Letter of the Day | Chang must be losing it

THE EDITOR, Madam:

Dr Horace Chang must be losing it. Clearly. First to be blamed was INDECOM for hurting police morale. Then it was the Peace Management Initiative (PMI) linked with the Citizen Security and Justice Programme (CSJP): social interventions have failed us.

Now it is the nation for failing to properly equip the police – Chang’s well-worn refrain of the past two years. Finally, he gets closer to the truth – it is the State for allowing squatting, thereby providing environs that criminals can exploit.

We should sympathise with Horace. He’s a desperate man. And desperate men do desperate things. After the Holness promise to fix crime, here we are four years later with murders surging past the 2018 mark that brought down the 2017 apocalyptic 1,643 murders. Horace is in the hot seat. He is supposed to be Mr Fix-It. He is the MINISTER of National Security.

Scapegoats

So what does a desperate man do but look around for scapegoats. His advice to Mr Holness turned out to be bad card. A state of emergency (SOE) works the first time, as it did in several parishes (with more than a little help, not acknowledged, from PMI East and PMI West). All praise be given. But endlessly extended as a long-term measure, it certainly has not worked in St James and St Andrew South. Everybody without green lenses is seeing it now. But not Horace Chang and Andrew Holness. They are apparently prepared to ignore the evidence-based findings of professionals like Dr Herbert Gayle and Dr Elizabeth Ward, as well as the personal testimony of numerous community people.

By doing so and clinging to the groundless, indeed slanderous, notion that the PMI hugs up criminals, Horace Chang and Andrew Holness are putting themselves outside the pale of rational discourse.

This is the unhappy situation in which desperate men place themselves. What is tragic is when such desperation, through being linked with power, costs hundreds of lives and harms an entire country.

It is a grim outcome, inevitable however, because, not solely Chang and Holness, but most of us have helped to shape it.

Horace Levy