Nagra Plunkett, Staff Reporter
WESTERN BUREAU:
CITING THE implementation of a memorandum of understanding as being integral to the reconstruction of community life in the nation's inner-city areas, Jamaican-born criminologist, Professor Basil Wilson, is contending that the move would counter the culture of violence.
"We have to empower the communities and ensure that the new institutions that emerge are not hierarchical and are in fact democratic, and can lead to a new sense of vibrancy," suggested the provost and senior vice-president of academic affairs at John Jay College Criminal Justice of the City University of New York.
His charge came during his address to the third Caribbean Conference on Dispute Resolution at Half Moon in Montego Bay on Thursday.
He told the gathering that the other critical element in the process is the police.
"There is the necessity to make the police force more professional, to ensure that intelligence-gathering becomes more effective and that the forensic capacity of the force is enhanced," Professor Wilson said. "Police forces are capable of transforming themselves and becoming effective crime-fighting units."
A past student of Kingston College and a member of the American Society of Criminology, the professor commented that one of the problems in Jamaica is that the gun is being used to settle disputes instead of conflict -resolution, the antithesis of the culture of violence.
"So the dispute resolution specialists in the society have a special role to play as we try to confront this epidemic of violence," he explained.
"It is not just a methodology but can easily become a way of life that impact inter-personal violence, domestic violence and gang warfare in the way in which the society looks at itself and connects with inner-city communities."
He said dispute resolution skills should be pioneered through public education programmes, and become prolific like the work being done by the Peace Management Initiative (PMI) and the Dispute Resolution Foundation.
"Despite the fact that these are very, very difficult times in looking at the homicide rates and escalation of violence in the society, there are mechanisms in place that can ensure that we make tremendous strides," the criminologist stated.
"The danger is that we should not see the struggle as something that is going to bring about a change apocalyptically. We have to see in the same way that the nurturing of the culture of violence lasted for many decades, our commitment now to beating back violence is that we've got to look at it in terms of the long haul."
