Vernon Daley
Peter Phillips, the Opposition's man on crime, told Parliament last Wednesday that the country needs to develop "a legal framework which will assist in removing violent criminals off the streets and facilitate the conclusion of police investigations".
A day later, coming out of the Vale Royal talks, Prime Minister Bruce Golding was kind enough to inform us that "society is going to have to choose whether or not it is going to be prepared to be inconvenienced in order to strengthen the capacity to restore order to communities that have been taken over by criminal elements".
Unless I miss my guess, it appears there is some emerging agreement among the political masters to suspend some of the rights of Jamaicans to deal with the country's stubborn crime problem. I'm worried.
When Golding, our philosopher-king, talks about people being "inconvenienced", we should be clear in our minds that this is usually a code word for saying that some of the ordinary liberties we enjoy will be dispensed with.
Goodbye, habeas corpus
Jamaicans will have to wait and see what is proposed, but based on Phillips' comments which were foreshadowed a few weeks ago by Professor Don Robotham, we could be looking at a plan to detain people for extended periods without charge. Goodbye, habeas corpus.
Professor Robotham has pointed us to the United Kingdom where there is legislation to hold suspected terrorists for up to 28 days as part of a strategy popularly called preventive detention. The House of Commons narrowly passed a bill last week to increase that period to 42 days. The already unpopular Gordon Brown government is catching heat over that and we can expect some political shake-up in Britain when next there is an election.
I can't see why Professor Robotham would look to the UK's approach to terrorism to inform our debate about solutions to crime. I don't know that we have had much trouble with 'ticking bombs'; or have we cast the terrorism net so wide that every gun-toting fool is to be caught in it?
Even more important, the documented history of this country tells us that this preventive detention approach is not only doomed to failure but is likely to make the problem worse.
What was the purpose of the Suppression of Crime Act, if not preventive detention? People were locked up for extended periods on the suspicion that they were involved in criminality. They were deprived of their liberties and some even their very lives. Still, murders flourished.
But the real and lasting impact of that act is that it bred enmity between the police and residents of depressed communities. As the Wolfe report points out, the police were gradually seen as the enemies of the people.
The authorities howl every day for people to support the police, but how can this happen when there is a broken relationship? We are just beginning to fix it and we should stay far from the failed strategies of the past. They have only made the job of the police harder by making them more reliant on force than intelligence.
Disastrous consequence
It is not Jamaicans who should be looking at the UK for guidance on this approach, it is the UK which should be looking at us to see the kinds of disastrous consequences that can attend such a regime.
I'm not saying we should sit and do nothing about this awful problem that's claiming some 1,500 lives each year. However, the approach must be driven by intelligence and not panic. I sense we have a narrowing window to do this thing right. If we go back to those strategies which have failed us in the past, then a decade from now, the country could be caught up in debate about how to deal with a murder rate of 5,000 per year.
Send comments to: vernon.daley@gmail.com; for feedback, email:columns@gleanerjm.com.
