ZOSOs & SOEs Will Not Work But Neither Party Has Moral Bona Fides To Speak Out..

As the Yuletide sea­son approach­es the need to be safe becomes more para­mount.
In times like this in which peo­ple are spend­ing more cash and maybe receiv­ing a few extra dol­lars from over­seas oppor­tunis­tic thieves, rob­bers and mur­der­ers will be even more brazen.
Nowhere is the need to be vig­i­lant more urgent than in Jamaica, though crim­i­nals every­where look to these high activ­i­ty events to take advan­tage of law-abid­ing cit­i­zens.
As vio­lent crimes con­tin­ue to increase, regard­less of what politi­cians in pow­er say to the con­trary, it behooves every­one to be extra vig­i­lant.
As some­one who writes from a for­mer law enforce­ment back­ground, I try to be as objec­tive as I pos­si­bly can. Needless to say, peo­ple on both sides of the polit­i­cal divide will find ele­ments of my analy­sis objec­tion­able of course.
As long as the objec­tions and sub­se­quent ad hominem reac­tions do not suc­cess­ful­ly chal­lenge the facts of what I write, I’m okay with the attacks.

The present admin­is­tra­tion con­tin­ues to use the *sup­pressed *crime sta­tis­tics from the States of Public Emergencies and Zones of Special Operations,(where those num­bers con­tin­ue to be sup­pressed) to (a) make the argu­ments for their con­tin­u­a­tion and (b) point to the sup­pressed sta­tis­tics as proof of the mea­sures’ suc­cess.
Without ques­tion­ing the motives of the admin­is­tra­tion, it is safe to say that the mea­sures are not work­ing as a suc­cess­ful or sus­tain­able crime strat­e­gy, for two pri­ma­ry reasons.

(1) The com­bined strength of the JCF & the JDF is not near­ly enough to begin to make the strate­gies sus­tain­able. There are sim­ply not enough bod­ies to staff these mea­sures.
Some may have seen the images of a group of sol­diers all sleep­ing in the Zone, with their weapons there for the tak­ing, not to men­tion the poten­tial of being killed while they sleep.
If we are hon­est with our­selves and set aside our polit­i­cal bias­es for a sec­ond we must con­clude that this is not sustainable.

(2) The shock and awe of the impo­si­tion of a ZOSO or SOE, nat­u­ral­ly result in the reduc­tion of vio­lent crimes. After they have been in place for a few weeks the crim­i­nals quick­ly adapt and it is busi­ness as usu­al.
The admin­is­tra­tion uses the sup­pressed stats to make its case as I have said before, but across the board, vio­lent crime num­bers con­tin­ue to climb as the crime-pro­duc­ers migrate to oth­er localities.

On Friday PNP Senator Lambert Brown berat­ed the lead­er­ship of the secu­ri­ty forces as, quote: ” fail­ures in his book”. Brown made the com­ments before oppo­si­tion sen­a­tors vot­ed to extend states of emer­gency (SOE) in five parish­es and a St Andrew police divi­sion for anoth­er 30 days.
There is more than enough rea­son to sup­port [Brown’s asser­tions], just not com­ing from either Brown or his par­ty.
The PNP had more than enough time to set the coun­try on a coher­ent path of law and order in which the rule of law pro­tect­ed the Jamaican peo­ple.
Under Michael Manley, Percival Patterson and Portia Simpson Miller’s failed lead­er­ship the coun­try has become a ver­i­ta­ble killing field.
Instead of doing its duty to our coun­try, the PNP chose cheap pop­ulism as a means to cur­ry favor with Jamaica’s most intel­lec­tu­al­ly and finan­cial­ly vul­ner­a­ble peo­ple.
Outside of the repet­i­tive fail­ure com­ments, Lambert Brown offered no ideas and how he believed the lead­er­ship of the secu­ri­ty failed the coun­try, nei­ther did he offer up any ideas on what may be done differently.

As I said in an arti­cle yes­ter­day, the crim­i­nals in Jamaica have won.
Period!
“Evil per­sists where good men remain silent”. I am not sure about the [good men] part in this case, but the gen­er­al idea holds true. The absence of will and deter­mi­na­tion to erad­i­cate from its midst mur­der­ers, rapists and oth­er vio­lent offend­ers have set Jamaica on a col­li­sion course with a dark destiny.

The process­es in the day to day oper­a­tions of many dis­ci­plines are a bit much for many peo­ple. For that rea­son, only a small per­cent­age of peo­ple sign up for the mil­i­tary in the United States, for exam­ple, There the chance of actu­al­ly hav­ing to go to war is always height­ened, not many peo­ple want to kill or be killed.
Only 0.5 per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion actu­al­ly vol­un­teer for mil­i­tary ser­vice.
I can­not stand the sight of dead bod­ies so I would be no good work­ing in a mor­tu­ary. Many peo­ple say they could nev­er be doc­tors or nurs­es and oth­ers could nev­er be police officers.

In fact, being a police offi­cer means that those who vol­un­teer have made a deci­sion that they are will­ing and ready to deal with the worst ele­ments in soci­ety.
Generally, those encoun­ters are not pret­ty events to wit­ness. Those encoun­ters usu­al­ly come with a pri­or warn­ing of “beware, vio­lent con­tent”.
The rea­son police encoun­ters with vio­lent crim­i­nals are not pret­ty events is rather sim­ple, peo­ple who make con­scious deci­sions to com­mit seri­ous vio­lent offens­es have decid­ed by default, that they will not con­form to soci­etal rules and norms.

It is for these rea­sons why the Legislative branch of Government must set the legal para­me­ters for the police to do its job, butt out, and allow the police to do what nei­ther doc­tors, leg­is­la­tors, nurs­es, talk­ing heads, nor arm­chair experts can do, enforce the laws.
Butt out already!
The prob­lem in our coun­try is that there are far too many peo­ple with too much time on their hands. They call in, to radio talk shows dai­ly, just so they can hear them­selves talk.
Juxtapose that with the self-styled sav­iors of human­i­ty who oper­ate in the media space, they take full advan­tage of the opin­ion­at­ed igno­rance, and encour­age the anti-police growth indus­try, and we have a per­fect storm, and the rea­son for the pop­u­lar cul­ture which exist in Jamaica today.

Mike Beckles is a for­mer Jamaican police Detective cor­po­ral, a busi­ness own­er, avid researcher, and blog­ger. 
He is a black achiev­er hon­oree, and pub­lish­er of the blog chatt​-​a​-box​.com. 
He’s also a con­trib­u­tor to sev­er­al web­sites.
You may sub­scribe to his blogs free of charge, or sub­scribe to his Youtube chan­nel @chatt-a-box, for the lat­est pod­cast all free to you of course.

Share this: