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Jamaica easy to love, harder to manage
MARK WIGNALL
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Take a helicopter trip or a flight in a light four-seater aeroplane over Jamaica, from Negril to Morant Point. If you do that as I have done a few times, your love for Jamaica and appreciation for its natural beauty will increase a thousand-fold. To borrow from the often ill-used cliché, but this time, to give it its truest merit, it will take your breath away.
MARK WIGNALL
We have no need to seek any paradise because paradise is our home. But there are problems.
If the way we relate to the physical and social spaces within our polity can be considered as a function of how we respect and treasure that polity, it must mean that, collectively, we really hate this country. It seems that once our slave masters had offered us physical liberty, not only did we make a pact with ourselves that we would never again be fettered, we travelled to the other extreme and etched in our mentality a promise never again to subject ourselves to authority of any kind.
Take the case of our perennial number one problem, crime, and especially murder. If you were the commissioner of police or security minister in 2003, while you would not necessarily be smiling, you would feel somewhat pleased. The murder numbers were down from the previous year and the comparison was the same for 2001.
In the 1970s our murder rate was close to 16 per 100,000 on average per year. In the 1980s, it increased to about 21 per 100,000 and in the 1990s it hovered at just below 30 per 100,000.
But just as some good news began to come in, the rate shot up for 2004, and in 2005, Jamaica had the dubious distinction of being at the top of the world in murders at just under 60 per 100,000 of our population.
How do you govern in these circumstances? First you know that each year, about 30,000 young people will leave the school system with a deliberately watered-down education. You know that on average, 75 per cent of our people 15 years and over have never passed a single examination. You know that the official numbers on literacy were, probably out of shame, made artificially and ridiculously high. You know that 80 per cent of university graduates eventually leave to find employment overseas.
Knowing all of that, there is the knowledge that there are about 200 criminal gangs operating with many of them having increasing tendencies to form alliances for specific purposes where the "common interest" is supreme.
It will also be common knowledge that crimes like praedial larceny, break-ins, robberies and terror-filled ones like rape are seriously under-reported. This is so for various reasons, but at the very heart of it is that not many of our people expect the police or indeed, the justice system to solve much. So many people weep and move on with their lives, but each day a little bit of them becomes undervalued as the state seemingly abandons them to the lawless and the vicious.
In the 1970s when our politics was at its tribal worst the Home Guard was formed. Persons with licensed firearms would patrol with members of the security forces. That was the theory. One night in the late 1970s I took a taxi to Majestic Theatre on Spanish Town Road to see a film I loved and had not seen in some time. I was unable to finish watching as less than half-way through, in a torrid love scene where oral sex was implied and not seen, the idiotic and undereducated patrons hurled bottles and even stones at the screen. As I left hurriedly I went across the road to a bar where I engaged myself in conversation with some policemen and home guards. It was then that I saw first-hand, the raw politics that parts of it were.
Even men with character demerits against their name nationally had guns and some were in possession of police guns. And openly so. Although the Home Guard system became politicised, for better or for worse, it was an attempt, another failed one at responding to a society spinning out of social control.
Recently a group in Central Jamaica called M Central Watch has been formed in response to a new wave of crime which has begun to target children of the better-off. There has been at least one kidnapping and safe return, with money paid. The safe return is good, the encouragement is bad, but the choices were extremely limited.
I am aware that at least two other such groups in other sections of the island are being formed as I write. I fully endorse the sentiments expressed by those who have appealed to these groups of firearm holders to resist the urge to vigilantism.
<span style="font-weight: bold">But let us get real here. Every single upscale residential community in Jamaica has a depressed, poverty-stricken, crime-producing and crime-prone community within three minutes' drive of it. It is known that some business persons maintain close contact with selected desperados in these neglected settings.</span>
Now, whenever a crime is committed in these ghetto pockets or whenever a criminal from one such area commits a crime on the outskirts, the inner-city community information highway is highly effective in passing on this information to "uptown". The fact is, uptown "watch" groups will only be effective if they link with more than just the informer class in these ghetto pockets. In this way, crime plans can be leaked to those who will most likely be affected.
<span style="font-style: italic">The idea that increased vigilance, in the purest sense, by way of patrols and forging closer links in the community will be mainly what these groups will do is a pipedream. Real effectiveness will come when information enhancement in the form of cash is passed down to sources in these ghetto pockets.</span>
The present JLP government is at a "short-time" motel and it is always expecting that knock on the door to come. The better-off citizens know this, and because they have a lot to lose socially and economically, even without love in the picture, it is worth it to push back against the persistent criminal threat.
My advice to these groups is, either through selected police personnel or active networking, links will have to be forged with elements which do not naturally fit in with the first objectives of this new security initiative. Without this link to the ghetto pockets, the effort will be fruitless.
The truth is, Jamaicans are individualists and in a tribal or social sense we keep our distance from each other at most times. If the poor man in the ghetto pocket believes that sharing-up ransom money from a successful kidnapping will make him eat better or live longer than passing on information to those who were or would be wronged, he will remain in his social space and care little about the pains of uptown.
The government cannot solve the crime problem because the plans it possesses to do so imply a basic level of social and civil viability that this country has not seen since the 1950s.
In this new citizen initiative, those better off in the society have one more chance of linking with the underclass and convincing them that they are all in this thing together.
But, are they really?
