THE EDITOR, Sir:
ON THE question of crime and violence, the only sensible solution is to allow local authorities to provide their own security forces.
When I started my training at the Police Training School that was only my third trip into Kingston. Then after six months training, most of the time being confined to barracks, four of us all country boys were shipped off to Hunts Bay. In the first three months at Hunts Bay I experienced such atrocities and human degradation that I never experienced in the many years I stayed in Harlem, nor during the time I worked in the New York City subway of all places.
Was I afraid at Hunts Bay? You bet your sweet life, I was terrified. That is why I readily understood when the white police officer standing with his back against the wall in a mostly black section of Brooklyn admitted that he would probably even shoot someone by mistake because being in unfamiliar surroundings naturally made him afraid.
On the other hand whenever I went home to my village, and even to this day, it does not take me long to discover who is responsible for even the simplest praedial larceny. Furthermore, in my travels throughout Europe and North America and being interested as I am in matters of crime and punishment, I have come to know that the surest way to keep the lid on crime is through the system of community policing. This must begin with the police officer being familiar with his surroundings and the criminals in the area. What better way to know these criminals than to grow up with them, go to school with them or to watch them grow?
So long as we continue to have the same small group of mostly men spinning the same old ideas and keeping all decisions centralised in Kingston, I am afraid that the situation will only continue to deteriorate. The society which Justice Wolfe describes as being ungovernable will wreak such havoc on itself that it will probably take us a century to recover any semblance of civility and nationhood and to really begin to heal the wounds. To avoid this tragedy the powers that be must act unselfishly to implement the changes necessary to give more people a say in the day to day running of their lives.
I am etc.,
JACOB HENRIQUES
jacobshut@yahoo.com
Decatur, Georgia
Via Go-Jamaica
