Sanitizing “Dog Paw”?
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On Monday, news broke that reputed gang leader Christopher Linton, known otherwise as “Dog Paw”, had been shot and killed following a confrontation with police. Linton who had been tagged with multiple murder and shooting charges was, in 2013, sentenced to 15 years for gun possession and shooting with intent at the police. Six years later, Linton and his co-accused were freed by the Court of Appeal as the Justices found that the identification evidence was unreliable. It appeared that once freed, Dawg-Paw returned to his old habits, resuming a reign of terror within the Papine, Kintyre, and Elletson Flats communities.
Interestingly, “Dog-Paw” had been moving in and among the up-town “brown-skinned” Jamaican community for quite some time to the extent that he sired a child with Leah Tavares-Finson in 2010. Such contact had more than provided him with multiple opportunities for self-development and him being parent to a child with the Tavares-Finsons’ offspring may have been the catalyst for the volume of responses. It is little wonder then that the news of his death lit up social media like a beacon with multiple apologists attempting to canonize him.
For openers, councillor for the Papine Division in Eastern St. Andrew, Venesha Phillips, stated in an interview on a popular talk show that “the life of crime that was led by slain gangster Christopher “Dog Paw” Linton highlights the need for better rehabilitation programs for convicted criminals.”
The same talk show heard views from founder of the Jamaica Environment Trust (JET), Diana McCaulay who contended that the wider society failed Linton during his formative years. According to McCaulay, she knew Linton as a promising child in the 1990s when he was still a student at St Hugh’s Prep in St Andrew. “He was a lovely young man with plenty potential, so I think the outcome is very sad. You know, I can’t speak to the crimes he committed – I have no knowledge of those – but as a youngster, he was lovely. I think we failed him; a long list of us and I include myself in that, failed him,” she said.
Diane Jobson, the lawyer who represented reputed gangster Christopher “Dog Paw” Linton from he was a teenager, is quoted in a newspaper report that “she found him to be charismatic and a natural-born leader.” According to the report, she said that it is “a pity that the society didn’t make good use of those characteristics … rather than treat him like a fugitive from justice, or a man that should be feared or gunned down like an animal.”
One commentator in giving his take on the saga wrote on his Facebook page that the Dawg Paw saga requires a Case Study. Under the heading – “Becoming Dog Paw” he wrote on Thursday of this week “I would love to get an understanding of how Dog Paw’s backstory from his childhood to up to two days ago when he died. I want to know, not because I want to be voyeuristic, but to understand the contributory factors leading to the formation of species of Jamaicans similar to him.”
The fact is that there are myriads of studies that have already been conducted and scholarly articles written and published by numerous social scientists and other professionals in Jamaica about murderers and other members of Jamaica’s criminal class. All this commentator needs to do is to perform an academic search.
It is difficult to argue against the fact that aspects of our social structure help in breeding our criminal culture. For starters, our secondary school system provides as central warehousing of candidates for the criminal class as more than a half of the population of secondary school graduates depart schools annually without a subject pass and with nowhere to go. That notwithstanding, only a handful embraces any kind of criminal lifestyle. Dog Paw’s story is no different from that of scores of other Jamaicans who chose to walk the criminal path including Vincent “Ivanhoe” Martin (1924–9 September 1948) and whose exploits spawned the Perry Henzel cult classic film The Harder They Come. Others in the lineup included Dennis “Copper” Barth (whose character was central to my own written work “Top Rankings-A Chronicle of The Origins of Jamaican Badness”), Claudius Massop, Anthony “Starkey” Tingle, among so many others. Not only do we know these men became killers but owing to the research work of the likes of Dr. Fred Hickling, Herbert Gayle, Geoffrey Walcott, and many others, we already know what to do.
If the intention of the discourse surrounding “Dog Paw’s” demise is to force the powers that be into rescuing our youth from similar outcomes, then it is one that is indeed welcome, and I hope the effort is taken all the way. If, however, the intent is merely to sanitize surviving relationships for the supposedly well-heeled class, then we are all just common hypocrites as no one speaks for the surviving family members of the victims of this man’s alleged murderous rampage.
Richard Hugh Blackford is a Jamaican creative artist residing in the United States.
