March to the adoption board!
published: Sunday | May 29, 2005

Mel Cooke, Freelance Writer

WESTERN BUREAU: If you can't breed 'em, borrow 'em. That is, in coloured, coarse terms, the driving force behind adoption because of infertility, to fill in the missing, oftentimes maddening, patter of tiny feet.

And it seems to be the motivation behind the march towards the adoption board of public opinion by church, state and shop counter,

Conspiracy theorists need not start concocting heinous plots of 'One Jamaica Order', though, because there is a split among the three driving forces of society.

The proselytisers and the politicians want to take communities and the gangs in hand, the business people want to take charge of the police stations.

Now, in the kind of adoption that we are accustomed to, a person or persons take total responsibility for a dependent human being with the consent of those who, in the normal course of things, would have been saddled with the joy disguised as a burden of doing all the providing.

NOT HELPLESS

This wholescale adoption, though, is another thing entirely. First of all, the communities, the police and the gangs are certainly not helpless. The communities (and here we are talking about the places where the mixers of cement and lifters of blocks live, OK, not where the places they build are may look grimy and gritty, but they are far from helpless. A lot of the help may not come from inside the country, but there is also a much stronger sense of community, of reciprocal help, than the headlines about gang wars would suggest.

The police stations are an integral part of the state machinery and, as such, should be in much better shape than the dilapidated state in which many find themselves in. The gangs ­ well, they have their own means of income, shall we say?

But there is a deeper flaw with these proposed adoptions. When a parent or parents adopt a child, the intention is to help shape an independent, self-sustaining human being. If these various bodies take over their intended charges, then what do they expect in return?

And, more to the point, will they not, in the cases of the communities and the gangs that are inseparable from the communities, be simply trying to usurp the dons, and in the case of the police stations, be replacing the state?

CONTROL

Will it not be, in the former case, the church attempting to wrest control from the dons, and in the latter, establishing a dangerous, direct link between the police and the business community?

The dons will certainly not give up their control without a fight.

As for the private sector companies adopting individual police stations, there are two rather dangerous possibilities. One, is an undue interest in the protection of their sponsors by the police ­ the formation of a state-sponsored private security force, so to speak. And then there is something that former Commissioner of Police Trevor MacMillan spoke about years ago, before the banking sector collapse, that 'white collar crime' was just as, or even more dangerous, than violent crime.

So, in a country where the theft of large sums of money by pen, paper and computer is often treated much more lightly than the smoking of a stick of marijuana, having the police in direct, continuous contact with and indebted to private sector persons could have disastrous results. There could be a situation of a tap on the wrist in return for a pat on the back, shall we say?

The breeding has been done a long time ago; the borrowing at this adult stage seems a no-go.