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Unsafe any and everywhere
Geof Brown
Friday, December 21, 2007
I never thought this column would ever come to the place where my topic is the pervading sense of lack of safety, a place to which we have come in this country. And it is hardly a topic to raise at this time in the season of goodwill.
Geof Brown
But we do ourselves little good by hiding our heads in the sands of illusion, ostrich-like, when stark reality stares us in the face. It is by facing the truth about our state that we may help to galvanise our collective will to take remedial action. Jamaica has never felt so unsafe, in my personal experience. And I am echoing the same sentiment of what I believe is the sense of the vast majority of Jamaicans.
Front-page news in one of yesterday's daily newspapers tells of at least three doctors being robbed at Tangerine Medical Centre, an upscale facility in what used to be the relatively safe almost sacrosanct location uptown.
At the same location, several staff have been robbed at gunpoint. In addition, two technicians were abducted and taken - not to some inner-city lair - but to Paddington Terrace in Barbican, an uptown residential area, by any test. There the two were beaten and shot. They are now in hospital. One surmises they were beaten to extract inner-working information which would be useful for the further exploits of the robbers in their future forays.
In another location which formerly would be a safe haven, two young women, students of the University of Technology (UTECH) returning from an end-of-term fete last week, were shot on the campus of the University of the West Indies (UWI) One was killed and the other hospitalised in serious condition. They were not even robbed. An attending surgeon tells me that the shooter hailed the girls who were in a group, but the girls ran when they saw him reaching for a gun at his waist. The girls were promptly sprayed with bullets. I mention these two incidents because the popular perception is that such daring criminal gun incidents take place mainly in the inner-city areas of the capital city.
Two weeks ago, a sergeant of police, travelling in uniform in a marked police car in Montego Bay, was shot with a high-powered weapon, dragged from his vehicle, further mutilated by bullets, his weapon and bullet-proof vest removed, and his body thrown into a gutter.
Last week the chief suspect, with whom the stolen personal items of the dead sergeant were found, was himself gunned down by a police squad. Who was he? The reports say he was a 15-year-old boy. Where was he located? Not, as you might think, in some inner-city hideout. No, it was in a fine, upscale home in the usually quiet town of Moneague in the parish of St Ann.
The barefacedness of the new crop of youthful gunmen is astounding. No longer do they tend to operate under the cover of darkness. In fact, there have been several instances of gunmen stalking their quarry and shooting them in crowded areas. In one case, it was in the crowd watching a football match. In the case of the sergeant mentioned above, the deed was committed in front of many witnesses who were up and about before 9:00 am.
Of another sort are the robberies taking place in residential areas by daring burglars who break into homes with seeming impunity. On my own quiet street in the Hope Pastures area of the Kingston and St Andrew suburb, a burglar broke a window, fished out the house keys from an inner table and then robbed several rooms in the household while the residents slept.
He even went into the master bedroom and robbed wallets, cell phones and other personal items on both sides of the bed on which the owner/couple slept. It is believed that this is the same daring burglar who removed both my wallet and my cellphone from my pockets while I dozed in my home office. Hardly a home on the street has been spared. He has robbed my home on at least three occasions, despite the prominent sign on the front gate naming the security firm which guards my home. I have encountered him face to face in the house as he carried out his daring house search.
That kind of burglar is reminiscent of the old-style cat burglar who was a danger mostly to himself. But now my neighbours and myself no longer dismiss that kind of unarmed thief as a nuisance. Guns have become so prevalent in Jamaica that street boys who can't afford the next meal may have one.
So no longer can one rely on the burglar being unarmed. Let us recognise what is happening. Between some unscrupulous politicians (documented in studies), some inner-city dons (reliably reported) and some popular "culcha" musicians ( heard in performance exhorting violence and reliably reported), guns are flowing freely into the country and falling into the wrong hands. The illegal drug trade feeds the exchange, and turf wars between rival gangs complete the picture.
