Dear Sir,

We’re policing on the cheap because, we are led to believe, there is no money to do otherwise. It can work, but it has to be carefully thought through and implemented. We would do well to take the advice of the physicist Ernest Rutherford who said “we’ve got no money, so we must think”.

There is much in law enforcement in Jamaica to cause the citizen to wonder why we’re failing dismally to pick the low hanging fruit. Drivers of robots/ taxis/ minibuses often act as if no law exists, and appear to get away with it. This single failure has done much to hold law enforcement up to ridicule. Right across Jamaica, thousands of these drivers know that whatever the law might say, little enforcement takes place.

They don’t even have to be subtle as they shred the Road Traffic Act. I witnessed same (again!) a few days ago while driving up Hope Road from Half Way Tree. At the Waterloo Road intersection, as I waited at the red light, two taxis came up the filter lane and just drove straight through the red light and went their way. At the next intersection with East Kings House Road two taxis coming down from Liguanea used the filter lane to cut in front of waiting motorists, then stopped in the yellow cross-hatch area. These things happen every day all across the country. Looking for an index of failure of law enforcement? Just stand by any major road and you’ll see it as robots/ taxis/ minibuses make three lanes out of two, run red lights, block intersections, all without consequence.

Our practice of writing laws and leaving them to enforce themselves has caught up with us. Moral suasion is not law enforcement. Neither is hand wringing and lamentation. We have, as a nation, to commit to writing just laws and enforcing them. Could it really be so difficult to police major urban corridors when we have a Transport Authority, traffic police, and traffic courts? Do we not see the larger impact of this failure on the general attitude to law in this country?

This failure goes hand in hand with the ticketing system. What a travesty! There are drivers on our roads with dozens, if not hundreds of outstanding tickets. They’re not in hiding. They’re driving around with impunity because the ramshackle system can neither find them nor bring them to book. Instead, we have periodic amnesties, hoping they’ll come forward. Then we crow about how much money the amnesty brought in. Shame!

We are enabling crime by failing to catch and prosecute offenders. Traffic offenses are the easiest since they must use the roads, and we know where those are. It is bad for morale when citizens can be seen openly flouting the laws without consequence. It also makes the police look silly. The solution is not more laws, it is enforcement. Nonsensical babbling about how lawless Jamaica is does not help. Jamaicans are not lawless when they go elsewhere, where those societies take their laws seriously.

Some of our laws might not be just, and some are just plain silly. The recent case of Tesha Miller was one for the “silly” files, but at least it got us searching for others like it that might be lurking in our code. Policing on the cheap, especially when you have no real alternative, cannot be done just willy nilly. Let Rutherford’s words ring in our ears…we must think.

Michael Nicholson