THE EDITOR, Sir:
TO PARAPHRASE the Bard: 'A plague on all your media houses'.
The media has spent more than a week now chastising Bruce Golding for an appropriate use of a Jamaican word. (Appropriate in that there is no direct English equivalent and the Jamaican word encompasses the full intent of the statement).
In all this chastisement, you have carefully avoided dealing with the issue he was commenting on. Here are the bare facts, followed by my humble analysis of them.
The government, through the police force, engaged in a programme of random detentions and warrant-less searches. This is both illegal and immoral.
In fact, there have, over the years, been a large number of lawsuits by victims of this kind of action. They usually win.
If the child of any news editor, columnist or talk-show host in Jamaica were found behind that barbed wire fence, Daddy (or Mommy) would sue and win.
I am hereby demanding one of two things from each and every one of you that has attacked Golding on this issue:
An apology to Golding and an endorsement of his view,
A solemn oath that you will never support and have never supported legal action against the state for the random detention of any individual, even your own child.
Morally, you cannot be offended by a politician ringing the alarm bells in defence of some of the citizens he aims to represent if when a similar matter involves your own flesh you plan to take offensive legal action.
A tip for your legal team when this comes home. If the police are only prosecuting two per cent of the people arrested, they do not have reasonable suspicion to begin with.
I am, etc.,
KEVIN SPROUL
forge@myrealbox.com
Kingston 6
Via Go-Jamaica
