The recent vicious murders of three boys and an adult in Clarendon must have devastated their parents, even as it had the nation feeling helpless and the prime minister visiting them to offer whatever comfort she could.

Many of us have felt rage within, but that is as far as we can go. Some of us act as if these heinous murders are a recent phenomenon but, the truth is, our dance with these devils has long been an old move and the song of a golden oldie reflecting our national shame and disgrace.

For those who can remember, in May 1976, when political tribalism was at its zenith, murdering thugs from an adjoining community firebombed the five blocks of 10-bedroom units which were constructed of board at Orange Lane. During the resulting inferno, as one woman in mortal fear was fleeing with her baby held in her arms, one of the armed thugs known as “Lack a Toot”, who was on the periphery of the flames, reportedly grabbed away her baby and tossed it in the fire.

You may say here, what sort of a man could do such a thing? And your question would be wrong. First, to ask such a question implies that you ascribe a reasonable amount of humanity to the thug to the point that he could understand what it is you are asking about his actions.

He is in fact a human being, that is, he is walking on two legs, has arms that can hold and manipulate weapons of death, and he can communicate with others who chose not to firebomb buildings and murder little babies.

But, after that, it ends. He is an irredeemable thing, able only to respond to the brutality heaped on him during his childhood. It makes little sense to “beat sense into him” and, if the police should apprehend him and he is taken to the courts, convicted and sentenced for 10 years, it will not bring him into a newer appreciation for the right that others have to preserving their lives.

Over a decade ago, then Finance Minister Omar Davies — member of parliament for one of the PNP’s main garrison communities from which sprung many of the PNP-linked most notorious thugs and enforcers — made mention of “irredeemable young men”, and for that description he was harshly taken to task by then fiery talk show host Wilmot “Motty” Perkins.

It may have been one of the few things that Omar Davies had ever got right.

In the 1990s, I got to know of the reality of John and Peter (not their real names). These boys grew up in the rough and tumble of a ghetto community somewhere off Red Hills Road. They were cousins to each other, did not know their fathers, and were raised by their mothers who oftentimes found reason to use their frustration with the financial horrors of ghetto existence to hit the living daylights out of the boys.

If that was not enough, the boys were subjected to the brutality of the various ‘uncles’ who drifted in and out of the women’s lives; in to get them pregnant, out to wait until they were ready to hatch up another member of the brood.

One of the debilitating things about inner-city living is that even if a single mother tries against all odds to raise her girl or boy on the straight-and-narrow path, the general hum of the ghetto tends to draw in the child towards glorifying violence and the laws of the streets.

At a time when Peter and John had just entered the teenage years, all of the pent up anger and bitterness towards life crashed in on them. John borrowed a gun and one day he came upon some grown men playing dominoes. It was about a mile outside his community. John opened fire at the table. Two people were shot but none were killed.

The next day a certain newspaper carried the story and as people in John’s community spoke of it — John could not read — he confided to Peter that he was the perpetrator. Both of them were ecstatic, but Peter felt left out, disappointed.

Two days later Peter boarded a bus and robbed a woman. While she was resisting he stabbed her with the kitchen knife he had. The next day she died in hospital. Both boys shared the info and, to each, they had stepped up a notch in life.

Over the next few months the boys went on a rampage in trying to ‘contest’ each other in shootings and killings, always awaiting the public results in the newspaper. In time, the whole community knew about them, and even some of the older hardened toughs in the community grew fearful of them.

It took the conversations between an uncle and an older relative to make a decision on them, as the boys’ actions had resulted in the police putting the community under too much pressure. The uncle then arranged to meet with them after a party, where he bought them more liquor, walked with them, led them to a pre-arranged ambush and shot them both to death. Some bleeding hearts will say that the youngsters needed another start in life. I say otherwise.

There are many of these irredeemable young men occupying our physical spaces and messing up vital areas that give us reason to exercise our mental abilities. To the parents of the children killed in Clarendon, it went way beyond that, meaning that if we should sit with them and say, “I know what you must be feeling”, it is pure mockery, because plainly, we do not know.

There is one sure-fire way to stem these deaths, and that is to ensure that within a week of a murder, skilled intelligence and detective work nabs the perpetrator. There is still too much net-fishing in Jamaica’s approach to police work.

The Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF) needs at least another thousand detectives who are highly trained and prepared to work with community police who know the hum of the inner-city pockets. The public also needs to ask itself if it will be prepared to pay for this re-equipping of the JCF via a special tax — a security tax.

The history of taxes in Jamaica is a sad one. The Education Tax, which came about in the 1970s, did not go specifically towards educating our children and was eventually sucked into the Consolidated Fund. When the General Consumption Tax was contemplated in the late 1980s it was seen as a tax to replace a slew of others. Because it became so wildly successful, successive governmental administrations simply kept it along with the ones it was designed to replace.

So the security tax is already dead in the womb. All that is left for us to do is deal with these irredeemable at our own peril. Unlike the politicians, we do not live in swanky, well-secured gated communities. We are on our own.

observemark@gmail.com