READERS may not know this, but whenever Jamaican policemen kill gunmen in shoot-outs the deaths resulting from those encounters are not added to the island’s murder count.

In a purely technical designation, a policeman in a shoot-out is defending himself and, theoretically, the lives of law-abiding citizens who may be close by. In the heated, frightening moment of a shoot-out, I can easily see a law-abiding policeman wanting to kill whoever is shooting at him, so, in that finite moment, his intentions to kill could be considered premeditated, but it is hardly murder.

What that means is the 70-plus people who were killed by the security forces at the end of May last year in Tivoli Gardens would be classified as gunmen killed while shooting at the security forces and not added to the blotters as ‘murders’.

The murder toll in the first four months of 2010 and in that fateful month of May was, taken on a simple average per month, headed for a record-breaking 1,800 murders, surpassing the record of 1,680 set in 2008!

Then came May and the incursion on Tivoli by the security forces. At the end of 2010 when all crimes were totalled, there was a seven per cent decrease in murders over 2009, an overall 15 per cent decrease when compared with the previous year.

Looked at another way, in the eight-month period since May 2010 to January 2011, there has been a whopping 35 per cent decrease in murders when compared with the period May 2009 to January 2010. Under any circumstances that is impressive, and I am certain that the prime minister and his Cabinet colleagues must be ecstatic.

One reader wrote me, ‘Why is almost no one in the media talking about the dramatic fall in murders — about 33 per cent — in the eight months since May 2010? Yours is one of the very few pieces to discuss the matter.

‘Early last year, The Gleaner was daily chronicling the murder count. Since May there has not been a single Gleaner front-page story about murders falling. Why are we keeping our crime drop a secret from the rest of the world?

‘Yes, I know all about the politics angle, but damn, isn’t saving Jamaican lives more important than politics? And the other big question — if “regularising” Tivoli can pay such big dividends, why not regularise all the other garrisons across the island?

‘I mean, judging by news reports, One Order and Klansman gang warfare alone must account for at least 10 per cent of the murders committed in the past few months.

‘I personally still blame Bruce Golding for lacking the cojones to reinstate the State of Emergency that over 70 per cent of Jamaicans wanted after the PNP and JLP conspired to vote it down and having the army march into St Catherine, Clarendon and St James and mash down all gangs.

‘It was both against the national interest and against his self-interest — such a foolish man. Had he been seen to be taking charge of crime personally and single-handedly trying to drive murders down, no one would have even remembered Manatt. Jamaicans today, above all, want to feel safe, and any prime minister who is seen to be doing everything he can to make them safer would be a hero, everything else be damned.’

According to the reader, the decrease in murders may be the greatest sustained drop since 1981.

I can appreciate that Dwight Nelson, our security minister, may not want to count his self-congratulatory chicks before they hatch and become chickens. In his mind and the mind of the PM must be a repeating of the mantra, ‘full steam ahead’ in the crime-fighting momentum gained after the end of May 2010.

While Minister Nelson may not be the pure politician that his boss Golding is, he is an integral part of the JLP administration and, like any political party, it would like to continue to hold power after the next elections are held.

That task will not be made any easier when cuts in the civil service begin. As it has on the small minimum wage increase, it is expected that the Opposition PNP will make its usual noise without telling us exactly what it would do better and where the funds would come from to actuate its prescriptions. In other words, it will say much, mean little but continue to huff and puff in the hope that it will be elected by default.

Has there been a visible improvement of the JCF?

APART from the ever-present traffic cops in the more urbanised areas, I came across two police checkpoints while I was travelling from Kingston to Trelawny for the music festival last week.

It is quite obvious that the police are occupying more of the public spaces than in previous years. In 2005 when I spoke to a gathering of about 10 policemen at the Denham Town Police Station, most of the stereotypes that I had formed over many years of interaction with numerous policemen were laid to rest.

I was pleasantly surprised that the young, ‘battle-ready’ cops were able to acutely observe the Jamaican situation, analyse and suggest solutions while we were in discussion. These men were not the idea of the beer-belly, tired policeman on the hunt for a handout of yesteryear. In plain language, they were intelligent.

There can be no denying that the JCF still has a dark side and, based on word from senior officers with whom I have spoken, that is, those who represent the wave of the future JCF, there was a deliberate effort on the part of previous commissioners Lucius Thomas and Hardley Lewin to reverse the widely held negative image of the force in the minds of our people. It seems that the present commissioner has continued that momentum.

What gave the Jamaican sound system birth?

ON the edge of an inner-city area a dance is about to be held. Young men who are uneducated and unemployed use their muscle power to lug huge and heavy seven-foot bass boxes housing multiple 18-inch speakers and other smaller boxes with wide arrays of midrange horns and tweeters.

Eventually a weighty, multi-tiered trolley with pre-amplifiers, power amplifiers, equalisers, mixers, CDs, a laptop and microphones is rolled out and hundreds of feet of connecting wire are routinely plugged in to make the many components into an ear-splitting, ground-shaking experience, much to the delight of the young and energetic who will attend the dance later. At the same time, it will be hell on earth for the older, more conservative folk who will have no sleep for that night in a highly unregulated environment.

