Garnett Roper | Has Horace Chang gone mad?

I hope you have misquoted National Security Minister Horace Chang in attributing to him on his tour of the community in Westmoreland in the wake of the killing of seven people there.

Your newspaper account indicated that the minister said, "The perpetrators are ... literally animals. We have to track them down, find them, and get rid of them." The minister said that if they engage the security forces, "I will not tell them to call an ambulance."

Have we gone mad? Have we forgotten "no angels died at Green Bay"?

Or, as the then Prime Minister Alexander Bustamante said of Rastafari at Coral Gardens, "Bring them in dead or alive!" or "Don't read them the beatitudes."

The amnesia, double-speak and inflammatory language of members of the Jamaica Labour Party administration are underwhelming. If the criminals are indeed animals, we must not become animals ourselves in responding to them. Indeed, the measure of our good sense of the long haul of the national interest requires us to keep our heads when all around are losing theirs. We must not return to a past from which we have progressed. We must not repeat the mistakes we have already made from which the good name of this country has already been made to pay a heavy price.

Violence has antecedents

The violence in Westmoreland has antecedents, as does the violence everywhere in this country. There is a context out of which the ready resort to extreme and extraordinary violence as seen in the gang culture that has emerged. Extreme measures will only make it worse - as it has in the past.

What suffers is the belief in justice, the rule of law, and the idea of a country for all us.

Once law enforcers are given carte blanche and the impression that we are prepared to look the other way when they act outside the law, we set in train a race to the bottom from which we will not easily be retrieved.

This is a society of laws, and even the most recalcitrant and violent criminal must be dealt with according to law.

- Garnett Roper is president of the Jamaica Theological Seminary. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and garnettroper@gmail.com.