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Smoke screen has lifted
Jason McKay
Columns
Jason McKay  
October 29, 2022

Smoke screen has lifted

THE horror and benefit of the video-recorded world we now live in is that we see the brutality and animalistic behaviour of young men in our country.

This is really no different from cruel men in Europe or Africa other than one small factor, that being that in Jamaica for 30 years we painted them as victims, innocent youth who were how they were because of police, politicians, bad fathers, and more bleeding-heart rubbish.

I am here to tell you that men who pump bullets into innocent people are garbage, not victims. They are what they are and are responsible for their own conduct — irrespective of how many times their daddy didn’t hug them.

The public have been fed a grand fraud about the killers who fell in the Braeton Seven shooting, Baugh, and many others. You were fed a meal of ‘innocent teenagers’ in the Braeton Seven incident, despite them shooting three people in the Above Rocks Police Station, and killing a school principal the night before they met their demise.

Tivoli’s Baugh was presented as a good father and community leader, when he was a lifelong gang member and gunman.

These are just two examples of how you have been misled. The men in that video of the robbery of the Asian businessman in St Elizabeth or the rifle-toting gunmen in May Pen are the same in character and conduct as the young cowards who executed the principal in Braeton 20 years ago.

We are where we are because of how we view or viewed the gunmen among us. This forced the Government to take measures to curtail its efforts to protect its citizens from them.

Front-line police who engaged the killers too often had their careers subjugated or their liberty threatened. They were marketed as killers, not heroes, and in many cases destroyed.

Culture changed and conflicts were avoided. The once-revered term ‘name-brand police’ became a prescription for career limitation or a criminal charge.

We lost the war against our greatest threat and increased our murder rate by 400 per cent in 30 years; extortion became an accepted cultural norm and gang control an expectation.

Why do I keep saying 30 years? Well, this movement of misrepresenting killers as victims began in the early 90s after a fatal shooting at Nuttall Hospital in St Andrew which birthed an anti-police culture. The cops were charged and, despite their acquittal, the seeds were sown.

Now, once the ‘money’ in this town is out to get you, it’s over. Soon after, the movement brought in international pressure and the Government bowed.

The end result is the slaughter we see on videos daily.

This is what happens when you stop fighting a dangerous enemy, when civilians and international groups determine strategies — total and complete anarchy.

So, I like solutions. Love, like or dislike it, we can’t change what has occurred.

We can’t dial back to 30-year-old strategies irrespective of how effective they were.

I speak specifically of the era when police officers who put their lives on the line were treated as heroes and careers enhanced.

Drastic measures need to be introduced — not moderate, but extreme.

Civilians should not sit on any body that determines police promotion. They don’t understand the environment they are being asked to make decisions on.

No organisation that investigates police shooting should be mandated by law to act as a mechanism to control it .

This is contrary to the principle of impartial investigations. Yes, I am talking about Indecom, and I am not saying its investigations are biased. I am actually quite impressed with how thorough the entity is.

The Act that governs it, though, mandates that it functions as both investigator and activist. This a breach of natural justice.

It can no longer be acceptable that political oppositions go up against the introduction of laws as an accepted norm, irrespective of the party in charge. Opposing crime control measures must be viewed as aiding the enemy in the videos.

The gangs must be viewed as terrorists and thus stripped of rights, once so defined, such as habeas corpus, bail, and the right to silence.

The right to silence, after all, is removed once you are a police officer or soldier.

Our constitution needs change and it’s that simple.

We are either at war with the guys in the video killing innocent people, or we’re not.

If we are not moved by what we’re seeing on those videos to change the way we view them then we damn well deserve them.

Any politician who opposes any Act or law that enhances the ability to fight this enemy must be sought out by the press and asked, no demanded, to explain why. Justify their position.

The defence attorneys, when being interviewed, must be challenged when they present killers as ‘poor Jamaicans’. No act or law is being aimed at the average guy.

The various legislation that are being enacted are there to target the guy in the video, not the kid on the corner who chooses to crush weed in his hand all day, but rather the one who preys on him.

There is no scenario that can describe the animals in that video killing of that shopkeeper as anything other than cold-blooded killers.

These are the men who are going to be impacted by the new Gun Court Act and the New Bail Act.

Who in the hell cares if they spend too long in custody awaiting trial? They shouldn’t have killed then.

Think of the victims that you are actually seeing being destroyed, think of their loved ones. Then pretend it is them being killed like an insect.

Not even animals deserve to be treated as they are treating us.

History will be confused by the era 1990 to 2022, likely to 2030.

A hundred years from now the then generation will wonder why we, a nation of three million, sat down and allowed 10,000 scrawny cowards to destroy us whilst we quarrelled among ourselves about their “rights”.

Feedback: drjasonamckay@gmail.com

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