ONCE AGAIN vicious mob violence has surfaced, with tragic and disastrous results.
Some residents of a community near to Spaldings, Clarendon, outraged understandably, by the recent slaying of a villager, the victim of an armed robbery, stormed the Spaldings Police Station on Saturday, demanding the release of three men who had sought refuge there, after breaching their unauthorised roadblock.
Thwarted in their attempt to impose their jungle justice, the villagers attacked the police station, damaging property and injuring personnel, resulting in a teenage boy being fatally shot.
Dr. Peter Phillips, the National Security Minister, has condemned the siege the Spaldings Police Station was put under by the mob and has expressed the hope that there will be a speedy return to normalcy in the communities involved.
Police Commissioner Francis Forbes has ordered the Bureau of Special Investigations to probe the shootings at the scene.
With the return to normalcy, the nation will have to continue to walk the road of peace and reconciliation, but we will have to go further.
We must denounce mob violence in all its forms, in every place it rears its evil head. The security forces must neither excuse nor tolerate it. The perpetrators should be found and made to experience the full extent of the law.
The politician, the parson, the police, the school teacher, the Justice of the Peace, the doctor, the nurse, the lawyer, the shopkeeper, just about everybody, will have to prevail on the hot-headed citizen that mob violence is wrong, and denounce it.
While it is more than a perception that some major crimes seem to be spreading, even to hitherto tranquil, isolated areas, citizens must learn that they cannot take the law into their own hands, regardless of how slow a pace they may think the law is moving.
Enforcing the laws of the land is the job of the police. The citizens' role is to co-operate with the police by providing them with information and support. Taking the law into their own hands as police, judge, jury and executioner is anarchy.
