Does the prime minister understand the statistics?
Dear Editor,
I wanted to be fair to Prime Minister Andrew Holness when he said that the states of emergency (SOEs) are useful crime-fighting tools, and so I went to the Jamaica Constabulary Force’s (JCF) website to look at the murder rate since the Government began using SOEs in this manner.
The other night, as I was about to reach my what you would call somewhat gated community, because I could really live nowhere else in Jamaica and feel any semblance of safety, I saw police tape at an intersection and was told that a shooting occurred, but luckily no one was injured or, worst yet, killed.
It took the crime scene investigators over two hours to reach the location. They spent another 30 to 40 minutes taking all kinds of pictures, placing markers, and retrieving the spent shells before they left.
I am sure the spent shells will be useful because they do tell a tale, which brings me back to data gathering and statistics. The JCF’s website states the following:
Year Murders
2019 1,339
2020 1,323
2021 1,463
2022 1,481
Now I want to ask all high school students across Jamaica, not tertiary students, because this is statistics 100, not 101: Are these SOEs working?
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Holness recently told the nation that based on intelligence he is still authorising a failed concept to rein in murders.
People can say all they want and try somehow to obscure the hard facts, but the utterances of this prime minister, when compared to the statistics being presented, suggest that the Jamaica Labour Party needs a new leader, because “Brogad nah mek it.”
Mark Trought
marktrought@gmail.com