Thus no one is assuredly safe anywhere anytime irrespective of status or location. How will this country be saved?
browngeof@hotmail.com or geofbrown07@gmail.com
Geof Brown
Friday, December 21, 2007
I never thought this column would ever come to the place where my topic is the pervading sense of lack of safety, a place to which we have come in this country. And it is hardly a topic to raise at this time in the season of goodwill.
Geof Brown But we do ourselves little good by hiding our heads in the sands of illusion, ostrich-like, when stark reality stares us in the face. It is by facing the truth about our state that we may help to galvanise our collective will to take remedial action. Jamaica has never felt so unsafe, in my personal experience. And I am echoing the same sentiment of what I believe is the sense of the vast majority of Jamaicans.
Front-page news in one of yesterday's daily newspapers tells of at least three doctors being robbed at Tangerine Medical Centre, an upscale facility in what used to be the relatively safe almost sacrosanct location uptown.
At the same location, several staff have been robbed at gunpoint. In addition, two technicians were abducted and taken - not to some inner-city lair - but to Paddington Terrace in Barbican, an uptown residential area, by any test. There the two were beaten and shot. They are now in hospital. One surmises they were beaten to extract inner-working information which would be useful for the further exploits of the robbers in their future forays.
In another location which formerly would be a safe haven, two young women, students of the University of Technology (UTECH) returning from an end-of-term fete last week, were shot on the campus of the University of the West Indies (UWI) One was killed and the other hospitalised in serious condition. They were not even robbed. An attending surgeon tells me that the shooter hailed the girls who were in a group, but the girls ran when they saw him reaching for a gun at his waist. The girls were promptly sprayed with bullets. I mention these two incidents because the popular perception is that such daring criminal gun incidents take place mainly in the inner-city areas of the capital city.
Two weeks ago, a sergeant of police, travelling in uniform in a marked police car in Montego Bay, was shot with a high-powered weapon, dragged from his vehicle, further mutilated by bullets, his weapon and bullet-proof vest removed, and his body thrown into a gutter.
Last week the chief suspect, with whom the stolen personal items of the dead sergeant were found, was himself gunned down by a police squad. Who was he? The reports say he was a 15-year-old boy. Where was he located? Not, as you might think, in some inner-city hideout. No, it was in a fine, upscale home in the usually quiet town of Moneague in the parish of St Ann.
The barefacedness of the new crop of youthful gunmen is astounding. No longer do they tend to operate under the cover of darkness. In fact, there have been several instances of gunmen stalking their quarry and shooting them in crowded areas. In one case, it was in the crowd watching a football match. In the case of the sergeant mentioned above, the deed was committed in front of many witnesses who were up and about before 9:00 am.
Of another sort are the robberies taking place in residential areas by daring burglars who break into homes with seeming impunity. On my own quiet street in the Hope Pastures area of the Kingston and St Andrew suburb, a burglar broke a window, fished out the house keys from an inner table and then robbed several rooms in the household while the residents slept.
He even went into the master bedroom and robbed wallets, cell phones and other personal items on both sides of the bed on which the owner/couple slept. It is believed that this is the same daring burglar who removed both my wallet and my cellphone from my pockets while I dozed in my home office. Hardly a home on the street has been spared. He has robbed my home on at least three occasions, despite the prominent sign on the front gate naming the security firm which guards my home. I have encountered him face to face in the house as he carried out his daring house search.
That kind of burglar is reminiscent of the old-style cat burglar who was a danger mostly to himself. But now my neighbours and myself no longer dismiss that kind of unarmed thief as a nuisance. Guns have become so prevalent in Jamaica that street boys who can't afford the next meal may have one.
So no longer can one rely on the burglar being unarmed. Let us recognise what is happening. Between some unscrupulous politicians (documented in studies), some inner-city dons (reliably reported) and some popular "culcha" musicians ( heard in performance exhorting violence and reliably reported), guns are flowing freely into the country and falling into the wrong hands. The illegal drug trade feeds the exchange, and turf wars between rival gangs complete the picture.
Thus no one is assuredly safe anywhere anytime irrespective of status or location. How will this country be saved?
browngeof@hotmail.com or geofbrown07@gmail.com
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