With the practical application of Lee DeForest’s vacuum tube in the early 20th century to the development of the much smaller solid state device, the transistor in the 1950s, not only has audio quality improved in the 21st century but amplifiers have improved in their power output while speakers have also seen great improvement in quality, efficiency and power-handling capacity.

Today, an array of multi-channel solid state amplifiers at a dance may be putting out in excess of 50,000 watts of high fidelity sound in contrast to single-channel vacuum tube amps of the 1950s pumping out 50 watts of scratchy, hissy music quality.

I state all of that as introduction to the second part of Leslie Galbraith’s History of the Jamaican Sound System. Last week, Mr Galbraith told readers of his early tinkering with amateur radio (HAM radio), and that took us up to the period during the beginning of the Second World War when radio station ZQI became RJR.

History of the Jamaican Sound System by Leslie Galbraith — Part 2

“FROM Central Branch I moved with my friends to Kingston Technical High School and in my second year at Kingston Tech, I went abroad to war. It was 1944. I was 18 years old. Previous recruits had made their own way to Canada and joined the Royal Air Force (RAF) there to be trained as pilots and navigators. In 1943/44, applications were accepted by the RAF here for Jamaicans to be enlisted as ground crews. Many of us, school boys from high schools and technical schools who met the educational requirements, enlisted.

“When we were interviewed for the British Air Force in Jamaica, about 30 of us were selected to be sent immediately to Glasgow University where we trained for six months in Radio Engineering, which included radio receiving and communication apparatus. Thereafter, a group of about six of us were sent to a special course at Cosford to do what was then called Radio Location (radar technology). Of that group, about three of us were sent to Bomber Command stations in East Anglia, from where the long-distance bomber planes went out to bomb cities in Germany. We were dispersed amongst the operational stations there and, from that point on, I was on my own. I worked on radar equipment.

“While there, I read every text book, technical manual and magazine that I could get my hands on and continued to “fool around” in my spare time. One of my achievements was a portable, 4-inch square radio which I built with secret Air Force miniature tubes. (These tubes did not have numbers like regular tubes, but only military identification numbers.) The radio was powered by four flashlight batteries, (which took up half the space in the radio) and was heard through an earphone. I also built a television receiver to pick up the BBC broadcast from London when they restarted broadcasting after WW II.

“The end of my military life in the Royal Air Force and my return to Jamaica meant that it was time for me to find a job and to start earning a living. We all lived in a very small house at 17 Fisher’s Road, Rae Town, at the beginning of Tower Street. The exservice men who trained in wireless and radar in the RAF all tried to go into business, or find employment in other fields such as government, post and telegraph, civil aviation and at the airport.

‘Hedley Jones (now in his mid-90s and still writing for the Western Mirror) opened a shop on upper King Street, B Potopsingh on King Street, Finzi and Gadpaille on Orange Street, AB Harris in Port Antonio and many others at home. Milton Haughton started Teletronics.

“One day Kenneth Wong came to see me, asking me to repair a small radio. He told me that his brother Edward and Milton Edwards were starting a radio repair business upstairs Hyatt’s Drug Store, near East Street on East Queen Street. Shortly after my 22nd birthday I went to see them and asked if I could join them. It was 1948.

“Edward, Milton and I worked as a team. They had a small vehicle which picked up the work and did the deliveries. I was the bench-man who stayed in to do the jobs. After a while it became difficult to operate on East Queen Street, especially upstairs (the units repaired being bulky and heavy), so we found a new location on Temple Lane, above Barry Street, in downtown Kingston.

“Before the war, Times Store, Stanley Motta, City Radio and Henderson’s were the main importers of radios in Jamaica. RCA, GE, Zenith, Philco, GEC, HMV, PYE, were well-known brands. Also, Philips, Mullard and Murphy. After 1948, many more imports became popular in Jamaica. Among them Grundig and Telefunken became household names. Stanley Motta and City Radio were the importers of vacuum tubes and components for radio servicing, as well as accessories. Turntables, record players, records and needles were sold at LR Depass.

“Silvera on East Street, Anderson on Temple Lane, Ruel Samuels on Beeston Street and King Street, Gordon’s on Barry Street, Winston Rodney in Cross Roads, Chin’s Radio on Church Street were all established radio repair shops before 1950. With so much competition, the repair business was not an occupation that could pay the bills or support us and so, after about a year, Milton decided to seek his fortunes elsewhere. Just about this time, Delevante Agencies had started importing Romac car radios and we received the contract to install the units in cars, buses and trucks. This was the first regular employment that we had.

‘Romac car radios were imported from America. (In those days England did not have radios in cars. Car radios were so big that only the big American cars could fit them.) These car radios were all medium wave radios and so, along with installing them, we built SW (short wave) converters so that these car radios could pick up ZQI, the local station. We also continued fixing all makes and models of radios.

