Reserve as it were, but my dream of becom­ing a detec­tive would be severe­ly side­tracked, were I among those sent to the Division.
At that time the Police Force Orders was a con­fi­den­tial doc­u­ment between com­mand struc­ture and per­son­nel.
Criminals and their sup­port struc­tures did not know unit strength, they had no idea where offi­cers were to be trans­ferred to, and they damn sure did not have pri­vate and con­fi­den­tial infor­ma­tion of police offi­cers which should be con­fi­den­tial, avail­able only by court order.
It was the lat­ter-day, new age crowd-pleas­ing, Owen Ellington who made that doc­u­ment pub­lic for absolute­ly no good rea­son.
And so that fate­ful day as the Force Orders arrived and we all crowd­ed around a sin­gle copy of the doc­u­ment, I learned that what I had always con­strued to be shit­ty luck, was not about to change in that Force Order. Not on that day.
Mobile Reserve it would be for me. My tears flowed freely. I did not want to go to a unit which was best known for break­ing up riots and doing sta­t­ic duties. I did not want to be a part of a unit which was rumored to be where careers went to die. I joined the force because I want­ed to inves­ti­gate crimes and put crim­i­nals away.
After spend­ing the bet­ter part of four years there includ­ing on the crack super effec­tive Rangers Squad, I grew into becom­ing a proud mem­ber of that famous Division.
My time spent at the Mobile Reserve will for­ev­er be memo­ri­al­ized in my life’s his­to­ry, as one of the most con­se­quen­tial and invalu­able peri­ods of my per­son­al growth and devel­op­ment.
It was what I learned and lived at the Mobile Reserve which saved my life in a dark alley­way on Blackwood Terrace in 88 when at point-blank range, a would-be mur­der­er opened fire on me, two oth­er cops and a civil­ian mem­ber of the com­mu­ni­ty.
The com­mu­ni­ty mem­ber was shot twice and the two cops ran away leav­ing me to fight off the shoot­er.
It was that tac­ti­cal aware­ness which allowed me to dis­arm the assailant even after I was shot, there­by sav­ing the injured man’s life as well as my own.
There was no call from the Commissioner of Police nor any of his min­ions. There was no state­ment of out­rage that some­thing like that could hap­pen in his con­stituen­cy by the mem­ber of Parliament.
He was prob­a­bly ecsta­t­ic, because he had no love for me based on my no-non­sense approach to the low-life scum­bags who oper­at­ed out of his con­stituen­cy.
There was no nation­al hon­or, I was back to my beloved CIB office the next day.
Back then that is what we did, that is who we were. We were made that way. 

It is rather dif­fi­cult to break through the self-assured igno­rance and the inces­sant gib­ber­ish of a plu­ral­i­ty of our peo­ple.
It is near impos­si­ble to con­vince our peo­ple to seek facts, then insert their opin­ions, rather than to hard­en their own pre­con­ceived notions and opin­ions, ignor­ing facts which sur­face lat­er.
As a Jamaican, I too had to come to grips with the real­i­ty that we are extra­or­di­nar­i­ly opin­ion­at­ed, even when we have no access to facts, we cre­ate our own nar­ra­tives then fend off the truth of what­ev­er top­ic is under dis­cus­sion.
I also learned that truth in our coun­try is processed depend­ing on the teller.
Our polit­i­cal, reli­gious, soci­etal and oth­er beliefs struc­tures, large­ly inform how we process infor­ma­tion.
They deter­mine whether fac­tu­al infor­ma­tion find fer­tile space in our sub-con­scious or are dis­card­ed and replaced with our pre­con­ceived notions and opinions.

And so even though infor­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy has made it pos­si­ble to rad­i­cal­ly trans­form dark spaces of igno­rance into bright hemi­spheres of light, there are some who will ignore the real­i­ty of avail­able cred­i­ble infor­ma­tion, choos­ing instead the default option of stale and ran­cid opin­ion-based non­sense.
I had one such con­ver­sa­tion yes­ter­day with a man who tells me that his girl­friend is a cop back home. He pro­ceed­ed to lam­baste the police even though he had just told me that his girl­friend is a police offi­cer with over twen­ty years of ser­vice.
I quick­ly real­ized he was one of the pro­grammed opin­ion­at­ed facts-be-damned types, so I lim­it­ed what I said and allowed him enough lever­age to hang himself.

