EDITORIAL - Does Bunting get it?

Peter Bunting just doesn't get it. He might not have felt threatened by whatever it is that happened at that Portland villa, but the rest of us in Jamaica are damned frightened.

Perhaps he should ask Donnette Archer. On Good Friday, her husband, Gregory, decided to take a leisurely morning walk with his nine-year-old son.

It is the kind of things people do - or ought to be able to do. It is the kind of things fathers do with their sons; what we preach, they should do.

Well, Gregory Archer didn't make it back home. He was shot dead by gunmen near to Vale Royal, the prime minister's official residence. This happened in full view of Gregory Archer's nine-year-old son.

In all likelihood, Gregory Archer will become just another homicide statistic; one of more than 1,000 people who will be murdered in Jamaica this year, of which the police will 'clear up' perhaps one-third, but for which far fewer arrests will be made and very few will make it to the courts.

WEAVING WEBS

But that's not the kind of thing that Peter Bunting, Jamaica's minister of national security, seems to get. He, however, seems to get spin and obfuscation.

So, our goodly minister parses, wiggles, shimmies, quivers and squirms. Or, so it appears.

We have no reason, however, to believe that the minister prevaricates.

What we know is that it matters little whether Peter Bunting himself was actually held up at that Portland villa, or his friends were. Many people actually are. Some of them, like Gregory Archer, are shot dead.

Even if the villa was merely burgled, as Mr Bunting explains, he should perhaps be glad that the thieves were gone by the time his friends investigated. For they, too, might have been added to Jamaica's homicide statistics.

Mr Bunting is right to feel badly for his friends, but not because they were even from Jamaica.

His concern should be for every single victim of crime in Jamaica. And as the man in charge, he must work with the technical people on policies and strategies to deal with a national crisis that reflects itself, in part, in a murder rate of more than 40 per 100,000 Jamaicans.

SOLUTION BY COVER-UP

Denying and pretending are not policies. They won't change the dynamic of crime in Jamaica or the statistics on the ground.

They certainly won't help Peter Bunting meet his target of a homicide rate of 12 per 100,000 by 2016. That would mean Jamaica slashing the number of murders in four years to around 327 from 1,084 last year.

On its current trajectory, that homicide rate can be achieved somewhere between 2037 and 2040. Merely blowing hot, obfuscatory air at the crisis won't change a thing.

If Peter Bunting wants to make a difference, he must begin with a full and honest engagement of the Jamaica people. He has to feel and know their fear. Even a little bit. This can't be an aloof, intellectual exercise in which the minister is not fully invested.

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