Hylton Dennis | Profiling is injustice, Mark Shields

What does the ruling Jamaica Labour Party regard as 'equal rights and justice', which in the opening line of its official party song, members solemnly declare "is our everlasting call"?

Is it the same thing that Peter Tosh demanded in one of his many hit songs, Equal Rights and Justice, without which, he intoned, the call for "peace" everywhere is meaningless? The musical prophet perceived rampant social discrimination and class profiling in Jamaica and the wider world community.

Profiling, which means subjecting someone to prejudice and social stigma, is injustice. It results in perpetual social turmoil or civil war and is the foundation of Mark Shields' colonial prescription for fighting crime and restricting employment in Jamaica.

That is why he and the other British policemen, seconded to the Jamaica Constabulary Force some years ago, with top executive pay and perks, failed to deliver better law-enforcement results. They were not the best choices.

They were not required to think like Jamaican policemen. They were required to think with them.

Instead, they thought above them, appeasing the privileged minority of the Jamaican society that preserves its status by profiling the rest of the society. From the lofty perch of suburban balconies, on the hills overlooking the aesthetically splendid city besieged by pollution of their industries, they cast aspersions on the characters of their workers who lived less comfortably around and within it.

This is the retrograde uptown-downtown stigma they created, or adopted, because it is not unique to Jamaica, yet they expect to live in a peaceful country. Quite naturally, it is the lifestyle to which any 'ambitious' member of the 'poorer' class who is its victim at birth should aspire, by getting an 'acceptable education' and a 'good job' in the 'right establishment'.

The privileged are the 'guardians' of justice but do not respect the rule of law and natural justice. So by profiling, like Mark Shields, at family meals and social gatherings, they decide how to make economic benefits, like education and employment for upward mobility, privileges.

A convicted person is permanently blacklisted from employment almost anywhere. Rehabilitation by what is euphemistically called 'correctional services' is a farcical notion.

They can exclude you from employment and render the head of a household permanently incapable of being the breadwinner s/he should be by naming him or her 'a person of interest' or claiming s/he has 'an adverse trace'. It is often the case that the victim is unaware that such a record of them exists until they seek employment at certain places or attempt to obtain official records.

 

THE LAW

 

Even when the law prescribes that only a judge in a court of law can approve surveillance and assign 'criminal' or 'unfit' classifications of citizens, they ignore it without sanction.

So, by sweeping generalisations, Mark Shields has a profiling prescription in the typical, reactionary response to media stories, like the absurd one that appeared in an overseas paper recently that Jamaica's assaults against them in seven years means a serious epidemic of sexual assault against tourists.

 

HOTEL PERPETRATOR

 

Sadly, because of the carelessness of one hotel chain that allowed a suspected perpetrator to slip through the cracks when overwhelming information to justly excluding him from being employed was easily accessible, Shields wants to probe beyond conviction to the antecedent history of anyone seeking employment in the sector to find evidence that says, more than he would be, that they are likely to perpetrate sexual assault, or other criminal acts if employed.

This profiling, aside from being unjust, is paranoid, and anyone resorting to it is equally unfit to lead in the organisation or industry they wish for it to be applied in.

Jamaica's crime issues are a cultural legacy of the injustices of colonialism that established its much-vaunted 'civility' through fear rather than fairness. Corporal punishment, rape of domestic servants leaving bastard children, and unjust imprisonment were features of it.

- Hylton W. Dennis is a publisher. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and denscriptions@yahoo.com.