Crime crying for divine intervention

Martin Henry, Contributor

Minister of National Security Peter Bunting, who has been reshuffled out of the portfolio in The Gleaner's dream Cabinet, has been forced to take out a full-page advertisement to explain his dark-night-of-the-soul speech at NCU.

I have no problems with a minister of national security "fighting back tears" or shedding them in front of TV cameras. After all, even "Jesus wept".

There should be more tears falling from high places. There is a lot to cry for. The Old Testament prophet Joel commanded, "Let the priests ... weep between the porch and the altar", and he ordered the people, "rend (tear) your heart and not your garments".

The minister of national security and the Government of which he is a part should weep for the 40,000-plus people slaughtered over the last 40 years. The 270-plus murdered in the first quarter of this year. And the 800-plus yet to be murdered over the rest of the year projected from last year's 1,082 killed.

The whole Cabinet at this
Budget season should be weeping and wailing at the crime cost to the
economy. Tears should freely flow over the criminalisation and
disintegration of communities and the enslavement of people in the
garrisons. There should be weeping over the police shooting 270 citizens
per year over the last 15 years, according to INDECOM, and being shot
themselves by vicious armed thugs in a country riddled with illegal
firearms.

But the greatest bawling should be reserved
for the complicity and contribution of the political parties which have
formed the Government of Jamaica in nurturing crime through political
violence and garrisonisation. The beleaguered police are reporting that
70 per cent of murders are committed by gangs, not the domestic violence
and mob violence which so moved the minister at the police appreciation
day in a place of prayer.

The country's best
organised, most powerful and vicious gangs are embedded in exactly those
zones of political exclusion called garrisons in which criminal conduct
has been normalised. That five of the country's nine prime ministers
have come to Jamaica House from garrison bases is itself a cause for
tears.

But neither crying nor praying, of itself, will
solve the crime problem in Jamaica, as indexed by the murder rate. Mr
Peter Bunting is destined to be defeated by the crime monster as every
minister with the crime portfolio has been, going back to Roy McNeil,
the minister of home affairs with responsibility for the police, who
presided over the independent country's first state of emergency in West
Kingston in 1966 when political violence with guns began to take
root.

Murder marching upward

The
murder rate has marched relentlessly upwards since then from four per
100,000 at Independence to 50-plus per 100,000 for the last many years,
with only short-term reprieve every now and then.

The
most spectacular defeat must be that of Col Trevor MacMillan. Head of
the Jamaica Defence Force. Head of the Jamaica Constabulary Force.
Consultant author to the Jamaica Labour Party of its Road Map to Crime
Reduction. Minister of National Security, appointed through the Senate.
Clean hands and a big heart and loads of technical
experience.

But he was a monumental failure under
whose leadership crime flourished and grew as usual. MacMillan quit and
died a broken man. He told the nation as plainly as he could, without
calling a spade a spade, that the social entrenchment of crime and its
old and strong political links ensured that the monster defeated
him.

In more buoyant days before the descent of the
dark night of the soul, Minister Bunting, six weeks into the job, was
projecting to the media on pretty PowerPoint slides a reduction of the
murder rate from 62 per 100,000 to 12 per 100,000 by 2017, taking crime
down to First World levels. A daydream without the "paradigm shift"
which the minister said would be necessary to achieve such spectacular
results.

We know with absolute certainty that there
will not be any paradigm shift this year, as there was none last
financial year. The Government is focused, as governments past, on debt
management and an ever elusive 'growth agenda'. But the most fundamental
functions of government of every type, everywhere, every time, are the
safety and security of the life and property of citizens, the dispensing
of justice, and the provision of public infrastructure that private
enterprise cannot, or will not, undertake. All within a framework of
maintaining law and public order.

On these
fundamentals the Government of Jamaica has been a monumental failure. In
the face of the escalating crisis of crime, the Government has kept the
crime-management agencies starved of resources while scattering the
nation's scarce resources like confetti everywhere. This is more than
political failure; it also moral failure, dereliction of duty - and
wickedness.

Three fundamental actions are required for
any dramatic reduction in crime, as indexed by the murder rate, to be
achieved:

• Effective policing across the whole range
  of policing interventions.
• Effective delivery of
  justice to both criminals and victims and for dispute
  resolution.
• Rehabilitating communities which are
  centres and drivers of criminal activity.

It really is
that simple as strategy.

Even before the matter of
equipment, vehicles and facilities are considered, the minister simply
does not have the number of police boots on the ground for effective
policing. With the highest crime rate in the Caribbean, Jamaica also has
one of the highest police:citizen ratios in the region. That is, one
police officer to how many citizens.

Improve
force

With more than 1,000 murders per year, an
8,000-member (that is fewer than eight police officers per murder per
year), the JCF would hardly have hands to do anything else but
investigate murders, catch killers and build cases that can withstand
defence lawyers in court. The security forces need to be greatly
expanded, paid much better, trained better and equipped much better for
the fight against crime.

In justice (perhaps the two
words should be joined), there are 400,000 backlog cases jamming the
system; fine colonial courthouses are falling down; there is nowhere for
judges to sit, even if more could be recruited; and prisoners, in
national defiance of the sacrosanct and civilised principle of habeas
corpus, languish in jail for months and even years before
trial.

Mr Bunting's former business partner and
minister of justice, Mark Golding, was on national TV openly lamenting
the lack of resources to deliver on justice.

The
country's chief crime centres, which also export a lot of crime
elsewhere, are politically organised poor urban communities which are in
economic and social shambles. Their broad-based rehabilitation is both
possible and affordable, and is urgently necessary in any serious fight
against crime.

Where is the money to come from for
these clear strategic initiatives against crime? From the Budget, not
loans, not gifts - and not manna falling from the sky by divine
intervention. Another failed national security minister is now in charge
of the Budget! A mere five per cent of this year's total $502-billion
Budget repurposed to the fundamentals of security, justice and community
rehabilitation would yield an additional $25 billion on top of what has
already been allocated to these areas.

We now have
estimates from the World Bank and other international agencies on the
impact of crime on economies. Crime is killing us in more ways than
one.

A much older source speaks of crime and injustice
polluting the land and crippling its potential and prospects. It speaks
of the guilt of innocent blood resting on the land from unresolved
murder. It says: "By killing and stealing, they break all restraint with
bloodshed after bloodshed. Therefore, the land will mourn and everyone
who dwells there will waste away."

To leadership which
practises iniquity, it cries out, "Woe to those who devise iniquity and
work out evil on their beds. At morning light they practise it because
it is in the power of their hand."

Against nation
builders who have foolishly and wickedly sought to build with violence,
it pronounces, "Woe to him who builds a town with bloodshed, who
establishes a city by iniquity."

Divine intervention,
that ancient source insists, comes with confession and repentance led by
the leaders. The beleaguered Bunting, rather than appealing to parsons
who are all too eager to pray for those who should pray for themselves
and to direct government, should take a chapter out of the book of that
great Hebrew statesman Daniel in Babylonian exile (chapter 9) and lead
the Cabinet in confession and repentance. Daniel said, "Then I set my
face toward the Lord God to make request by prayer and supplications ...
. And I prayed to the Lord God, and made confession ... we have sinned
and committed iniquity, we have done wickedly and rebelled ... . O Lord,
hear! O Lord, forgive! O Lord, listen and act!"

Martin Henry is a communication specialist. Email feedback to
columns@gleanerm.com and
medhen@gmail.com.