Ignoring threats, forgetting history, and a cycle of crime

THE conduct of largely normal southern Caucasian people in the 1960s in the United States regarding the issue of the desegregation of the south was, to put it lightly, disgraceful.

This was a response to institutional racism, hate, and what most people choose to forget — fear. The people actually believed the garbage that was being fed to them, namely that their women would be raped and their babies dragged from their cribs. So they justified turning hoses on peaceful protesters; setting dogs on children; assaulting protesters at lunch counters; and brutalising young, black men and women.

You may wonder why I have not spoken of the lynching, burning, and assassination of minority leadership groups. Well, the people who participated at this level weren’t normal. They were criminals masquerading as activists. They weren’t manipulated. They were killers and were simply looking for a group to destroy.

Fast-forward 40 years. It is obvious to the average person that the people were in no danger whatsoever. And they realise that, quite frankly, it wasn’t as big a deal as the white power activists had convinced them it would be. So one would think they learned from this experience. Yet in 2017 they elected Donald Trump.

He ran using the same racist propaganda that Sheriff Jim Clark used to rile up normal people to attack black children who wished to attend formerly segregated schools. So this particular group of southerners learned nothing from the experiences of their grandparents and the fraud that was sold to them.

So, is there a difference between persons who are motivated to hate because of fear, and those who simply enjoy hurting people because they hate? I wonder.

Not learning from your history is unwise. Not remembering your history is short-sighted. Manipulating your history is unforgivable.

We are guilty of manipulating our history. We behave as if the 70s weren’t that bad and romanticise it on the grounds of social improvements.

We fail to remember that the political leadership of both parties resorted to thuggery as a staple to win elections.

However, do we learn from the mistakes that we acknowledge? I’m not so sure. One of our biggest mistakes has been ignoring threats and pretending we are not in the predicament that we are facing.

Let’s remember the deportee crisis of the 90s. We underestimated the threat that we would be facing from these returning killers — the same ones that we had exported after the 70s civil war. In that same period — 1993 to 1996 — we removed the Suppression of Crime Act. We brought in a commissioner of police who openly criticised the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF) prior to his appointment. We allowed for the purge of the front line police officers who were the point of the spear in the fight against the gangs.

Did we really believe that the movement by the Independent Commission of Investigations (INDECOM) to have the power to arrest police officers would have no effect on the motivation of the police or the empowerment of the gangs. Well, that little blunder resulted in a 63 per cent increase in homicides between 2011 and 2017. And the list goes on.

We now face other threats. The quality and quantity of weapons in the hands of gangs are the greatest ever. This is an incredible threat against our national security. The quality of weaponry is a major determinant of who wins this war. And, yes, we are in a war.

The big difference is that our armed forces are trained and the gangs, to a large degree, are not. We, therefore, have to ensure that trained people are monitored and more importantly, channelled into legitimate industries such as security, the penal services, customs, and not gangs. This whether they received their training during short stints in the police force, the army, the Jamaica National Service Corps (Jnsc)/jamaica Defence Force (JDF) programme, or the private security industry.

Let’s shower the trained with opportunities and not let the gang recruiters step in. The threat of the new deportee crisis is coming. When the US changed their policy at the Mexican border about five years ago to grant asylum to virtually anyone who showed up at the border with a story, many Jamaican gangsters entered the US via a Central American pipe line.

Many are now incarcerated and they are coming back. They are not coming to seek employment, they are coming to rob, kill, scam, and extort. We need a plan for the well-armed, the trained, and the new deportee before we see a crisis that brings us to our knees.

We have seen the treachery of the gangs in Haiti. Well, they got the blueprint from us in 2010 during that gun battle we like to call an incursion. We see the example of how to fight gang domination through our neighbours in El Salvador.

Take your pick of where you want to live in 2030: a carbon copy of Haiti or a carbon copy of El Salvador. It’s going to be one or the other.

A significant militarisation of the police force is required to face this threat. A strict programme must be put in place to micro manage the trained among us. Legislation that may appear to be draconian needs to be created to incarcerate the returning killers.

Pretending that we are not in the position we are in and forgetting the history that embarrasses us is not a solution to fight these gangs who will soon begin to function like a militia without a cause.

It’s simply a road to Port-au-prince.