THE TERM "gated community" has taken on new meaning. Many in the society have long sought security in housing estates behind gates and guards. Security concerns from a rising crime wave over years have been the main motivator. We have not yet quite reached the stage of the armoured personal vehicle, which is popular among the monied class in places like Colombia. But how far away can we be? There are already alternative security forces in the companies providing residential area security like municipal police forces.
Jones Town has joined the ranks of gated communities for the same sort of reasons that have driven those with more resources to move in that direction. The main difference is that the Jones Town gates have been erected across public thoroughfares, not at entry points to private property.
As we reported pictorially and with text last Tuesday, this inner-city community, which was once a prime suburban residential area without gates, has now erected "official" barriers across several roadways. On March 13, George Phang, community leader and manager of the Arnett Gardens Football Club and another man, were shot in a drive-by shooting at the intersection of Thompson and Septimus Streets at a game of dominoes.
As one fearful resident told our reporter, if the perpetrators were brave enough to attack 'the big man', then ordinary residents were just as vulnerable. So the citizens have taken steps to protect themselves. They have erected neat lift bars across roadways to prevent a recurrence of the drive-by shooting. The barriers "necessary because we haffi protect wi self an' wi children", one mother explained. It is not certain if that other feature of the gated community, armed guards, is in place. But someone has to raise and lower the bar, screen those seeking to enter and exclude undesirables by force if necessary.
The Prime Minister told the nation in his last election victory acceptance speech that he had seriously accepted his grand-daughter's re-definition of P.J. to mean "Protect Jamaica". We have already commented with respect to another community, Kintyre in East Rural St. Andrew, on what has now become a familiar role of the security forces to provide cover for residents to flee their homes rather than to secure them in their homes and communities.
The street gates in Jones Town are just another manifestation of the incapacity of the state to perform its most basic function of providing security and maintaining law and order, leaving citizens to fall back on their own measures, within and outside the law, to protect themselves and their children. This cannot be acceptable in a modern society.
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