{"id":2289,"date":"2019-04-01T22:04:43","date_gmt":"2019-04-01T22:04:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/westernmirror.com\/?p=2289"},"modified":"2019-04-01T22:04:53","modified_gmt":"2019-04-01T22:04:53","slug":"bring-back-the-state-of-emergency","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/westernmirror.com\/?p=2289","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Bring back the State of Emergency!\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong><em>Michael Nattoo &#8211; <\/em><\/strong><em>Staff Reporter<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Last week, following Friday\u2019s report of some\neight persons being killed across sections of Western Jamaica, six more persons\nwere reported to have been cut down under violent circumstances, effectively\nmarking what has been one of the bloodiest periods in the West since the murder\nspike in 2018.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">As other instances of criminality continue to rise \u2013 to\ninclude a heist in a section of downtown Montego Bay last Thursday evening,\nwhere over 2 million dollars were reportedly stolen, some residents have\nexpressed that they are increasingly becoming fearful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cJah know bredda, St. James a gwaan bad enuh. Is like di man\ndem couldn\u2019t wait fi di State of Emergency fi gweh fi dem start wid dem\nfoolishness again. Mi soon cut enuh, caz mi nuh waa get ketch inna dis,\u201d\nexplained a man, who requested to be identified only as Cyril, in response to a\nquestion posed by the Western Mirror. \u201cUnu nuh see it? Unu nuh see how dem slap\nout di two man dem head back pon Barnett Street Thursday gone? You hear wa mi\nseh don\u2019t? Mi gone.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Cyril\u2019s view is just one of many shared with the Western\nMirror in a question-and-answer session recently.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cRight now, sir, as soon as sun go down, mi lock shop and\nhead home. Mi prefer lose money before mi lose mi life. Even when mi a go home,\nmi paranoid, and even after mi reach home, mi still paranoid. It hard to find\npeace these days, because how tings a run, you never know when somebody feel\nlike seh a your turn fi dead,\u201d shared *Cynthia, a bar operator in&nbsp; Trelawny. The 36-year-old woman also shared\nwith the Western Mirror that currently, she feels the best option is to get\naway from Jamaica. \u201cListen, I know they say foreign a nuh bed of roses, but mi\nhonestly feel like mi woulda do better anywhere but here. I\u2019ve lived in this\ncommunity all mi life, and if mi cyaa feel safe here, so what\u2019s the sense? Mi\nnuh know yaa man. It just sticky everywhere you turn.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">*Jevaughn, a 22-year-old&nbsp;\nuniversity student, had a different perspective on what\u2019s happening\nacross the West, and was quick to share it with this newsroom. \u201cI know it looks\nbad because it\u2019s all you hear about in the news, but, objectively speaking,\nthings are not as bad as they seem. If anything, we have a chance to stop\nthings from being as bad as they can be if we act fast. I do have doubts about\nwhether or not we can apply effective remedies, but even with that being the\ncase, things aren\u2019t that bad.\u201d The Business Management Studies student, when\nquizzed about whether or not he considered migrating as a result of the crime\nsituation, shared: \u201cNo. Well, to be honest, I do plan on migrating, but not\nbecause of the crime situation. It\u2019s actually a lot worst in some of the places\nwe look at as better options, such as the US. But no, I\u2019m not migrating because\nof crime. I\u2019m migrating because of a lack of reasonable employment options. Oh\nalso, most of my family is over in the States, so there\u2019s that too.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Evident in some of the responses were calls by some to reinstate\nthe State of Emergency. In one instance, a high school teacher, who requested\nto remain anonymous, appeared furious at the lack of reasonable substitutes to\ncrime-fighting, particularly in St. James. \u201cI teach in one of the schools where\nmajority of my students are from the inner-city areas, and though there are a\nfew of them who seem to glorify crime, there are also those who are deathly\nfearful for their lives. They do not feel safe, any at all. That makes it hard\nto deal with, and as an educator, that makes my job, and that of others, a lot\nmore difficult than it has to be. How do we expect our children to learn some\nof these complex subjects, when we have to spend a great deal of time trying to\nrehabilitate them from the crippling fear that haunts them? It\u2019s a shame that\nthe government hasn\u2019t seen it fit introduce an effective crime-fighting measure\nthat could approximate to the effect the State of Emergency has. It\u2019s one hell\nof a shame to be honest.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Though not all responses could be shared in these spaces, a\nnumber of them saw residents across the West begging for something to be done\nabout the spiraling crime rate. As one other resident expressed, \u201cThis feels a\nlot like in 2017 or 2018 when we were having all those murders and nothing was\nbeing done about it. What ended up happening was the West experiencing historic\nnumbers in murders and crimes. It looks like we headed back there. A time fi wi\nbring back the State of Emergency.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As other instances of criminality continue to rise \u2013 to include a heist in a section of downtown Montego Bay last Thursday evening, where over 2 million dollars were reportedly stolen, some residents have expressed that they are increasingly becoming fearful.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1069,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[392,30],"class_list":["post-2289","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-uncategorized","tag-crime-fighting","tag-western-jamaica"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/westernmirror.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2289","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/westernmirror.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/westernmirror.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/westernmirror.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/westernmirror.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2289"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/westernmirror.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2289\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2291,"href":"https:\/\/westernmirror.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2289\/revisions\/2291"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/westernmirror.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1069"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/westernmirror.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2289"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/westernmirror.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2289"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/westernmirror.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2289"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}