I once sneaked inside the police armoury at Elletson Road but because of promises I made then I will not give the date or timeline because it will breach those promises.

An ex-cop with close attachment to the JCF was concerned that too many policemen were walking around with faulty firearms and he wanted me to have first-hand knowledge of these conditions. On arrival at the Elletson Road armoury, he simply walked to the door, a cop looked at him and he said to the cop, “Friend of mine.” We both entered.

I had on a cap and dark sunshades over my spectacles. We stood by a table near the door where many disassembled revolvers and pistols were laid out, either for repair or sorting. In a box at the base of the table were bits and pieces of firearms. For about one hour we remained there while my friend posed questions in the most casual manner to the person attending to matters at the table. I remained silent as I made notes in my mind.

At no time did anyone ask for my ID or seek to determine the purpose for my being there, but it is possible that arrangements could have been made that I was unaware of. At the end of the visit we both left. No one searched us and the impression I got was that a visit to the armoury was just like a normal visit to one of the bars attached to many of our police stations.

In the early part of the 1990s a relative of mine died. He was the owner of two licensed firearms. Immediately after his death his wife carried his two guns, one a 9mm automatic, the other a 45-calibre revolver and ammunition to the nearest police station where she gave the receiving officer necessary details and left the guns. A year after when I decided to apply for my own gun licence, I approached her in connection with purchasing one of the guns. The guns were, after all, a part of the estate which she was in full control of.

On her visit to the police station, the guns were nowhere to be found and no reasonable explanation could be offered for their whereabouts. She took it in stride because, like me, she recognised that the integrity of too many of our institutions had fallen apart, and in any event accountability in Jamaica was neither a wish, a hope nor a reality.

In the top of the 1990s when only very few Jamaicans could see the train wreck coming, the late political scientist Carl Stone suggested that as heinous as “donmanship” was, if its back was broken and the authority of the state could not viably fill the vacuum, then anarchy would be the result.

It is quite obvious that Jamaica has now reached a stage of “controlled anarchy”. Up until the decade of the 1980s the police force and the commissioners who headed it were, in many instances, lackeys to the ruling political administration. Because the political parties needed their political enforcers to deliver the vote, the parties also needed the police on board to bring completion to the game. As the political enforcers extended their reach into mercenary killings and drug involvement/transshipment, the middleman or the catalyst to make this more effective was the politician who could guarantee that certain members of the JCF wore selective goggles.

As a result, the politics, the druggists and the police found reason to do business. Since that time a few interesting and important developments have taken place. In the stops and starts in our way to development, the political influence on the criminal elements have lessened at the same time that the political directorate has lost its direct influence on the police force, and especially the commissioners of police.

This has brought about a greater closeness between raw criminality and the police in the drug trade and the widespread extortion network that exists in our main towns and parish capitals. At the same time the politics has found itself fielding on the boundary and it has been a lonely game. No balls are coming its way. Neither right nor left.

Inside the police force over this period, there has been a gap growing between the commissioners of police and the rank-and-file membership, simply because without the hardline connection between the commissioners and the political directorate, the commissioner has now become a “bwoy” in the eyes of rogue corporals, constables, sergeants and “specs”.

The same type of anarchy which Carl Stone spoke of is now alive and well inside the JCF.

Where do we go from here?

With Jamaica feeling the full brunt of the economic recession it is not likely that the force will be getting better any time soon. Like most people feeling the long, unrelenting pinch of high utility rates and more than creeping inflation, the typical policeman’s pay packet does not encourage him to be clean, especially when we consider that the police force’s slide into anarchy has been part and parcel of the nation’s slippage into the abyss of dysfunctional behaviour.

That policemen are selling and renting out guns to criminal elements must tell us who our real governors are. That the example set over the years by the elected authority has being used as the template for this controlled chaos is only telling us that the politics will continue to be a waning influence on our people, especially the young.

Calls have been made from certain quarters for the total revamping of the police force, but that is simply not a pragmatic option. To do so will create another vacuum and what is likely to get sucked into that only our imagination can conjure up.

The fact is, most of our bright young people are finding reasons to leave Jamaica. That in itself is not really a brain drain if there was the likelihood that their influence could return to assist in restructuring the society. Most of them never return because of the rampant criminality and the lack of integrity of our important institutions such as the police force and the governmental structure.

For this reason Jamaica will have to be prepared for all important institutions to continue to get caught in a spiral of decadence and “ketchy shubby”. This generation obviously has no answers, and sadly, it appears that the next is much too tainted by the present one to offer any solutions.

Bringing violent crime into livable limits is at this time a pipe dream, given the game plan mapped out by the managers of the system.

Many more will have to suffer and a hell of a lot more will have to die. And if you don’t know why, it must mean that you have been sleeping all of these years. I want to see the light but I also want to be honest.

observemark@gmail.com