LETTER OF THE DAY - How about a special tax to fight crime?
published: Friday | November 25, 2005

THE EDITOR, Sir:

HAVE YOU ever wondered how an elderly person who is sick with high blood pressure, diabetes, etc., has very little or no family support, being fed and taken care of by the neighbours, suddenly ends up with a quarter of a million dollar funeral once he/she sadly passes away? The reason is that once he or she dies, every family member comes out of the woods, from abroad, from uptown, to participate so they can remove the shame from their eyes.

In many cases, if we had spent 10 per cent of the funeral money on the poor old guy or gal before he or she died, we could have extended his/her life another five to 15 years. What if we could approach crime-fighting with the same goal - to remove shame from our eyes? What if we can take resources from other departments, put a cap on salary increase, and institute a crime tax to purchase necessary equipment for the police? What if we could create a special lottery for crime fighting? What if we could have a Salvation Army-type crime fund? Don't you think the business people and the rich would contribute generously to it? Of course, they have no problem paying extortion. If we make a sacrifice now and deal once and for all with crime, we will not have to deal with it later, when it will be 10 times harder to finance and will have left 10 times the destruction in its path.

When you travel abroad and you hear that Jamaica is the murder capital of the world, especially for a country which is not at war, when you hear one out of every three Jamaicans saying that they will not return to Jamaica, not even for a vacation, we know that an expensive funeral is coming. We need to do something now.

I am, etc.,

ALVIN BUCHANAN

alvinb@htn.net

USA

Via Go-Jamaica