You Want Courtesy And Respect From The Cops, How About Giving Courtesy And Respect?

Within the Serengeti of chaos that the Jamaican cul­ture has devolved, is still the inces­sant chat­ter about Police cus­tomer ser­vice, or to put it more suc­cinct­ly the lack thereof.
Built into that non­sense notion is a belief that despite com­ing from a cor­rupt, aggres­sive and dis­re­spect­ful pop­u­la­tion and despite forced to deal with the worse of the worse, offi­cers must be the equiv­a­lent of saints while cit­i­zens bear no bur­den to be respectful.

The infer­ence inher­ent in the con­stant gnash­ing of teeth is still a con­found­ing and retard­ed one-sided expec­ta­tion that crass dis­re­spect­ful behav­ior must be reward­ed with cour­tesy as long as the dis­re­spect and crass­ness are direct­ed at police officers.

On the one hand, there are those from the self-styled “upper crust” who believe that laws do not apply to them. They have no respect for the laws and by exten­sion, they have no regard for those who enforce the laws.

Then there is the oth­er sub­sec­tion or the sup­posed “low­er tier” which believes that vio­lence and dis­re­spect should be direct­ed at offi­cers and offi­cers should retreat from their aggres­sive behavior.
Insofar as polic­ing is con­cerned since it’s incep­tion, to present day and going far into the future that is a dan­ger­ous posi­tion to take.
Officers have every expec­ta­tion that they should go home after the end of their shift, they have no respon­si­bil­i­ty to absorb ver­bal or phys­i­cal abuse for doing their job.

Having a cour­te­ous soci­ety is and should be in the inter­est of all Jamaicans, nev­er­the­less, it is incom­pre­hen­si­ble that the entire­ty of boor­ish behav­ior would be laid at the feet of the police when Politicians, judges, lawyers, doc­tors, nurs­es, and oper­a­tives from every stra­tum of the soci­ety demon­strate the same gut­ter behavior.

The Police which has earned more than it’s fair share of demer­its con­tin­ue to be the scape­goats of every talk­ing head regard­less of the issue under discussion.
The real ques­tion is how do we extract from a dirty pool, clean water with­out the process of fil­tra­tion and con­stant purification?
And if we place the puri­fied water back into the same dirty pool does­n’t that once puri­fied water return to its for­mer state of impurity?

The unmis­tak­able fact is that rude behav­ior should not be tol­er­at­ed from any indi­vid­ual which deals with the public.
With that said mem­bers of the pub­lic have a respon­si­bil­i­ty to con­duct them­selves with the great­est cour­tesy and respect when deal­ing with ser­vice providers.
It is a two-way street.

Maybe Jamaicans need to under­stand that no one cares about their con­ver­sa­tions when they barge into spaces pub­lic and pri­vate talk­ing at the top of their voic­es on cell phones.
How about speak­ing soft­ly while on the phone, how about hang­ing up the phone when you enter a place of business?
How about join­ing the line at the back? How about wait­ing to board the bus and if it’s full await the next bus? How about not yelling over those stand­ing in line?
How about giv­ing some of that which you crave?

You know you want respect, how about giv­ing respect and act­ing respectfully?
The aver­age Jamaican is over­ly opin­ion­at­ed and underinformed.
Those who con­sid­er them­selves from the upper-crust com­plain that offens­es are being com­mit­ted in front of offi­cers and they do noth­ing about it.
Realistically when offi­cers act with cour­tesy they are ignored and phys­i­cal­ly assaulted.(social media plat­forms are filled with instances of such assaults, which only hap­pen to Jamaican cops ).

When they do act with force in order to gain com­pli­ance they are cas­ti­gat­ed as brutish vio­lent, aggres­sive and abusive.
It’s a no-win sit­u­a­tion in which the police is damned if they do and damned if they don’t.
What the Albert Einsteins in the soci­ety fail to under­stand is that respect is a two-way street in which you get as much as you give.

Unfortunately for Jamaican offi­cers who strive to do the right thing in uphold­ing their oaths even some who served in this cesspool of crim­i­nal acqui­es­cence are now skeptics.
Well over a quar­ter cen­tu­ry ago being a young beat cop in South parade, West Street, Heywood streets required grit and determination.
Every arrest had to be made with force, today the lev­el of hos­til­i­ty and dis­re­spect met­ed out to offi­cers is vast­ly and expo­nen­tial­ly, multiplied.

There is no short­age of vil­lage lawyers who have opin­ions on what police should have done in the heat of the moment, to those opin­ion­at­ed know-noth­ings I ask where have you served your coun­try, what would you have done as an offi­cer faced with any of the sce­nar­ios in the post­ed videos?

Jamaicans have a choice to make if they want to return the coun­try to any mod­icum of civility.
Stop look­ing at the oth­er per­son to be civ­il and cour­te­ous. You be cour­te­ous and civ­il and maybe, just like a peb­ble in a brook, there will be a rip­ple effect.
Just maybe the cour­tesy and civil­i­ty you give to that offi­cer on the street or on the phone will be rec­i­p­ro­cat­ed. You are the change you seek instead of look­ing to oth­ers to give you what you crave.

The change you seek begins with you. Police work is dirty, it’s some­times ugly and yes some­times cops step out of line, there should be no tol­er­ance for that but they need all the sup­port they can get to do a thank­less shit­ty job that many who crit­i­cize them would not and can­not do.
Let’s stop the crit­i­ciz­ing and give them the sup­port they need as they place their lives on the line to pro­tect your mis­er­able hide.