Quit the blame game, find solutions

Colonel Allan Douglas, Contributor

For many Jamaicans, 2013 was a year fraught with challenges, particularly towards the end of the year, when Jamaicans were left in total bewilderment (and for many, hopelessness) with pronouncements of the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF), the minister of national security, and the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) on the upsurge of crime in Jamaica. Of course, the JLP blames the People's National Party (PNP) and vice versa, while the bloodletting and criminality continue, to eat away at Jamaica.

Last year, the JCF boasted on the success of its Operation Resilience and trotted out numbers in support of their claim. One statistic was the claim that there were 174 arrests. However, only a few of these arrests ended with successful convictions.

The JCF can claim success based solely on a large number of arrests, unless, of course, the operation was intended to be some sort of a scraping up of Jamaicans without any credible intelligence to support these arrests, like casting a fishnet with the hope that something will be caught.

flushing out criminals

The JCF also claimed that because Operation Resilience was so effective in the parishes in which it was conducted, this led to the flushing out of criminals from these parishes into others, such as those in western Jamaica, presumably. Is the JCF really being serious in making such statements? Is the JCF suggesting that they never appreciated the likely outcome of their operation and, as a result, failed to put in place measures to counter any such negative outcomes? How could Operation Resilience have been a success when it heaped such disastrous consequences on western Jamaica, for instance?

Operation Resilience has now been launched to deal with the upsurge in crime in western Jamaica; should we now expect an upsurge in crime in those parishes not covered by this operation? Of course, one will continue to receive the usual claims about the number of weapons recovered, but without any links to the owners!

The JLP leadership, apparently so as not to be outdone by the nonsense and showmanship of the JCF, embarked on a fact-finding mission in western Jamaica to establish what just about everybody already knew about the upsurge in crime there. At the conclusion of this mission, the JLP disclosed that it found that the PNP was to blame for the upsurge, because that party had failed to support an extension to the 2010 state of emergency. What a disappointing attempt at scoring political points.

Our honourable minister of national security has to find a reason for the upsurge in crime; he determined that a major contributing factor was the delay in the enactment of the DNA legislation. The minister probably should have arranged with the IMF to have that piece of legislation passed as a precondition for our loan agreement. Nevertheless, could the minister please advise whether the DNA legislation, making it compulsory to be tested, will apply to all Jamaicans, just to those suspected of some criminal act, or only those arrested? If it is going to be for suspects only, will the court be the body that gives the go-ahead, or will the decision be left solely in the hands of the JCF or the minister?

One sincerely hopes that in 2014, our political leaders will stop the blame game with respect to crime and get to work on making Jamaica a safe place to work and live. Certainly, most Jamaicans who do not belong to either of the two political tribes must be tiring of the political gamesmanship and the carelessness with which our political leaders are treating the future of our country.

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