GILLIAN LUCKY

It seems that when it comes to the fight against crime, many be­lieve that the on­ly so­lu­tion is di­vine in­ter­ven­tion.

But those with such be­liefs bet­ter think again or hold their tongues for just re­cent­ly the Ja­maican Min­is­ter of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty, Mr Pe­ter Bunting, re­ceived mixed re­ac­tions for his state­ment, when speak­ing at the North­ern Caribbean Uni­ver­si­ty, that he was con­vinced that "the best ef­forts of the se­cu­ri­ty forces by it­self will not solve the crime prob­lem in Ja­maica, but it is go­ing to take di­vine in­ter­ven­tion, touch­ing the hearts of a wide cross sec­tion of the so­ci­ety."

That his ref­er­ence and re­liance on the almighty would be­come a ma­jor sub­ject for the print, elec­tron­ic and so­cial me­dia might sur­prise many of us here be­cause the ut­ter­ance, on the face of it, does not ap­pear of­fen­sive.But there was ad­verse com­ment made by var­i­ous mem­bers of the Ja­maican pub­lic about the in­sen­si­tiv­i­ty and in­ap­pro­pri­ate­ness of Bunting's as­sess­ment of the way for­ward in re­duc­ing crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ty.

Pres­i­dent of the UWI Guild of Stu­dents, Ter­ron De­war, is re­port­ed as say­ing that the min­is­ter ought to have giv­en words of as­sur­ance to the pub­lic, along the lines that "right now we are hav­ing some dif­fi­cul­ties, but we have a few more tricks up our sleeves."Might I say that the use of the word "tricks," es­pe­cial­ly by politi­cians, would not be ad­vis­able.Sev­er­al in­ter­est groups and stake­hold­ers chas­tised the min­is­ter for his re­mark which, in their view, sug­gest­ed that the min­is­ter had con­ced­ed de­feat in the fight against crime.

Some in­di­vid­u­als ac­cused the min­is­ter of send­ing the wrong sig­nal to the law-abid­ing pop­u­la­tion with a mes­sage of lost hope in bring­ing crime un­der con­trol.And oth­ers went so far as to de­mand that Mr Bunting re­sign be­cause his ut­ter­ance means that he is not up to the task of fight­ing crime.

Sec­ond Look

Based on the vol­ume of ob­jec­tion raised about the state­ment, I de­cid­ed to re­view the re­mark with the great­est ob­jec­tiv­i­ty and with­in its con­tex­tu­al pa­ra­me­ters.Ini­tial­ly, I could not un­der­stand the jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for lam­bast­ing the min­is­ter who, up­on read­ing the words, may well be com­mend­ed for en­dors­ing the be­lief 'that God helps those who help them­selves."

And while that in­ter­pre­ta­tion may not find favour with athe­ists and ag­nos­tics, the min­is­ter was speak­ing to cit­i­zens who be­long to a coun­try that has the most church­es per square mile.

But af­ter mak­ing the state­ment, the min­is­ter went on to say, "I am not em­bar­rassed to say that right now, as Min­is­ter of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty, I am go­ing through a kind of a dark night of the soul. We are try­ing hard as a min­istry...I see men and women of the se­cu­ri­ty forces try­ing very hard. I see the lead­er­ship both of the po­lice and mil­i­tary work­ing hard and so much ef­fort is be­ing made and yet so lit­tle head­way, such slow head­way is com­ing out in the sta­tis­tics."

And that is where the min­is­ter ran in­to prob­lems. Hav­ing ex­plained the re­al­i­ty of the crime sit­u­a­tion, he should have at least in­di­cat­ed whether plans were be­ing im­ple­ment­ed to ad­dress the mat­ter and if so, the time line for such im­ple­men­ta­tion.

Slow Re­treat

The min­is­ter, in his de­fence to crit­ics, re­spond­ed, as re­port­ed in the Ja­maica Glean­er, "that his state­ment was in no way in­tend­ed to sig­nal any po­si­tion of re­treat, but rather an af­fir­ma­tion of the con­tri­bu­tion of a faith�based sys­tem shared by a ma­jor­i­ty of Ja­maicans."As stat­ed be­fore, had the min­is­ter not pro­ceed­ed with paint­ing a pic­ture of gloom and doom with no light at the end of the tun­nel, his ex­pla­na­tion would have served to ap­pease those who were con­cerned about his neg­a­tive re­marks.

Per­haps the les­son to be learnt by politi­cians is that the cit­i­zen­ry ex­pects to hear the truth but equal­ly an­tic­i­pates that if the news is bad, that things are in place to rem­e­dy or han­dle the sit­u­a­tion.There­fore, one can un­der­stand the rea­son for the ex­treme re­ac­tion that a res­ig­na­tion was in or­der, bear­ing in mind that the min­is­ter ap­peared to have con­ced­ed de­feat in a war in which he has been giv­en the lead role.

To save face and ob­vi­ous­ly grace, the min­is­ter has since clar­i­fied that "for the record, I want to as­sure all Ja­maica that, far from re­treat­ing, there is in­creased de­ter­mi­na­tion on my part as min­is­ter, and on the part of the ad­min­is­tra­tion I rep­re­sent, to con­front and re­move the mon­ster of crime and vi­o­lence from our midst."The weight that will be giv­en to these words will de­pend, of course, on the abil­i­ty of the min­is­ter to make sig­nif­i­cant strides in the fight against crime.

And the whole of Ja­maica will have their eyes glued on his per­for­mance.