Dear Editor,
Last week we were once again visited by the all too familiar tragedy of one of our children being killed. This time by what we are learning is a career miscreant all too familiar to the system, yet walking among us in our public space. The perpetrator of this heinous crime, we are told, has several charges pending against him and had been listed as a person of interest in other criminal activities.
Having said that, one could not ignore the city’s mayor, who waded into the fray with a comment that literally blames the child for causing his own death.
Remarkably, there are Jamaicans who are prepared to support the opinion; a kind of Stockholm-like syndrome, where we blame ourselves for being victims of crimes.
There was a time when people believed that if you got on to a sailing vessel and sailed out to towards the horizon you would fall off. With the passage of time, and the social and technological advances associated with that, we know differently. It is against this background that I have equated the mayor’s comment to saying that because the country’s murder rate is so punishingly high then people should perhaps never leave their homes, as the chances of being killed, whether in the process of being robbed or something, is as statistically as high as it currently is.
We are being alarmed by a child being killed in the process of being robbed of a watch and cellphone when the fact is that larger numbers of adult Jamaicans are killed for the same reason and it does not evoke the same reaction. Why? Because we have come to accept the country’s murder rate as a matter of common course. What we fail to appreciate is that such an attitude towards murder, and the fact that less than 10 per cent of all Jamaican murderers are caught and made to pay for their crimes, is what makes crime a now permanent problem in our midst.
Instead of addressing the issue of the State apparatus’s inability to treat this malady for the pandemic that it has become, we are prepared — id we accept her mutterings — to blame ourselves and to even encourage depriving ourselves of enjoying the fruits of our own labour because it makes us potential victims of crime.
It is mind-numbing to see the extent to which we have allowed our psyche to become accepting of this scourge so much so that, in the process, we have shifted the blame on to ourselves.
Just in case we choose to forget, Mayor Angela Brown Burke is an integral player in a major political party in Jamaica; one that is in large part responsible for the dysfunctional crime management apparatus within the country today. She is the “first citizen” in a country that ranks as the fifth-deadliest country in the world.
In my opinion, her reaction is merely to provide herself and the political organisation of which she is a major player with an excuse, as the boy’s death took place under her watch as mayor, and in that regard, she is merely responding in the same way that all her predecessors have done in the past...by positing an excuse. That is unacceptable to me and it should be equally unacceptable to all Jamaicans.
Richard Hugh Blackford
richardhblackford@gmail.com
Last week we were once again visited by the all too familiar tragedy of one of our children being killed. This time by what we are learning is a career miscreant all too familiar to the system, yet walking among us in our public space. The perpetrator of this heinous crime, we are told, has several charges pending against him and had been listed as a person of interest in other criminal activities.
Having said that, one could not ignore the city’s mayor, who waded into the fray with a comment that literally blames the child for causing his own death.
Remarkably, there are Jamaicans who are prepared to support the opinion; a kind of Stockholm-like syndrome, where we blame ourselves for being victims of crimes.
There was a time when people believed that if you got on to a sailing vessel and sailed out to towards the horizon you would fall off. With the passage of time, and the social and technological advances associated with that, we know differently. It is against this background that I have equated the mayor’s comment to saying that because the country’s murder rate is so punishingly high then people should perhaps never leave their homes, as the chances of being killed, whether in the process of being robbed or something, is as statistically as high as it currently is.
We are being alarmed by a child being killed in the process of being robbed of a watch and cellphone when the fact is that larger numbers of adult Jamaicans are killed for the same reason and it does not evoke the same reaction. Why? Because we have come to accept the country’s murder rate as a matter of common course. What we fail to appreciate is that such an attitude towards murder, and the fact that less than 10 per cent of all Jamaican murderers are caught and made to pay for their crimes, is what makes crime a now permanent problem in our midst.
Instead of addressing the issue of the State apparatus’s inability to treat this malady for the pandemic that it has become, we are prepared — id we accept her mutterings — to blame ourselves and to even encourage depriving ourselves of enjoying the fruits of our own labour because it makes us potential victims of crime.
It is mind-numbing to see the extent to which we have allowed our psyche to become accepting of this scourge so much so that, in the process, we have shifted the blame on to ourselves.
Just in case we choose to forget, Mayor Angela Brown Burke is an integral player in a major political party in Jamaica; one that is in large part responsible for the dysfunctional crime management apparatus within the country today. She is the “first citizen” in a country that ranks as the fifth-deadliest country in the world.
In my opinion, her reaction is merely to provide herself and the political organisation of which she is a major player with an excuse, as the boy’s death took place under her watch as mayor, and in that regard, she is merely responding in the same way that all her predecessors have done in the past...by positing an excuse. That is unacceptable to me and it should be equally unacceptable to all Jamaicans.
Richard Hugh Blackford
richardhblackford@gmail.com