21st Century Crime Fighting: CRIME APP

The Jamaica Constabulary Force, I believe needs to employ modern strategy in the campaign against crime. I would like to propose as part of any future initiative addressing crime, that the JCF considers implementing Crime Applications(APPs) for Smart Phones as to best start empowering and engaging citizens. As any Smartphone user will tell you, the Smartphone’s application store is the go to place for tools to make your Smartphone even smarter. Do you want the song playing in the department store on your playlist? Download Shazam. Want to find a telephone number? Get the YellowPages or RedBook app. Want to have the Cashpot Chart at fingertips? Get the Supreme Ventures app. But can an application provide women and students with the tools to empower themselves and help strengthen law enforcement? The creation of a Jamaican Crime application manage by MOCA and INDECOM, regulated by the relevant government agencies and monitored by JFJ would go along way to enable citizens, activists and local actors to take action to improve their communities. By employing the latest in mobile technology to provide urban populations with fast, discrete, and intelligent safety assistance to conveniently help them report and prevent crimes for the 21st century.

Users of a Jamaican Crime App could potentially report an ongoing crime with the push of a button. A package of information including the location of the crime, photo, video, audio, and text description of the crime are sent to authorities immediately. The application also allows for users to report crime ANONYMOUSLY so that they may continue with their busy lives knowing that with a push of a button, police will know and have everything to pursue the criminal. Ordinary users become the eyes and ears of authorities. Submitted issues could be displayed on the city's map, so citizens are aware of crime hot-spots.

There are often tense situations when calling the police is not an option. There are other times when inconvenience or fear of reprisal prevents one from reporting an incident, featuring the ability to take a photo, record video and audio, and provide a description of the incident, citizens could be assured that their phone has the capability to alert family, friends, and the authorities at the push of a button, should a threat arise.

The application would be especially useful to high school and college students, who often find themselves walking back from class late at night, or the victim of sexual assault. What is key, is that the App would empower the average citizen and ordinary bystanders, to report crime instead of ignoring it.

Local law enforcement organizations are expected to tailor their services to suit the citizenry it intends to serve and protect. In today’s world, everything is going mobile… why not crime prevention? Jamaica's local authorities need a 21st century make-over when it comes to reporting and preventing crimes.

Now... while mobile apps are the most obvious example of how organizations are responding to the public's demands. With reduced budgets, there is no denying that making sure public services and information can be delivered via a mobile phone in an accessible way, whilst keeping up with changes in technology is a hard task... there are a variety of projects of this nature in action today all across the world in a variety of nationalities and municipalities, many of them using OPEN SOURCE options.

Once again... it is therefore incumbent on our relevant ministries and national constabulary to explore these options earnestly and zealously. For a truly user-centered digital application, adapted to the needs of local communities can quickly and affordably achieved, as well as possibly effecting much change and altering our social climate. We must now think local and act global!

Are We Independent? Montegonian Exclusive

AFTER 50 years, we have not really released our vestiges of the Crown in England. Granted, Mrs Simpson Miller has made the gesture towards a break with the Crown, but I cannot help but feel it is just political talk, pandering to the public. We still have a representative of the Queen as an influential part of the state, the governor general. We still have British ceremonials in Parliament, we still have appeals to the British courts. We are a part of their Commonwealth, we still have the remnants of their laws. Are we really independent of England?

After our recent return to the International Monetary Fund and our leaders begging on a world tour, are we financially independent? Our money is printed in mints in England and is backed by debt and United States dollars, which is losing its footing as world currency. How can one really say we are independent? What are we celebrating this 50th anniversary?

How are we independent when we are slaves to the foreign media, especially the 'mighty' Uncle Sam? We are dependent on imports from the USA; we depend on their food, their clothes, even their entertainment.

How are we independent when we subscribe to the neoliberalist policies of globalisation that insist on lessening the powers and sovereignty of the state, and the continuous breakdown of international barriers? How are we independent when foreigners own our electrical supplies, our airports, our mining plants? What are we independent of?

Bound by handcuffs

Are we not bound by so many handcuffs of ever-growing poverty, illiteracy, unemployment, crime, men-women inequality, limited technology and, worst of all, which result in other bounding forces too - corruption?

In the word of Kahlil Gibran ... "Pity the nation that wears a cloth it does not weave, eats a bread it does not harvest, and drinks a wine that flows not from its own wine press. Pity the nation that acclaims the bully as hero, and that deems the glittering conqueror bountiful. Pity the nation that raises not its voice save when it walks in a funeral, boasts not except among its ruins, and will rebel not save when its neck is laid between the sword and the block. Pity the nation whose statesman is a fox, whose philosopher is a juggler, and whose art is the art of patching and mimicking. Pity the nation that welcomes its new ruler with trumpeting, and farewells him with hooting, only to welcome another with trumpeting again. Pity the nation divided into fragments, each fragment deeming itself a nation."

Yannick Pessoa
YannickPessoa@yahoo.com

Montegonian Toons

Montegonian Editorial Exclusive: POLITICIANS CRIMINALISING JAMAICANS

The atrophy of socialism, social welfare, the welfare state and the growth of the penal state represent a double criminalization of poverty. Criminalising Survival, Vending, Hustling, Small Businesses, Corner Shops, Street Life Street People Street Hustling... Street children might not be securely lodged in the life-patterns that the middle class impose on young people, but their reward from trying to maintain a minimum standard of living that their parents and governments are unable to provide them is infinitely preferable to living in the absolute poverty that surrounds them, yet police and state will incarcerate them... in juvenile centres and later on in life in BIG PRISON... We know there is a Marginalised Black male, A lack of opportunity, a lack of education, a lack of funds and lack of land and access to it. We born in Jamaica and then they say you are a squatter, "wah mi supposed to do, born and float above the ground, since me cannot get any plot of land via birth right. rent an existence forever"

The government needs to stop seeing the people as a mass of cattle for culling taxes and revenue! The poor appear to be just another commodity, good, product... to be speculated, traded and profited from by the gang of bankers and political cronies

This folly continues by using a stance on Weed and drugs as an excuse to systematically incarcerate even non-violent youth. Black religious expression and such is facing serious repression. while court houses and tax office are cash collectors. They take much and give us so little.

The transition from welfare to taxfare and the proliferation of young bodies behind bars taken together work to marginalize Jamaica's black poor population, with an economy forcing them out of Jobs and no public aid, on the one side, and holding them under lock, on the other, and eventually pushing them into the peripheral [and deeply precarious] sectors of the labor market and farther on the road to poverty

We don't live in a direct or indirect democracy, in reality. We live in a police state, controlled by oligarchic forces, a two head serpent. The heads of state lack the will to HELP people out of poverty. instead we have generation that go from Cradle to Prison...

 This country is based on slavery and land grabs by a small plantocrasy. Had they been decent people, to begin with this plantation class would have asked for permission to share this land with the Tainos and or Arawaks. Instead, through force and genocide they took the land and resources and divided them up, as they did again after emancipendence, when they divided the land and this country among the descendants of slave masters and the indentured labourers and buffer classes, just as we do now by letting the wealthy determine the laws and by making slaves of the have-nots, through debt and financial slavery and usury.

If Jamaica is ever to be fixed... land reform, education reform, energy reform, economic  and spiritual reform are now absolutely necessary!

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