The Time is the Crime
on George Hamilton (Jamaica), 18/Sep/2011 16:54, 34 days ago
I read the two Jamaican crime stories below, and it was like I went charging into the arena after a red cape.Unexpectedly the target I eventually hit was not the one I originally pursued, but something more important. A misinterpreted word had sent me on my Quixotic quest.Being Canadian I think of igloos as looking like this one below the Northern Lights.So naturally I was intrigued by this following Jamaican news article. It was the first of two crime stories that grabbed my attention that day."A Maroon Town, St James, resident (name withheld to protect the innocent) accused of stealing an igloo valued at US$5,000 was offered bail in the Montego Bay Resident Magistrate's Court on Monday. The accused man, a juice vendor, was offered $50,000 bail with up to two sureties. He pleaded not guilty to simple larceny and receiving stolen property and was also instructed to submit his fingerprints to the police. http://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20110917/lead/lead8.htmlMy first thoughts after reading it was "Wow that's incredible. He was able to steal the igloo and get it home before it melted away into a pool of water in sunny, hot Jamaica. Similarly, the police must have showed up really quickly while there was still some solid evidence remaining".Unknown to me there were more types of Jamaican igloos than in an arctic subdivision. The next picture is also an igloo, but its price and weight means it couldn't possibly be the type of igloo that was stolen.This is the J$70,000,000 (roughly US$80,000) igloo being built . http://www.first-magazine.net/2008/06/building-your-dream-caribbean-home-make-it-an-igloo/I had the feeling that neither of the above two were correct so I went to the local equivalent of Home Depot or Rona. I was directed to this more plausible object that is a Jamaican igloo and it costs about J$5,000.That made more sense for something that a juice vendor might want to steal. My thoughts of an igloo being a cooled-down sofa-sized thing you could escape into in order to cool off in an un-air conditioned apartment in the tropics were not to be.And here's the other story really blew me away at the time."Vanished! - 3,000 chairs missing from MBCCPM requests police probeBY INGRID BROWN Senior Staff Reporter browni@jamaicaobserver.comFriday, September 16, 2011PRIME Minister Bruce Golding has ordered that the police be called in to investigate the disappearance of 3,000 chairs and 70,000 square feet of carpeting which were in the custody of the Urban Development Corporation (UDC) at the newly constructed Montego Bay Convention Centre in St James.The US$62,000 worth of items were leased from a supplier in Puerto Rico by the Jamaica Hotel and Tourist Association (JHTA) in January for use at Caribbean Marketplace -- the first event to be held at the facility".http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/news/VANISHED--3-000-chairs-missing-from-MoBay-Convention-Centre_9720386Three thousand chairs, or over 300 stacks the size of the above, went missing into thin air. Now in China or India with hundreds of thousands of square miles of land and populations in the hundreds of million that might be understandable, but in the small island of Jamaica that has 5,000,000 people, is mainly empty countryside, and is only 140 miles long, where could the chairs have possibly gone?The only places I recall I seeing big piles of stackable chairs were in the outdoor Jamaican churches I sometimes drive by going to the Fort Clarence beach. But it would have been un-Christian to accuse the churches without proof.The only other thought I had was that for inexplicable reasons somebody threw them into a deep remote sinkhole? Here's an example of a sink hole at the Blue Hole mineral springs.My first guess proved more accurate. Soon after the PM's request to the police, a church at the other end of Jamaica notified the authorities that it had some of the chairs. The carpets had not strayed as far and seemingly were mislaid around the convention centre itself.That's excellent. The Prime Minister's intervention fixed the problem in under two days.However, in the big scheme of things you can't get too excited about this success, because, after all, an igloo is just an igloo, and a chair is just a chair even though it comes with 2,999 of its buddies.But there are crimes you can get excited about. I use a particular bus stop, located directly across the street from the Liguanea police station, on Old Hope Road usually five times a week. One day, a couple of blind people waiting there were run over and killed by a car that had swerved over from the other side of the road. Many others were injured by this upscale Toyota sedan. It seems that there is no rush to see justice done even after nine months. http://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20110105/lead/lead2.htmlMore recently and somewhere else, Khajeel Mais took an ill-fated ride with the type of taxi I might have used. There was some sort of altercation with the owner of a BMW after a fender-bender, perhaps. As the taxi fled away at least one shot was fired. Khajeel Mais in the taxi's back seat was killed. The owner of the BMW had a police registered firearm . For non-Jamaicans, the relevance of registered firearms is that the police have approved the issue of the weapon to a law-abiding, stable, respectable citizen.It may have been that coincidentally somebody else who had a grudge against the taxi driver was in the neighborhood at the time and pulled the trigger of a different gun. But whatever gun did the shooting, the killing bullet has disappeared. There's quite a story to all this and it gets curiouser and curiouser. For brevity's sake just read about it at this link. http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/news/Who-is-the-X6-killer-While missing chairs and igloos can be found, you can't bring people back to life. Jamaica must put a stop to these avoidable deaths. Maybe criminal prosecutions might prevent some in future?Jamaicans at all levels need to respect each other more and make Jamaica a safer place. The government needs to show that it is serious about prosecuting alleged criminals no matter their level in society.You could say that I had stopped bulling around and hit the important target - although not the first one I had thought of - I missed the red cape.It was strange the way this blog's topic changed from tangible objects to intangible ideas and values.