Melville Cooke Any inconvenience you may experience will be greatly outweighed by the restoration of our freedom P.J. Patterson in announcing new crime measures
There will be some inconvenience to law-abiding citizens, but one must expect some inconvenience. Derrick Smith in reacting to the latest crime plan.
WHY DOES P.J. Patterson read like George Bush II? And why does Derrick Smith of the JLP sound like P.J. Patterson?
The elections are over, Parliamentarians' wages have been raised and it is now time to get the country back to some tolerable level of murder and mayhem so that the business of sharing up scarce benefits and spoils may continue in peace.
There is crime and there is crime. I maintain that a certain level of lawlessness does not exist without the complicity of those who are trusted with maintaining said law. Hence, Jamaica could not be in the state that it is in without the People's National Party (PNP) and the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) using violence in their political campaigns, notably in 1980, when over 800 people were slaughtered in the run-up to that election.
Similarly, there would be no Taliban to host the ghostly Bin Laden without the United States and the then USSR fighting a 'Cold War' to share the world's resources.
And just as Putin and Bush are all gung-ho about stamping out what they have created, so are the PNP and the JLP in total agreement that Jamaica is in a shocking state.
Bully for them. The last time I checked P.J. had a full security detail. It is not as simplistic as "all violence is politically motivated," but our two major (and for practical purposes only) political parties have created a situation in which there is no law. They have created a culture in which it is quite fine to operate as if the police do not exist and the courts are just a set of yellow buildings where they sell overpriced furniture.
And how can the problem fix the problem?
The most recent Sunday Herald informs us that 18,147 Jamaicans were murdered between 1970 and December 1, 2002. Over 800 people were killed in the run-up to the 1980 election (granted, not all of them were political) and the police say that 12 persons were killed in political violence this year (they must have a different count from what I read about). I do not have the statistics for the other general elections, most notably 1976 but it is safe to say that an appreciable percentage of the 18,000 persons murdered is directly attributable to politics, even by the understated 'official' figures.
And what of this round of post-election violence in August Town, for example? Or the pre-election war in Mountain View last year?
Or the pre- and post- election flare-up in Spanish Town?
A lot of people have died so that some can put MP behind their names.
Not to kill you with statistics, but there is one other figure I find mighty interesting. The murder clear-up rate of the police hit a real low of a little over 30 per cent in 1980, the same year as our undeclared civil war. Why? Was it that there was so much killing, or that cases of politically motivated murder were not pursued with the same vim and vigour?
A lot has been said about gang killings and I maintain that if you keep your nose clean and are not unlucky enough to be born in certain areas (like the ones that the soldiers and police are currently patrolling), then your chances of becoming another rung on the ladder to 20,000 murders are drastically reduced. I fall in both those categories, but from my lofty uptown perch I ask: where did the gangs that are responsible for these crimes and drugs come from?
I am not likely to find the answer in a Jamaican newspaper, but I have had an inkling from Laurie Gunst's Born Fi Dead and a couple other papers/books. The 'posses' and 'yardies' and 'crews' came out of the politically organised gangs of the day. So how can the PNP and the JLP now tell these same people, or their descendants, to give up their opulent lifestyle and change their crooked ways?
There is such a thing as moral authority. The United States does not have it, Russia does not have it, the PNP does not have it, the JLP does not have it.
Which leaves us, effectively, with a state of official tyranny. Internationally and locally. After all, when the US breaks wind, we inhale and say "beans!"
And who are we entrusting to enforce the peace? Soldiers and police like those who beat Michael Gayle till he ended up dead? The same police force whose elite Special Anti-Crime Task Force (SACTF) had to be disbanded? The same police force which had to transfer every single officer in Portland out of the parish when the drug runnings in that parish got too obvious? The same police force that the JLP were adamant (pun intended) about being politically motivated during the West Kingston 'incident'?
The ghettoes should know by now that no matter which colour flag they fly before an election, the ones they pin up after will be the same colour as their skins.
We are all up crap creek without an oar; the only difference is I know I will have to use my hand to paddle.
Finally, the usual communities are being curfewed and, for all intents and purposes, occupied. So, hypothetically, if a drug man or crime boss from such an area has an 'uptown base,' then he will not be restricted, right? But that is merely hypothetical, because we all know that they are sitting in the communities with the guns on clotheslines a la Third World Cop, just waiting for Paul Campbell to bring them in.
Oh. One last thing. Is this operation intended to stop the extortion racket downtown as well? Y'nuh, the last time the police ran an effective long-term operation was Ardent. They sure locked those sound systems down.
Melville Cooke is a freelance writer.
