Trauma crippling west Kingston youth
DURING THE infamous Tivoli incursion of May 2010, I was living in a section of rural St Andrew that afforded me close to a bird’s-eye view of Kingston’s west end.
The plumes of smoke seen through my binoculars and soft thuds from a little more than 10 miles away told me that the inevitable raid by the security forces had begun. It was always a given, to my way of reasoning, that Dudus would not be surrendering, and, for the first time at last, the police and the army would not be backing down.
Seven years later, Dudus is incarcerated in the USA, and the scars that resulted in the death of 69 people are now being felt in west Kingston youngsters acting out their human scars on the city.
It was always known that the police hated everything that Tivoli Gardens represented and they wanted to clean it up. Fifty years from now, we may never know how to separate the innocent from those who were firing guns.
One thing is certain: There had to have been ‘collateral damage’.
VIOLENCE BEGETS VIOLENCE
The scars sown in Tivoli Gardens would be explained by some youngsters seeing their fathers, uncles, brothers, friends killed. And on top of that, coming close to their own deaths after being beaten by some members of the security forces.
Although the official word would have been different, the reality inside Tivoli on those days in May 2010 would have been that the people are the enemy. The violence had to have been prolonged and widely targeted.
The philosophical argument governing violence in any polity is that only the State has the right to exact violence. That, of course, is grounded in the
assumption that the agents of the State must at all times act to ‘serve, protect and reassure’ and that extra judicial killings are punishable under the law.
The reality is that for too long, policing in Jamaica has been all about throwing more muscle at criminality. In this process, many innocent youngsters have been killed. Many have also been taken in by the police, beaten and released, but the scars inside hurt more than the bruises on the chest.
Many are the new gang members bearing the hidden scars. Just as how many turf wars are being fought over feuds that started 20 years ago and divided two or three lanes into warring sides, so are the youngsters of west Kingston hurtling into the only curve they know: a downward spiral.
The trap the society finds itself in is that it is powerless to adjust the violence template. It
reads like this. The Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF) knows that modern policing requires more soft policing, intelligence gathering, and application of forensics instead of kicking down doors and blowing away the bodies of young men.
But many in the JCF know that the youngsters with guns have no intention of playing by society’s rules. So this forces the police and the army into throwing more muscle at the violent-crime problem. And the cycle of violence continues.
Just as how the agents of the State have assumed the right to be the only perpetrator of violence, so do they know that they have the power to dictate the level of their own violence. In theory, they can turn off the spigot. Wrong.
The gunman is not prepared to give up his power. The gun. And so it continues.