Last week's murder of Assistant Commissioner of Police Gilbert Kameka, on the same day that another policeman, Constable Valentino Chambers, was shot dead, unleashed a range of emotions among Jamaicans.

People were mournful, hurt and angry. But mostly, they were confused and afraid.

ACP Kameka was not the first policeman killed in Jamaica; neither was Constable Chambers. In fact, their deaths have brought to at least 20, the number of members of the constabulary who have been murdered in Jamaica this year. What was different about this was Mr. Kameka's rank.

He was the most senior Jamaican policeman murdered in living memory, and his death, as is the case ever so often, dramatised for another strata of Jamaicans, the vulnerability felt by the vast majority, that segment who are mostly the victims of the country's wanton epidemic of criminal violence. Already this year, there have been more than 1,200 homicides in Jamaica and these do not include the killing of nearly 200 civilians by the police.

No one, clearly, has an easy or ready-made answer to this violent criminality. And when people feel vulnerable and are afraid, they often become confused and lash out not always physically.

We noticed a fair bit of that last week as Jamaicans had to deal with the murders of the policemen as well as the killing of perhaps another dozen Jamaicans within the same 24 hours in which they had died. An increasingly common hypothesis is that what appears to be a recent spike in murders is politically motivated.

The assertion is that the death toll has jumped since last September's general election, which brought the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) to office.

The seeming conclusion at which we are supposed to arrive is that the jump in criminality is being orchestrated by persons sympathetic to the People's National Party, which was in office for 18 years and is now in Opposition. Of course, in the past, we also had people asserting that crime was being fomented by the JLP to subvert the then PNP government.

Given the lack of evidence or rigour of analysis with which these assertions are made, we are tempted to conclude that it is a logic, on the part of those who espouse it, founded in partisanship and cheap political expedience. It is an easy and lazy way to explain the very deep, serious and complex problem faced by Jamaica.

Criminality and criminal violence are not new to Jamaica. Even in the 'good old days' Jamaica had a far higher rate of homicide than its English-speaking Caribbean neighbours. For more than 40 years, we have been doubling the aggregate number of homicides every decade or so, and during that period, we have recorded over 20,000 murders. Since the beginning of this decade, it has been common to think of the body count as a four-digit number count.

These are not pretty statistics, but they are real. This is not to say that there is not, in some inner-city/garrison communities, a residual link between crime and politics. But we insist that it is far too easy and glib to claim that this is the fundamental part of the problem now confronting the country - whether as manifested in the events of recent weeks, or at the start of the year when the PNP formed the administration.

We do not, however, believe that this is the basis of analysis being used by the Security Minister in formulating policies to deal with the problem. If so, he is staring hard at failure.