He pro­ceed­ed to tell me that Jamaican police are lazy and that they need to work more hours. This gen­tle­man knows I am a for­mer law enforce­ment offi­cer, and he was stand­ing in my busi­ness-place telling me this.
I asked him whether he thought his girl­friend was lazy he said ‘no,” she works hard.
I asked him, “do you con­sid­er me lazy, “when­ev­er you come here, I am here work­ing, I led”? he replied in the neg­a­tive.
He then went into the canned nar­ra­tive about police sta­tions being closed at nights in Jamaica.
I asked whether he had ever gone to a police sta­tion for help and not received assis­tance, whether night or day, he respond­ed no.
I then asked him whether the two precinct hous­es with­in a three miles radius of where we were stand­ing were opened at nights, or does one have to enter and speak to an offi­cer through an inter­com, he respond­ed they are closed.
I end­ed my con­ver­sa­tion with him there.
As a young offi­cer, I worked so hard some­times my hands shook for lack of sleep. Nevertheless, we have a coun­try which has come of age on an inces­sant anti-police drum­beat.
One made pos­si­ble by the likes of Wilmott Perkins, Ronald Thwaites, Barbara Gloudon, Garnett Roper, Cliff Hughes, and oth­ers.
A dem­a­gog­ic cliché of self-serv­ing trai­tors to our coun­try, who like ter­mites ate away at the foun­da­tions of the rule of law, and now the very foun­da­tions of our embry­on­ic democ­ra­cy are at the per­il of crumbling.

Jamaica wants to become a devel­oped coun­try but it woe­ful­ly lacks crit­i­cal think­ing among those who lead to ever be a seri­ous con­tender for that des­ig­na­tion.
Jamaicans like to point to the Singaporean mod­el as a mod­el which copied strains of our sys­tem, yet what the Singaporeans did to arrive at where they are, have com­plete­ly elud­ed Jamaicans.
There is no rea­son that Jamaica’s Tourism, Bauxite, reg­gae, Ganja, Coffee, our rich fer­tile soil in which every­thing thrives and the dynamism of our peo­ple should not make us the Dubai of the Caribbean and the envy of the world.
Unfortunately, the Island can nev­er be that, because at best we are a peo­ple who rather like to hear our­selves talk.
We are giant pon­tif­i­ca­tors and prog­nos­ti­ca­tors, nev­er mind that when we do both we some­times have no idea what we are talk­ing about.

The idea to dis­man­tle the Mobile Reserve has been one of their goals all along.
The ele­va­tion of Carolyn Gomes to rel­e­vance in the way our laws are struc­tured to go after mur­der­ers and gang­sters, the cre­ation of INDECOM and the appoint­ment of rabid anti-police dem­a­gogue Terrence Williams and the British Imposter Hamish Campbell.
A man who did noth­ing to inves­ti­gate his cor­rupt for­mer col­leagues who plant­ed evi­dence on black peo­ple in England, is proof that they want­ed to dis­man­tle the force.
So when Horace Chang referred to the Police Department as a glo­ri­fied secu­ri­ty guard com­pa­ny, don’t believe for one moment that was a slip of the tongue.
Don’t believe for one moment that Andrew Holness’ con­stant state­ments, that, “no longer would police be kick­ing in doors”, were made in the abstract.
He knew all along that he want­ed to car­ry out the man­date of Bruce Golding before him. He want­ed to fin­ish what Golding start­ed with INDECOM, and the acqui­es­cence of the PNP, tells its own sto­ry of cor­rup­tion and deceit.
Throughout its his­to­ry, the Mobile Reserve has stood as a bas­tion of solace to free­dom lov­ing law abid­ing Jamaicans.
True to form, those who would mur­der and maim had it out for that unit, none more so than the filthy scum­bags who pass for politi­cians but are suit-wear­ing gang­sters.
Imagine a coun­try in which the mem­ber of par­lia­ment with the most vio­lent gar­ri­son in his con­stituen­cy is the Minister with the respon­si­bil­i­ty to quell the nation’s crime epi­dem­ic.
And so they devise a plan to destroy the force while telling the nation that they intend to rebrand it, what they do not say is that the peo­ple who will staff the new and improved force will not be com­ing from China or Mars, they will come from the very same 84% cor­rupt Jamaica, so clear­ly that method­ol­o­gy is a fake and a fraud.
The clear and unequiv­o­cal intent of Andrew Holness and his Administration is to dis­man­tle the JCF and replace it with a [cour­tesy corp of degreed]stooges who talk a good game, but have no clue how to han­dle the Nation’s rapid­ly grow­ing mur­der­ous gangs.