“Shortly after I had returned from the RAF, a commercial Avianca aircraft had crashed into the sea over Palisadoes. After the inquiry into the crash, fishermen salvaged pieces of aluminum sheets from the plane, some of which came into my possession. (In those days these were a rare commodity.) By this time I had saws, hand drill bits and files to do metal work so I was able to fabricate a chassis for building an amplifier. I cut the metal by hand, filed the holes and assembled the amplifier, purchasing the transformers, tubes, tube sockets, volume controls, resistors, and capacitors from City Radio Service.

“This amplifier used 2-GVG, 1-543, 2-6SLT tubes and delivered 15 Watts of output power. This unit I sold to Attai Lusang, an old school friend who had recently returned from the RAF like myself. Since I could not afford to buy the instruments I needed for my work I built an oscilloscope, an RF signal generator, Hetrodyne and frequency meter. In learning to use these instruments I had learnt their design and make-up and so it was not difficult to build these units on my own and with the bits and pieces I brought back from England.

“Although we had gained invaluable knowledge and experience from the war, the war had kept things at home pretty much the same and, up to 1950, there were still many people who did not own a radio. The radios available at the time were all large table models (10 tubes and more) in large cabinets. Some models had provision for connecting a phonograph or electric turntable externally. This provided an opportunity for us and we obtained orders to convert these radios into ‘radiograms’. These were, effectively, small sound systems for home use. We fitted the radios into new and larger, locally made mahogany cabinets with a separate compartment for the new electric turntable which we connected to the radio. There was also space to store records in these units. Most of these units worked very well, but some models were not so successful and so we started building and incorporating small amplifiers into the radiograms to enhance the sound quality.”

In Part Three next week, Mr Galbraith tells us that it was politics, yes, politics, that really gave the Jamaican sound system its beginning. Don’t miss it.

Taxing sins, sex and cigarettes

IT seems to me that the main reasons why government has not got into the business of taxing sex are, first, the cost of monitoring our carnal activities would exceed the taxes collected, and second, even if it could collect, we would cheat.

The Bible foolishly states that if a man takes up (in his mind) lust for a woman who is not his wife, he has already committed adultery. A man’s carnal hopes, if not intentions, cannot also be monitored, so we are left with income and the consumption of that which sustains us along with those items which make us feel good.

I gave up smoking in 1976 but I still go to bars where most of the people I know who drink, also smoke. In an imperfect world, people who strive for perfection must always learn to live with those who imbibe alcoholic beverages and smoke cigarettes. If they cannot do that, there is always a cave or a mountaintop to which one can retreat in an effort to reach nirvana.

Manufacturers of liquor and cigarettes have always been the perennial beating stick of the government as budget time rolls around. As government levies another tax on alcohol, the non-drinkers cheer it on and the government basks in the widespread approval. As another levy is imposed on cigarettes, the non-smokers applaud loudly and the government imagines that the noise from the gallery is worth another point in the opinion polls.

There are only two importers of cigarettes in Jamaica — Carreras and Musson Jamaica Ltd. Carreras controls the lion’s share of the market, about 96 per cent. It was one of the first companies in the manufacturing sector to begin operations in Jamaica (1963) and it operated in that manner until 2005 when the cost of production became too high.

It imports the popular Craven A and Matterhorn brands and, to a lesser extent, Dunhill and Rothmans. In April 2008, the tax on cigarettes was increased by 100 per cent. In April 2009, there was a 42 per cent increase. In December of 2009, with the government reeling from job losses in the global recession, a further increase of 23 per cent was imposed on cigarettes.

That took the tax to $10.50 per stick of cigarette, and because of the high prices at point of sale which resulted — $30 to $35 — that only served to fuel the trade in black market cigarettes.

In the three-year period from 2007 to 2010 volumes have fallen by a whopping 50 per cent! While not all of that decrease can be laid at the feet of the increased cost, in light of the fact that people are becoming more health-conscious, in the bars throughout Jamaica I have witnessed patrons wanting to buy cigarettes (especially Craven A) but instead purchasing Capital (black market sourced) which obviously attracts no tax and represents super profits to the bar owner and those who sold her/him the product.

The question is, will the government continue to eye the ‘sin’ sector as this year’s budget rolls around again? As stated in the company’s 2009-2010 annual report, ‘The revenue from two of every three cigarettes sold by Carreras is passed on to the Ministry of Finance in taxes.’

Further in the report it is stated: ‘As Carreras continues to be a major contributor to government revenues, delivering a total of $8.184 billion in SCT, GCT and corporate profit tax for 2009/10, we are obliged to manage our relationship with the Ministry of Finance with the objective of ensuring that the levels and timing of tobacco tax increases are not detrimental to the long-term sustainability of our company.’

In the 2010/11 fiscal year that is expected to increase to $11 billion. The question is, how much can a company be taxed before the golden goose, the egg and the casket begin that slow trek to the cemetery?

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