We can dismiss as nothing significant the killing of two policemen in six days — eight since the start of the year — and the videotaped police killing of a helpless, unarmed man, albeit an accused woman killer.

Or, we can see it for what it is, the slow but steady return of the blood thirstiness that we had become accustomed to, up to the imposition of the limited State of Emergency in May, which brought a dramatic slump in the runaway murder rate.

In these columns, we have described the period after May 23 when the State of Emergency was declared in Kingston and St Andrew and later extended to St Catherine, as a psychological space created by the security forces — a space that we should use to consolidate the gains.

That psychological space is now being eroded, starting with the dastardly scuttling of the State of Emergency by our all-wise politicians who believe they know more than the security forces who have to put their lives on the line — like Corporal Omar Duncan of Haughton Grove, Hanover and Special Corporal Jermaine Cummings of Langston Road in East Kingston — and more than the populace who had have to suffer the loss of their loved ones to cold-hearted killers.

Notice how the Opposition and the Government have coalesced around the notion that the country cannot depend for too long on a State of Emergency as a crime fighting tool.

Prime Minister Bruce Golding, after first putting the motion to the Parliament for the extension of the measure, has now taken to educate us on the dangers of a State of Emergency, similar to the People’s National Party (PNP) which abstained from voting and effectively defeated the motion.

But then, we must always “take sleep mark death”, as our old folks instructed us. For it is the politicians who brought the guns of death to this country and created the killing fields that gave us the dubious distinction of being one of the most murderous places in the world.

Why should we, therefore, look to politicians to usher in the new crime-free Jamaica that had its promise in the huge fall-off in murders and other crimes in the wake of the State of Emergency?

Moreover, why shouldn’t we believe that politicians generally do not have any interest in silencing the guns, because they wouldn’t know what to do without the guns and the gunmen they command, even if with waning influence?

Truth be told, Jamaica cannot afford to continue to indulge this current crop of politicians. To do that, we would have to be prepared to continue losing our lives, as 1,600 did last year, and to lose our security forces, as the eight so far since the start of this year.