At the end of the day dis­man­tling bas­tions of cer­ti­tude only to cre­ate the illu­so­ry effect that you are mak­ing changes is a solace to fools. How can you puri­fy water by mov­ing the same dirty water to a dif­fer­ent ves­sel? The bright young offi­cers they are talk­ing about are peo­ple steeped in UWI phi­los­o­phy of human rights. They have zero strate­gies, skills or will to stamp out crime and so they intend to per­fume the shit while the peo­ple are being slaugh­tered dai­ly.
It can­not con­tin­ue that peo­ple are being slaugh­tered every day while the PM and his Government with the full acqui­es­cence of the Opposition par­ty tears down the police depart­ment and make it out to be the bad guys. The police have been set up to fail from the get-go, first, they pro­mote fools and lack­eys and polit­i­cal lap­dogs, then they pro­mote slav­ish yes-peo­ple, effec­tive­ly forc­ing out ded­i­cate good career peo­ple and now they have peo­ple with more degrees that they have guns at up park camp but none of it has helped. The Prime min­is­ter and Chang who runs the most killer gar­ri­son (laugh­able) tell Antony Anderson to reduce the force to noth­ing, that is the rea­son he was hired. Anderson in his igno­rance said he hopes to see the day when all police offi­cers are human rights offi­cers. What absurd igno­rance? Every real per­son who stepped for­ward to be a cop was already a human rights activists, they place their lives on the line for peo­ple they do not know. Which of the so-called human rights activists in the coun­try can claim that they have ever been shot at, much less shot, defend­ing any­one’s right to life (their most sacred right)? But Anderson would nev­er under­stand it because he is a fake cop, and the peo­ple above him are police haters. 

The only thing that the PNP and the JLP agree on, is some­thing that is anti­thet­i­cal to the good of the coun­try.
That thing is the total destruc­tion of the Jamaica Constabulary Force.
Through the Starving of the Department of resources, Support to gang­sters in the Garrisons, Interference in law enforce­ment, set­ting up oth­er gov­ern­ment agen­cies to be antag­o­nis­tic toward the police, and a raft of oth­er sub­ver­sive meth­ods, both crim­i­nal gangs have effec­tive­ly destroyed the once proud agency.
This they did with the glee­ful assis­tance of some in civ­il soci­ety and the media.
Make no mis­take about it, a com­pe­tent non-aligned police force is a dan­ger­ous force to the crim­i­nals who sit in the peo­ple’s house.
As my friend said to me today, the law-mak­ers are the law­break­ers, but for the most part, the peo­ple are too stu­pid and brain­washed to see it.
That is why there is no longer any hol­ler­ing from the PNP about Petrojam.
If a thor­ough and pro­fes­sion­al inves­ti­ga­tion was to be done many in both polit­i­cal gangs would die in prison.
So some­one high up in the PNP hier­ar­chy told them to lay off the issue.
A total and com­pete bunch of scum, but then again why would either of these sets of gang­sters stop with their crim­i­nal­i­ty?
Where there is no wis­dom the peo­ple per­ish.
Those of you who think that this new cour­tesy corp that Andrew Holness and Horace Chang with the con­sent of the PNP is cre­at­ing, will stop the blood­shed in your com­mu­ni­ties think again.
Neither of these sets of gang­sters cares about the close to 1700, who are mur­dered each year.
Neither do they care about your daugh­ters being raped and dis­card­ed like thrash by the ani­mals who pose as human men.
But then again you get what you deserve.