Ewart Walters | Mr Chang’s complaint

Has the nation really failed the police, as National Security Minister Dr Horace Chang has charged?

Chang’s comments last December drew instant repudiation as people reacted to the headline. But a careful reading of the story shows he is not entirely wrong. It is our leaders, though, who have failed the police, and the nation.

Perhaps Mr Chang did not wish to blame his prime minister. And, in truth, it would not have been Mr Holness alone. But when he says “as a country, we neglected the security forces all of post-Independence,” he is on solid ground.

When he acknowledges the State’s failure in allowing squatter communities to develop to the point of becoming havens for rampant criminality, he is right.

And when he states that “we have allowed our inner-city communities to deteriorate,” that, right desso, is a matter of “Hammer, meet nail”.

But who is the “we?” He is saying he has not been given all the tools he needs to make Jamaicans secure. He is saying he is not to blame.

In this he is uttering the publicly unspoken words of several of his predecessors. Not former Police Commissioner Owen Ellington, though. Ellington focused on the importance of personal security in a lawful society. A society where people abide by the law because the result of any other behaviour is too painful to ignore. A society where the option of fines for gun crimes is removed completely. A society in which gun criminals get 20-year minimum prison sentences.

Mr Ellington had also issued an important warning about the place of human-rights concerns:

“Any preoccupation with human-rights backlash from bold and courageous policies to enhance public security will only assure continued deterioration in the quality of life for all Jamaicans, rather than the denial of freedom for the few who undermine our security.”

Mr Chang’s complaint exposes failed leadership. If he complained to the Cabinet, clearly he has not been satisfied. But Cabinet has a leader. And that leader must be a person of vision. Do we have a visionary leading the Cabinet? Stay with me.

MANLEY’S VISION

Before he became prime minister, the late Michael Manley focused his visioning on Jamaica’s needs and saw education as the only route because money was unavailable for the needs: land ownership and employment – hangovers from Emancipation. He also knew that Independence was granted without funds to support it.

He recognised that while he could call on the World Bank, no institution would provide money for primary education. But he was convinced of the need for an educated people who could then parlay that education into jobs, land ownership, home ownership and a satisfactory life. He saw that education could reduce the need for land capture and squatting.

Just about everything in Jamaica depends on something else working properly. Mr Chang points to failures in the number of cars available to the police and to broken accommodations and communications facilities.

He could have added potholed roads, streets without name signs, streets without numbers, shortage of doctors, nurses, drugs and ambulances, unreliable food supply, unavailability of uniforms, gas masks, bullet proof vests, one-way mirrors, identification spaces, a modern morgue, and enough policemen retained in the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF), a foreign affairs ministry focused on using diplomacy to the hilt to stanch the inflow of guns, an increase in jobs that pay more than a living wage… and I could go on.

Governments need to approach policing not as a subject by itself but as one (very important) cog in a wheel that is unerringly rolling to a developed nation.

But Mr Chang mentioned something else. And that is what happened after Independence. Ever since its formation, the JCF reported to one unchanging authority, one person, the governor. At Independence, our governors general were not given that responsibility. Instead, the JCF, these 58 years, has been subject to a shifting authority as the political parties replace each other after winning elections.

The problem began showing its face shortly after Independence one Sunday afternoon in 1962 at the poolside of the Sheraton Hotel. A policeman approached two men about their behaviour. The men, two newly minted ministers of government, likely with the assistance of Mr Wray and his nephews, grabbed him and threw him in the pool.

Many officers, wanting to stay dry, then saw their future in the hands of whichever party was in power.

The result of all this is seen in the blatant refusal of the gangs of Gordon House, as The Gleaner called them, to dismantle the garrisons, and the feeling among garrison communities especially, that the police are not their friends.

It also seems to have fed into the “need” for each party to maintain its own platoon of strong-arm and strongly armed men because they could not depend on police loyalty.

Or perhaps this complaint was just Mr Chang’s swansong. Perhaps he is signalling an imminent departure from the political scene and, seeking absolution, wants us to know that he did try, but that the absence of success from so-so ZOSO and SOE is not his fault.

But if he plans to stay on and fight, he will have to man-up and forcefully persuade his Cabinet colleagues, and their leader, that the struggle for prosperity is not a thing of developing economically to the exclusion of social development. That they have to make a priority of building the nation, and work to that priority. Time come.

Ewart Walters is a triple prize-winning journalist, author, former Gleaner parliamentary reporter, and retired diplomat. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com