After the violently contested elections of 1976 and 1980, Jamaica went into a period of relative peace.

In 1983, a snap election was held by the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) that the People’s National Party (PNP) did not contest. They gave a number of reasons for this, but really it was because they just weren’t prepared to participate. They were caught by surprise. This resulted in a Parliament without an Opposition between 1983 and 1989.

The 1989 election, although relatively peaceful compared to the elections of 1976 and 1980, was fiercely contested as the PNP wanted power back and the JLP wanted to keep it. To the greater population of Jamaica, all was well; political violence was behind us. This was not so in the inner cities of St Catherine, particularly Spanish Town.

I interviewed a ‘middle-aged man’, who was nine years old and living on Jobs Lane in Spanish Town in 1989. He is a policeman today. He recalled that a few days before that election in 1989 the local strongman came into his yard with dozens of men armed with rifles and gas bottle bombs. They were looking for people affiliated with the rival party to their own.

As a nine-year-old child, he knew the political affiliation of his family. He also knew that this gang of gunmen were from the side opposing his family’s affiliation. In his words, “they all had rifles or petrol bombs. I expected them to do as they pleased with the women and just kill us and burn down our house. They were the law in my community; they could do as they like”.

Lucky for this family, one of the women was friends with one of the leaders of this mob’s girlfriend. The leader basically ordered his animals to relax and moved on to the next victims.

This is perhaps the best explanation of what the gangs truly are in our inner-city communities and how they were in the 70s and 80s. They are the law; nobody can stop them when they are on a rampage, unless the police are on the ground.

Gangs are not community protectors. They are parasites on the community. This garbage about them being protectors is just rhetoric spewed by 70s and 80s politicians.

Gang members are not disenfranchised youth! That is just rubbish created by human rights organisations to give the appearance that they are protecting the rights of unfortunate civilians.

Gang members are cowardly killers who simply want somebody to dominate, to suppress, to abuse in an effort to satiate their desire for violence. The rival gunman that they are claiming to be protecting the community from is only a rival because of their existence.

This is the culture that the armed forces of this country are trying to stamp out: the existence of men who abuse, dehumanise, and kill innocent people. When you oppose the armed forces, who are trying to destroy the virtual clones of the men who went to the home of that nine-year-old child and made decisions on whether the occupants would live or die, be raped, or have their homes burned down, you are, in effect, a participant in the very activities that these men are carrying out. You are doing so subliminally.

When in a political campaign you use men like this to ensure that people vote for you, your hands become as red as theirs. Until we, as a country, separate ourselves from the gangs that have been romanticised by artistes, politicians, and human rights activists they will continue to exist.

We cannot hate what they represent and still pay them extortion fees because we want our business to thrive and be left alone. If we do so we are perpetuating the acts that they are carrying out. We are, in effect, funding the next rape, the next torching of a family’s home, and the next murder of someone who has somehow got on their bad side.

Children look at everyone with a gun in their hands as a threat. Sometimes this includes the police. This is unfortunate, but it is just the by-product of carrying visible weapons. The police force, through its various community outreach programmes, works towards changing this mindset in inner-city communities.

The gangs, on the other hand, thrive on this fear. Over the last two decades of fighting these gangs, I am just seeing a quantum effort by them to stop drawing attention to themselves. This is because they realise that the police force and the army have drawn that line in the sand.

This culture of gang domination is dying, but dying slowly. If there is a total rejection of them by all politicians in every constituency as an agreement between the contenders, it would be the first step to ending the gangs’ reign of terror.

If the entire business community takes a decision that their money won’t buy one single round of ammunition, one firearm, one gallon of gas, then we could possibly dry up the funding of these parasites.

If our Parliament passes laws that send anyone who collects extortion fees to prison for a decade, then the police could work towards removing the gang members from our streets and into our cages.

An all-out attack against the gangs from all quarters will stop one more nine-year-old from being terrified that he is going to be killed and his home burnt to the ground.

When my children were nine years old they could not understand the point of view of the nine-year-old mentioned in this story. They cannot identify with his terror. In the minds of the children in the community where I live, that type of terror simply doesn’t exist. In the community that I work in, every nine-year-old child knows that if the gang of the community wants their home burnt to the ground, there is very little to stop them. In fact, the only real protectors in the eyes of those children are the same “name brand” police that human rights organisations are committed to destroying.

What we have here is a Jamaica where one set of children are safe and another set are born, live, and grow up under gang domination.

During the interview with this middle-aged man, who no longer lives in an inner-city community but has a home in a gated development, he said, “I will work on the back of a rubbish truck to pay my mortgage, rather than have my children live in an inner city ever again.”

A child should not have to experience gang domination to become an adult who feels strongly enough to make that pledge. Have you, as a citizen of this country, truly done your duty if your children are not subject to that terror, but other children are?

I have spent most of my adult life fighting these gangs and still feel ashamed that I am a man in a society where thousands of people still live under gang domination. I am not sure that enough of our society understands what these people are going through.

My father fought gang domination for 30 years. I am not too far from that figure myself. I expect my son to fight gang domination. However, the three of us and the other 20,000 members of our armed forces are simply ploughing the sea if the whole country doesn’t find it unacceptable that a nine-year-old can believe and be correct that he and his family can be killed and their home burnt down simply because some cowardly mongrels with guns decide that’s what they want.

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