Crawford takes issue with Anti-gang Bill clause
GOVERNMENT Member of Parliament (MP) Damion Crawford has made a case for the throwing out of a clause in the Criminal Justice (Suppression of Criminal Organisations) Act which will effectively bar persons from producing, recording or performing songs that promote or facilitate the criminal activities of gangs.
Crawford, in a fevered debate on the Bill last Thursday during a meeting of the Joint Select Committee of Parliament, which is deliberating the provision, took issue in particular with the call from the police high command in August for the criminalising of lyrics, signs, recordings or performances promoting criminal activities of gangs.
Police Commissioner Owen Ellington, who headed the team of high-ranking officers before the committee in August, made the call after he was asked by National Security Minister Peter Bunting to speak to the importance of the current clause in the proposed Bill that is designed to criminalise songs with the explicit purpose of promoting the criminal activities and its effectiveness in the fight against organised crime.
Ellington, who presented a compilation of some 150 songs, said such songs were among “the measures used by criminal gangs to recruit members and to deter them from leaving and to intimidate witnesses and dissuade them from communicating with the police and to promote the kind of culture within the communities that will see informers and witnesses being visited with violence”.
But on Thursday, Crawford took umbrage to the commissioner’s arguments.
“If you should look at the examples that were given by the police force, not many showed reference to gangs, it only spoke to the use of guns or the killing of parents, so what is the purported base is not what the supporting documents are showing. If we should look at songs that glorify a particular gang you would have much less than a page,” Crawford argued.
According to the MP, artistes were more or less drawn into singing such songs because of economics and the palate of their fans.
“MIT (Major Investigation Taskforce) presented a book of songs as the basis for clause 15; clause 15 is not about violent songs in its intent, it’s not about whether or not a man can sing a song about bussing a gun, it’s about whether or not he endorses a gang. If that is so make it clear that the endorsement of a gang is now illegal in music,” Crawford said.
His arguments almost persuaded Bunting, who chairs the committee.
“I think you have made your point, maybe if everyone is in agreement we could just delete the clause and move on,” Bunting remarked.
However, that was not to be as Government members, Senators Wentworth Skeffery, Sophia Fraser-Binns, Norman Grant and Opposition member Senator Arthur Williams held that removing the clause would cripple the provision.
“The words of the section in my view are clear, it is not a generality…I accept that that kind of explicit lyrics is not allowed, free speech cannot allow you that kind of language in a song and I personally see nothing wrong with this clause,” Senator Arthur Williams contended.
Crawford, however, was not convinced arguing that only a handful of those songs presented by the police would be caught by the clause rendering the basis for their defence ‘flawed’.
“This was presented by MIT as the basis for clause 15 and that basis has no example of the intent we speak to. If Gaza was really a gang, both myself and Usain Bolt would have been charged because Usain came on the Internet and seh Gaza him seh, simply because of the artiste that he supports and I seh Gaza too. All I am saying is 15 is an attack on lyrics and not an attack on gangs and it needs to be in my mind, thrown out but reformed at least to reflect what Member Williams is saying,” he said.
Senator Williams, however, was adamant.
“It’s not the basis… it’s not that we are passing a law on the basis of what the police came with, that’s not so; they came to support a particular position and they took the songs,” he argued.
Bunting also had a defence.
“What that book of songs really supports, in my mind, is the violence and hatred being spewed, I would agree with you they don’t meet the definition in the clause but I think their point was just about how people are being bombarded with violence promoting the “informer fi dead’,” Bunting noted.
In the end, Bunting asked the team of technical experts from the Ministry of Justice to research further and advise the committee as to the route adopted by similar legislation elsewhere. The committee is also to be advised by behavioural specialists on the issue of evidence that such lyrics influenced criminal behaviour.
“One alternative is … make it more narrow and target hate speech,” Bunting suggested.