Daniel ThwaitesThe New Year began with a loud bang just not the sort of bang we would have hoped for. The headline read "Terrorists kill 3 at KPH". This is one day after injuring four other persons in a drive-by shooting. By Wednesday night there was a fundamental change in the country precipitated by the Ministry of Health asking citizens to desist from coming to the Kingston Public Hospital. The State had ceded territory to the terrorists: the island's recently refurbished premier medical institution was a red-light district, a war-zone of police and thieves in the street.
Gruesome murders happen everywhere. But when the perpetrators feel at liberty to chase down victims over days despite police protection, and when the sister identifying the first victim gets murdered after the alarm bells are sounded and the place is crawling with cops Houston, we have a problem!
Just a few months ago prisoner Mark Anthony Morant, awaiting extradition to the US on drug charges, was freed from police custody by gunmen and spirited away in a waiting motor vehicle. The public was assured that security at the hospital would be increased. Then, just this week there was the drive-by shooting.
Hence there was both an overall, long-term undertaking to heighten security and a proximate warning that danger was at hand.
Yet still the terrorists were able to waltz in, nail a man under police guard, escape without hindrance, and then move along to kill his sister three hours later.
It doesn't get any worse than that.
This is yet another West Kingston feud that has spilt into the public. The victim is a shotta from the general area, and so are the alleged perpetrators. The issue is a reprisal for a killing done in Tivoli. One burning question is whether some of the staff at the KPH did not collude with the slaughter, whether by omission or commission. It could be a lack of confidence in the security forces as well as allegiance and collusion with the killers, but either way, no alarm was raised.
Whether or not those reports are true, the killers are reported to have had KPH porter uniforms. How did that happen, and who is to answer for that?
The perversity goes all the way up. But they also need to investigate how gunmen have such easy access and egress to and from the premises.
As a new year dawns, crime management is the greatest challenge facing the whole country. Economic growth, infrastructural improvement, and tourism potential and growth mean nothing if ordinary Jamaicans cannot go about their lives with a basic freedom from fear. As it is now, city Kingston is a patchwork of metaphysical boundaries where one can and cannot go. This is unacceptable.
It is sometimes held that crime does not directly impact the fortunes of a government as people tend to see it as one of the uncontrollable factors outside the ambit of governmental control. However that may have been in the past, that indulgence by the public will not persist.
The present government has paid, and will continue to pay a heavy political toll for the omnipresent sense of insecurity. People feel that nowhere is safe this is a hospital for Heaven's sake and they are yet to feel that the government has reacted with the radical measures that the public is certainly prepared for.
Whereas the government has moved steadfastly ahead with far-reaching and beneficial justice-related legislation, it is worth nothing to people cowering in fear, unable to go to a hospital the very State has declared off-limits.
Daniel Thwaites is involved in teaching and writing.
