“Come to Jamaica…” the ads say to North American tourists enchanted with reggae music and visions of sun, sand and sea.
But the reality is something far, far different and the Jamaicans don’t “…feel all right.”
A 24-hour curfew has been in effect for parts of Kingston for months, and military patrols are a common sight. The government is offering no apologies for such a move, and even residents themselves are grateful.
Why?
An out-of-control crime wave. The Miami Herald quotes one resident as saying that “if they lifted (the curfew) tonight, by the weekend we’d have a war.”
Jamaica has one of the world’s highest murder rates, more than 1,000 killed last year alone, twice as many as in New York City, which has more than three times the population.
The expanding mayhem eventually forced a government crackdown, using the military to impose curfews and man checkpoints. And though 1,400 people were killed by Jamaican law enforcers over the past decade, most citizens today don’t seem to care, just desperate that something be done to control the country’s spiralling crime rate.
We offer this sobering account because, just by listening to the morning newscasts and reading our own pages, we get the impression that Nassau is becoming a city out of control. Just like Kingston, we are hearing of regular nightly shootouts, gang warfare, drive-by shootings, and neighbourhood riots. Young men on powerful motorbikes are everywhere.
Coughing up our hard-earned dollars to help pay for a foreign preacher’s jet-setting lifestyle will not do much to change things. But if we don’t change, people in other countries will soon be writing editorials about how the Bahamian TV ads don’t square with our own wild west reality.
Editorial, The Nassau Guardian
