Orville Taylor | Black police lives …

My commentary was interrupted on Friday morning by a hail of bullets that claimed the lives of and injured Jamaican police officers as they went in pursuit of a suspect … And their lives mattered. As we join a global movement catalysed by the killing of George Floyd by an American police officer and the outrage against law enforcement, including the burning of police cars and precincts in the USA, I did caution that we must pay attention to our logs in our eyes.

An America-based professor of social work, clearly not understanding what I wrote about two weeks ago, missed a simple point that my non-degree and undergraduate students obviously got. I referenced an American legislation commonly called the Leahy Law, which “prohibits the US Department of State and Department of Defense from providing military assistance to a foreign security force unit that violates human rights with impunity’. Using that statute, the American government withheld some level of assistance to our constabulary because of the narrative that our police were violating human rights with ‘impunity’, that is, with “exemption or freedom from punishment, harm, or loss”.

My point was that police officers in the USA, who are not as uniform in training, responsibility, or accountability as the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF), have less adherence to the UN standard on the Use of Force. Proportionally, fewer police officers are charged, and in absolute terms, fewer police officers from the more than 800,000 in the USA got convicted for murder. After all, the ratio of 18 civilians being killed for every police officer killed by criminals is the identical statistic for Jamaica.

However, the homicide rate for police officers in the USA is around six per 100,000, which is the civilian rate in many American cities, while the Jamaican rate is at least 60 per 100,000. Follow me here: Jamaican police are about 10 times more likely to be killed by suspects than in the USA. However, they do not kill proportionally more suspects than American cops.

Hopefully, my critic understands this a little more now.

IRONIC

What is ironic about the activists from Jamaica is that we hardly recognise that the majority of human-rights abuse that takes place here is within the world of work. Among the great predictors of violence in this country has been the lack of ‘decent work.’ Any labour policy that reduces the capacity of an employee to take care of her or his family is likely to lead to the young adult or adolescent male, who is of college of university age, being ‘kicked out’ of the home to ‘go mek it’.

Moreover, unfair labour practices, such as victimisation, unfair dismissal, and general abuse by superiors, begets abuse at home. It is so simple that the brightest among us take it for granted.

Based on the existing research, there is more than a 50 per cent chance that an abused person, whether at work or home, will become an abuser. Women who are the subject of abusive behaviour by their employers – not just their spouses – are more likely to be chronic and severe abusers. Importantly, my colleague, Herbert Gayle, has noted that one of the predictors of young men becoming mass-murderers is them being ‘tortured’ by their mothers.

Thus, unwittingly, by maintaining an environment of abusive work relations, we have helped to create a set of killers – and cop killers at that. Murderers do not raise themselves.

Given the deep history of abuse in our cultural DNA, this is why the reparation argument has to be a big part of the larger discourse on restorative justice.

The problem with this is that there is a great degree of dissonance between what people stand for verbally and what they do. Some 15 years ago when Mike Henry was a voice in the wilderness, being the only parliamentarian speaking about redress by the colonials, we had straw men and women parading in the Queen’s titles.

It became a mockery because many Queen’s Counsels (QCs) were so caught up in maintaining their privileged status and the stratification system in the region that they failed to understand that the inequitable and unjust environment that were benefiting from was in fact making countries like Jamaica more dangerous to police. Social inequity and social iniquity are the best predictors of societal violence.

Therefore, as we march in solidarity with other post-slavery populations who suffer indignities from the State, it is not enough for them to remove confederate flags, Victorian and slave owner statues, and colonial names.

Our nation’s leaders must stop enjoying the comfort of sitting on their knighthoods and repudiate all those vestiges of slavery and colonialism.

And by the way, I want a new emblem for the JCF – one without the crown.

- Dr Orville Taylor is head of the Department of Sociology at The UWI, radio talk-show host, and author of ‘Broken Promises, Hearts and Pockets’. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and tayloronblackline@hotmail.com.