We don't feel safe. We are not safe.

Everybody is frightened.

Martin Henry, Contributor

People are terrified. Women are terrified. Children are terrified. Old people are terrified. Everybody is frightened.

While I was in one of the world's safest big cities, London, a couple of weeks ago, a Jamaican newspaper ran a front-page investigative story, 'Do you feel safe?', which reported: "Jamaicans say they feel more vulnerable in the glare of rising crime." One of Britain's major stories holding media attention for days while I was there was the abduction and murder of a little girl, five-year-old April Jones, in Wales, a rare crime among a population of 62.5 million people.

A few weeks ago, the unthinkable happened there: The murder of two unarmed women police officers in the city of Manchester by a madman gangster.

They should read our newspapers and tune in to our news broadcasts!

While Commissioner of Police Owen Ellington is valiantly seeking to give assurance from the top of a 'security' force pledged 'to protect, reassure, and serve' that crime is declining, the stories of depraved criminal violence with unimaginable atrocity unrelentingly keep coming at us.

Major crimes, the commissioner said a couple of months ago, have fallen by 13.3 per cent between January and July compared to the same period last year. What consolation is this really, starting from one of the highest murder rates in the world at some 45 per 100,000 in 2011? Up to the end of August, 643 Jamaicans had already been slaughtered for the year.

Months in descending order of murderousness: May, 120; January, 108; February, 96; June, 88; July, 87; March, 73; April, 71. And this in a population, STATIN tells us from the just-released 2011 census, of 2,697,983. The census-taking itself was affected by crime and violence, and workers couldn't collect data at
nights in many areas, the most convenient time to find people at
home.

You can pick your own horror story from the
flood of crimes and acts of violence against the person which are
inundating us and driving fear into our hearts. We don't recover from
one before another threatens to overwhelm us. We have to forget them
fast and detach ourselves from them as a coping mechanism to remain
sane. And many Jamaicans are not managing to remain
sane.

Last week, firefighters responding to a call
about a bush fire on the Port Royal Road found the body of a teenage
girl with hands bound and a cord around her neck wrapped in a tarpaulin
and set on fire. Raped, murdered, discarded, and burnt like a roadkill
dog. Not the crime of the decade, or even of the year, or the month. The
crime of the day. One of the murders of the day. With murders now
averaging around three per day.

'RANDOM'
VIOLENCE

While gangsters shooting each other still
tops the list of causes of murder, and domestic disputes follow, there
is a pattern of random violence, including a spate of criminal attacks
upon the most vulnerable who are raped, murdered, and discarded like
used toilet paper. Foreigners are telling us that the police are making
arrests in only 44 per cent of murders, and the conviction rate is a
mere five per cent of cases (US State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic
Security, Crime and Safety Report on Jamaica,
2012).

Vigilante justice is on the rise, representing a
dangerous loss of control of authority by the State, but not without
its own logic. The number one business of the State and its Government
is to protect life and property, and to deliver justice. In this the
Government of Jamaica has been a miserable failure, and citizens have
been pushed to take the law into their own hands, acting to remove
perceived threats to their safety and security.

The
good commissioner of police has been reminding the country that
vigilante action is a crime and will be prosecuted. Perhaps dereliction
of duty in protecting citizens should be made a crime. But who to
prosecute?

Jamaica has sometimes been compared,
wrongfully, to the US Wild West, scandalising the true West of history
while pandering to the West of the movies. The West of real history was
less lawless and less violent than Jamaica is today. Advancing beyond
the reach of the official State, settlers secured their communities,
their lives and their property through vigilantism. When prevention
didn't work, disturbers of the peace were taught a lesson, with
deterrence attached. The six-shooter was more an instrument of law
enforcement than of lawbreaking. The sheriff was an ordinary citizen
assigned special law-enforcement powers by his neighbours, who pledged
to help him carry out those duties.

A spirit of
lawlessness, not a strong feature of the old West, pervades Jamaica,
placing both its initial acts of crime and violence and the vigilante
response on a different plane. The biblical spectre of every man's hand
against his brother has descended upon us. And fear rules the land. No
one is safe; or can feel safe.

A working man, a decent
family man, Morris Williams, stepped off a bus in Spanish Town on his
way home from work one day last week and was killed by an escaping
robber firing shots into a crowd. Another man was shot and
injured.

That other response to danger of communities
being protected by dons and gangs has its own rational logic as a
reaction to the failure of the State to do its job. The devilish
injection of guns into poor urban communities by politics converted the
fight for scarce benefits into armed conflict between paramilitary
groups. A situation which has nurtured a general culture of criminal
violence and the normalisation of crime. The don and his gang, replacing
the State and its police force, enforce a crude law and order within
the enclave.

The people of Tivoli Gardens were
recently in the papers lamenting the upsurge of crime in west Kingston
since the State removed the 'President' and smashed the system of
enforcement with its own court, jail and execution chamber. Enforcement
in don-ruled enclaves includes actions which the Jamaican State would
regard as criminal. And crime is often directed outwards against enemies
and against persons and businesses out of whom maintenance resources
are extracted by extortion.

WHAT MUST BE
DONE

It is not going to be an easy task to protect and
reassure the Jamaican people. Crime is now a mature monster which has
grown up aided and abetted by the 'system'. It is now threatening to
devour all of us. Who is not killed or injured, or robbed, or raped, or
extorted (yet) is crippled by fear.

There are two
clear tasks before us to restore confidence in the capacity of the State
to provide public safety, to maintain law and order, and to protect
citizens and their property. In the first instance, incidence of crime
and violence must be driven down in dramatic fashion to much lower
levels. A 13.3 per cent reduction in non-murder crimes is not a
confidence factor. Perpetrators must be caught and punished. The
conditions which breed crime and violence must be
ameliorated.

But, also, and just as important as the
first, the generalised lawlessness which is driving actual acts of
criminality will have to be driven back. And this is a huge attitudes
and values issue bigger than police and courthouse. In the meantime,
lock the grille (if you are rich enough to afford one), mind where you
go, get in before it is too late, watch your children, walk in posses,
don't appear to have anything worth stealing. Others will go further and
use counter-violence and vigilante justice in an effort to protect
themselves, their property and their communities.

The
State and its Government have failed us. We are ruled by
fear.

Martin Henry is a communication analyst. Email
feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and
medhen@gmail.com.