[email protected]
MARK WIGNALL
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Take a helicopter trip or a flight in a light four-seater aeroplane over Jamaica, from Negril to Morant Point. If you do that as I have done a few times, your love for Jamaica and appreciation for its natural beauty will increase a thousand-fold. To borrow from the often ill-used cliché, but this time, to give it its truest merit, it will take your breath away.
MARK WIGNALL
We have no need to seek any paradise because paradise is our home. But there are problems.
If the way we relate to the physical and social spaces within our polity can be considered as a function of how we respect and treasure that polity, it must mean that, collectively, we really hate this country. It seems that once our slave masters had offered us physical liberty, not only did we make a pact with ourselves that we would never again be fettered, we travelled to the other extreme and etched in our mentality a promise never again to subject ourselves to authority of any kind.
Take the case of our perennial number one problem, crime, and especially murder. If you were the commissioner of police or security minister in 2003, while you would not necessarily be smiling, you would feel somewhat pleased. The murder numbers were down from the previous year and the comparison was the same for 2001.
In the 1970s our murder rate was close to 16 per 100,000 on average per year. In the 1980s, it increased to about 21 per 100,000 and in the 1990s it hovered at just below 30 per 100,000.
But just as some good news began to come in, the rate shot up for 2004, and in 2005, Jamaica had the dubious distinction of being at the top of the world in murders at just under 60 per 100,000 of our population.
How do you govern in these circumstances? First you know that each year, about 30,000 young people will leave the school system with a deliberately watered-down education. You know that on average, 75 per cent of our people 15 years and over have never passed a single examination. You know that the official numbers on literacy were, probably out of shame, made artificially and ridiculously high. You know that 80 per cent of university graduates eventually leave to find employment overseas.
Knowing all of that, there is the knowledge that there are about 200 criminal gangs operating with many of them having increasing tendencies to form alliances for specific purposes where the "common interest" is supreme.
It will also be common knowledge that crimes like praedial larceny, break-ins, robberies and terror-filled ones like rape are seriously under-reported. This is so for various reasons, but at the very heart of it is that not many of our people expect the police or indeed, the justice system to solve much. So many people weep and move on with their lives, but each day a little bit of them becomes undervalued as the state seemingly abandons them to the lawless and the vicious.
In the 1970s when our politics was at its tribal worst the Home Guard was formed. Persons with licensed firearms would patrol with members of the security forces. That was the theory. One night in the late 1970s I took a taxi to Majestic Theatre on Spanish Town Road to see a film I loved and had not seen in some time. I was unable to finish watching as less than half-way through, in a torrid love scene where oral sex was implied and not seen, the idiotic and undereducated patrons hurled bottles and even stones at the screen. As I left hurriedly I went across the road to a bar where I engaged myself in conversation with some policemen and home guards. It was then that I saw first-hand, the raw politics that parts of it were.
Even men with character demerits against their name nationally had guns and some were in possession of police guns. And openly so. Although the Home Guard system became politicised, for better or for worse, it was an attempt, another failed one at responding to a society spinning out of social control.
Recently a group in Central Jamaica called M Central Watch has been formed in response to a new wave of crime which has begun to target children of the better-off. There has been at least one kidnapping and safe return, with money paid. The safe return is good, the encouragement is bad, but the choices were extremely limited.
I am aware that at least two other such groups in other sections of the island are being formed as I write. I fully endorse the sentiments expressed by those who have appealed to these groups of firearm holders to resist the urge to vigilantism.
<span style="font-weight: bold">But let us get real here. Every single upscale residential community in Jamaica has a depressed, poverty-stricken, crime-producing and crime-prone community within three minutes' drive of it. It is known that some business persons maintain close contact with selected desperados in these neglected settings.</span>
Now, whenever a crime is committed in these ghetto pockets or whenever a criminal from one such area commits a crime on the outskirts, the inner-city community information highway is highly effective in passing on this information to "uptown". The fact is, uptown "watch" groups will only be effective if they link with more than just the informer class in these ghetto pockets. In this way, crime plans can be leaked to those who will most likely be affected.
<span style="font-style: italic">The idea that increased vigilance, in the purest sense, by way of patrols and forging closer links in the community will be mainly what these groups will do is a pipedream. Real effectiveness will come when information enhancement in the form of cash is passed down to sources in these ghetto pockets.</span>
The present JLP government is at a "short-time" motel and it is always expecting that knock on the door to come. The better-off citizens know this, and because they have a lot to lose socially and economically, even without love in the picture, it is worth it to push back against the persistent criminal threat.
My advice to these groups is, either through selected police personnel or active networking, links will have to be forged with elements which do not naturally fit in with the first objectives of this new security initiative. Without this link to the ghetto pockets, the effort will be fruitless.
The truth is, Jamaicans are individualists and in a tribal or social sense we keep our distance from each other at most times. If the poor man in the ghetto pocket believes that sharing-up ransom money from a successful kidnapping will make him eat better or live longer than passing on information to those who were or would be wronged, he will remain in his social space and care little about the pains of uptown.
The government cannot solve the crime problem because the plans it possesses to do so imply a basic level of social and civil viability that this country has not seen since the 1950s.
In this new citizen initiative, those better off in the society have one more chance of linking with the underclass and convincing them that they are all in this thing together.
But, are they really?
[email protected]
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