Mark Wignall | A more powerful, less open Holness

With 57 per cent of Jamaicans indicating in the latest Don Anderson poll that they feel less safe than they did 10 years ago, the bigger, more pointed indicator that can be drawn from these findings is that the Holness administration, first elected in 2016, has spent about seven of those 10 years actively failing its most basic test in governance.

Government in a democracy exists at the will of the people, and the people expect the Government to devise policies to make them happy. People who are happy are usually those who first embrace their feeling of safety as the main route to household happiness.

If 10 or 20 or 200,000 Jamaicans were among the 43 per cent who said they felt more safe than they did 10 years ago, I am willing to take a bet that after they viewed the video of a savage group of females in Clarendon physically battering a 14-year-old girl because her mother, who was the one they wanted, was not available, they are feeling less safe now.

I honestly do not know if in some small way you are like me. If after viewing the video you would feel severely reduced as a human being and ashamed to occupy our Jamaican-ness. The air around us would occupy an electric tension, and we would want to rush indoors and slam the door shut behind us so that we can hide our faces and run away from ourselves.

But more on that later. A small group of concerned Jamaicans living and working in the US have been chatting with me for about 10 years. Last week, they wrote, “The very ‘sleep with your doors and windows open’ thing that Mr. Holness promised in his 2016 campaign has capsized and close to 60 per cent of the people want to send the PM a message.”

Then they went granular. “According to JCF statistics there were 1,647 murders in 2017, in 2018 there were 1,287, in 2019 there were 1,339, in 2020, there were 1,323, in 2021, there were 1,474, in 2022 there were 1,511 and in 2023 there were 1,393.

“No wonder Jamaicans do not feel safe. For an island of some 3 million people, there were 9,974 Jamaicans slaughtered in seven years. That is nearly 10,000 people on an island about miles 150 long and 50 miles wide. Seems worse than the Wild West to us.”

A key question to ask ourselves is, to what extent does PM Holness believe that he can strike that red-hot political iron, trash the PNP again, and do it without addressing key issues in the public domain?

It is useful to remember that Mr Holness, like all of us, is trapped in his own skin. He cannot be what he is not. But one thing is certain, as his political savvy/learning curve has soared, he seems to have recognised that the things that are ‘problematic’ to him and the JLP can be buried under the good and very vocal PR of gains on the broad economy and physical road build -out.

In other words, crow about the new balance between imports and exports, the positive intensity in the tourism sector, the low unemployment rate, ratings on the economy from international agencies, new business start-ups and hope that no pesky questions are asked about his unfinished business with the Integrity Commission and if any members of his Cabinet are compromised in shady matters.

LIVING BESIDE THE POTENTIAL GUNMAN

In 2014, the Island Special Constabulary Force (aka Blue Seam police) was disbanded, and its members merged with the regular police. At its best, the ISCF was that group of men who came from the community that was in the proximity of the station or area to which they were attached.

They knew the goat thieves and those men who would beat up their women on Friday nights. After excessive rum drinking. They knew the boys who made it a habit to break in through windows when people were off to work on Mondays. Because of proximate policing, a kind of hit and miss would play out. Some thieves would show up once they became aware that a report had been made. Some broke into, entered into, stole, and escaped suspicion.

The tenor of the various communities has changed in 2024 even though angels had no special prominence prior to 2014. We are, at present, a people with too many misfits among us. Well, let me put it differently. Too many of our good people have too high a fascination with, and tolerance for, the small percentage of our people who are rotten to the core.

I fear that we may be too late in forming a people-centric reserve force that can be truly effective at this time when young men are quite unafraid to display the tools of their trade and shoot them off as the words are uttered.

“A who did man yah inna di place a ask question?”

BRUTES IN CLARENDON

There are very few things I hate. ‘Tinking Toe’ would be one, and even now, I’m fascinated by how my late mother loved the strange fruit.

The other thing I hate is violence against women, and especially girls. And among that is community mobs. I could have been in primary school when I was introduced to the term domestic violence, people who have nothing to do will find something destructive to do. Which would be like social entropy. People left up to themselves with no universally accepted code of conduct would eventually devour themselves.

What we saw on that video clip is the end result of that social trip to calamity. We have been on that trip for about four decades now. But murders recorded in 2023 were eight per cent less than in 2022.

And unfortunately, the little, battered 14-year-old is, right now, developing a scar inside even as her visible wounds heal.

Mark Wignall is a political and public affairs analyst. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and mawigsr@gmail.com.