'They don't care about poor, black people'

Gary Spaulding, Senior Gleaner Writer

A FORMER soldier in the Jamaica Defence Force (JDF) currently serving as the chairman of Crime Stop has fired a volley of salvos at successive political administrations for failing to address the social ills draining away the lifeblood of deprived communities.

Peter John Thwaites, who served as a second lieutenant in the Jamaica Defence Force during the first state of emergency in western Kingston in 1966, took aim at politicians over what he characterised as their lethargic attitude to poor and deprived communities.

"I have been in the army, so I do come to the table with a predisposition to harder-than-normal-policing and harder-than-normal dealing with crime," Thwaites, also a representative of the Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica (PSOJ), declared at a Gleaner Editors' Forum late last week.

Thwaites recalled that his first assignment as a second lieutenant in the army was in 1966.

"And guess where we were?" asked Thwaites. "We were in Denham Town and we were searching for guns that were being allegedly used by political elements to intimidate the constituents in electoral matters."

He said many residents were also detained in that first state of emergency. "I was, in fact, in charge of a detention area," Thwaites said.

"When we left there, we could not believe that a place existed in Kingston like that - the degradation of buildings, the roads and other things were just absolutely unbelievable."

Thwaites lamented that notwithstanding the plight of the poor more than four decades ago, the situation has been allowed to worsen with each passing decade.

At the same time, he said, the security forces are undermanned and under-resourced, a situation for which he also blamed the political directorate.

Thwaites complained that a mere five per cent of GDP was being used to address the monumental crime challenge.

"They have deliberately underresourced - and you can't tell me it's not deliberate. We have 8,500 police. The cadre is 12,000," Thwaites argued.

"Sixteen thousand murders needs 25,000 policemen with cars that run up and down the place and you don't have to beg gas for them.

"And we have borrowed more money to do what, I do not know," he declared.

Thwaites contended that civil society was not much better than politicians. "We had two years to put some suggested changes that are being proposed now to the legislation, and we haven't done anything," Thwaites said, eliciting disagreement from human-rights activists.

Thwaites said the time was long past for the State to launch a full-scale assault on the social ills draining the lifeblood from deprived communities.

"We haven't really taken poverty, garrisons, poor people seriously," he bemoaned. "I have a theory on this: our politician don't care about poor black people.

"Our politicians are interested in filling their bags. I feel very strongly that we are in a situation in which we are fighting terrorists," Thwaites said.

He came out in full support of the anti-crime bills being debated in Parliament, which, he argued, would help to bring back law and order to these communities.

"We no longer have a crime issue ... . Any country that has the number of murders that we have on an escalating basis is dealing with terrorism," the ex-soldier argued.

"I feel that it is not possible for us to deal with the terrorists in the same way that civil society would deal with criminals," Thwaites said. "I would like to say that the PSOJ fully supports the implementation of the crime bills that are before the House.

"We are not lawyers and therefore we cannot say whether they are absolutely correct legally, but we support the objective and would like to see them enacted in the shortest time."