The Editor, Sir:

Another black Jamaican citizen has been beaten, battered and brutalised by black Jamaican police, courtesy of the Jamaican state. This is horrible and reminds me of one feature in the black-on-black violence that plagued the apartheid era of South Africa. But what is new? It happens every week, if not every day. Some of us have even been killed. The front-page difference is that it has now happened to Dr. Jephthah Ford, a roots member of the political and intellectual elite.

If the good doctor happened to have been an ordinary member of the lower classes, God knows what might have happened. He could have very well ended up as another obscure black statistic noted in the back or middle pages of the newspapers, perhaps with the regular shoot-out story.

I am outraged at the beating of Dr. Ford, not because he is a doctor, or a black man, or that he went to Cornwall College, but that he is a Jamaican, and injustice against one Jamaican from uptown, downtown, inner-city or from rural Jamaica is injustice against all.

No one is safe from these brutes who walk around with the power of the state behind them. The good doctor has the resources to take on the state, if necessary, with a battery of the best lawyers. The little man would have to wait on the human rights activists and legal aid to rescue him.

The leaders of Government, from Prime Minister down, must act decisively to root out the tendency to ill-treat, disregard, disrespect and brutalise the citizenry, not only by the police, but by every government department, especially so at a time when reparations are being pursued overseas. As my mother used to say, "You have to learn to dance a yard before you dance abroad."

I am, etc.,

MICHAEL SPENCE

Micspen2@hotmail.com

P.O Box 630

Liguanea, Kingston 6