Golding Screaming About Human Rights. Let’s Remind Him of Braeton 7!

[00:00:00]Crime remains the most potent political weapon in Jamaica.

[00:00:04]When the opposition, whether PNP or GLP, wants to paint the sitting government as incompetent, they point to a skyrocketing murder rate and scream that the state is failing to protect its citizens from criminals. But the moment the government tries to push back hard against those criminals, the opposition pivots immediately to highlight police excesses, screaming about human rights violations to make the administration look reckless. Now, we see opposition leader Mark Golding screaming about human rights concerns following a recent spike in fatal police shootings, but let us be real. Nobody expects a cold-blooded killer or a gang member to respect human rights. They are criminals. By definition, they break the law, destroy lives, and operate in total darkness. The only expectation society has for them is that they should be hunted down, arrested, and locked away forever. The police, on the other hand, represent the state. They are paid by taxpayers to uphold the law, and they carry a government badge. Because they represent the constitution, society holds them to a completely different legal and moral standard. If the state starts executing people on the street without a trial, the law itself collapses. However, let us remind Mark Golding and Zuleka Jess of the historical receipts. Jamaicans for Justice, JFJ, was birthed in 1999 under a PNP government because of state-sanctioned atrocities like the Braeton Seven in 2001, where seven youths were shot dead in a house in St. Catherine, and the Crawl killings right in Clarendon in 2003, where four people, including two women, were killed. Those operational executions were carried out by Senior Superintendent Reneto Adams and his infamous Crime Management Unit, the CMU. The outcry was so severe that the PNP administration was forced to disband the CMU entirely in 2003, and Adams, along with several of his officers, was arrested and charged with murder for the Krall incident, though they were ultimately acquitted by a jury in 2005.

[00:02:03]The historical pattern is clear. When the PNP is in power and facing crazy high murder rates, they deploy heavy-handed police tactics, use harsh suppression strategies, and essentially tell human rights groups to back off so the police can do their work. Yet today, with a labor right administration in power, the moment a minister states that the police have the right to use reasonable force to apprehend fleeing suspects, Mark Golding and Zuleka Jess suddenly remember the 2011 Charter of Rights. They instantly stand up as champions of the Constitution and accuse the government of promoting state-sanctioned murder. The human rights concern has always been a constant grim reality on the ground in Jamaica, but history proves that how loudly a political party cares about it depends entirely on one thing, whether they are trying to run the country or trying to win an election.