EDITORIAL - Mr Bunting's petard

Peter Bunting, the national security minister, dangles from a petard that he helped to hoist and from which he is attempting to extricate himself by rounding on his critics, which include this newspaper.

In that sense, Mr Bunting has drawn on an old, even if often futile tactic: that offence is the best form of defence. What it does not say, however, is where Mr Bunting stands on the question of accountability.

The issue at hand is this year's spiral of violent crime, especially murder, and the seeming ineffectiveness of government policy, for which Mr Bunting has responsibility, and the operational strategy of the constabulary, over which Police Commissioner Owen Ellington has control.

So, we are likely to end this year with 1,200 homicides, or 11 per cent higher than in 2012. That will follow a one-third decline over the last three years.

All this has to be considered in the context of Mr Bunting's promise when he took office two years ago - to reduce Jamaica's homicide rate from over 40, to 12 per 100,000 by 2016, then to have the Government retreat from that target without public acknowledgement of the change. The target is now 25 per 100,000, which it is very unlikely to meet. Indeed, if we return to the modest four per cent decline in murders of 2012, it will be deep into the 2020s before the current target comes into sight.

Meanwhile, there has been little progress in transforming the constabulary from a paramilitary-type force, in which public trust is low, into an organisation in which there is public confidence and which polices with the consent of the citizenry. Jamaica's police, for instance, will have the dubious distinction of killing nearly 300 people, many of which, human-rights campaigners say, are extrajudicial or because of weaknesses in training and leadership.

It is against this backdrop that this newspaper urged Mr Bunting and the police chief, Mr Ellington, to assess their future in their jobs, which was followed by calls in several quarters for both men to resign.

Complex issues

Mr Bunting dismisses these suggestions, saying that they amount to a "cop-out" by the critics, who should be offering solutions to fight crime. The issues that give rise to crime in Jamaica, he argues, are complex and defy simple fixes, whether by himself, or Mr Ellington. Cleverly, Mr Bunting seeks insulation by asking whether police field commanders, in whose divisions crime increased, should also resign.

Having heard Mr Bunting's arguments, we are reminded of a few things which the minister may have forgotten, or which may have become distorted by subsequent spin.

In 2010, when murders fell sharply in the wake of the police force's intervention into Tivoli Gardens to arrest and extradite Christopher Coke, Mr Bunting inferred that the back of violent crime in Jamaica had been broken.

The argument, essentially, is that Coke's Shower Posse criminal enterprise was the major purveyor of criminal activities in Jamaica; now that it was dismantled, it was in no position to spread its tentacles across the country.

We seem to recall, too, that Mr Bunting vigorously opposed the prolongation and widening of a state of emergency that might have been used to go after gangs elsewhere in Jamaica.

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