Editorial | Provide state of emergency data, analysis

With the naming of the review tribunal for persons detained or restricted under emergency powers in east Kingston, it is opportune that we again urge greater transparency by the authorities in how they assess the efficacy in these enhanced powers in crime-fighting. Or, more to the point, we would like to hear what elements of the states or emergency work best, and how.

We are, of course, surprised that this latest tribunal was so belatedly established, a full month after a declaration of the east Kingston emergency – the eighth in the island – given that the Government has, for the better part of two years, consistently employed these powers in its effort to get a grip on Jamaica’s crime problem. For while inherent in the declaration of a state of public emergency is the potential for the infringement, for a time, of individual rights, the tribunals are, in effect, the state’s assurance of good faith and its willingness to hold itself to some account when, in the circumstance, it encroaches on people’s freedoms.

In that regard, we would expect that the appointment, and readiness, of these review tribunals should be contemporaneous with the declaration of a state of emergency. Further, their role and functions, and how they can be engaged, should be aggressively promoted to the public.

In essence, when a state of public emergency is declared, authority is ceded to the political executive – de jure the governor general – to establish regulations (laws) for its operation, without immediate recourse to Parliament. Under the regulations that govern those currently in place, the authorities can engineer to detain persons, without charge, for the entire period of the emergency, which, after an initial 14 days, Parliament, with the appropriate majority, can periodically extend for as long as it wishes. Further, people’s movement can be proscribed under the measures.

MOST DETAINEES UNDER SOE ARE POOR

The upside, though, is that people who have been detained, or have had their movements restricted, can complain to, and heard by, the review tribunal, whose findings may or may not be entertained by the minister. Unfortunately, information of such complaints, if there are any, and their outcomes, isn’t readily, or widely, disclosed. Further, we suspect that most persons detained under the states of public emergency, often poor, unsophisticated and undereducated young men, are either ignorant of the tribunals or lack the capacity, or resources, to access them.

There is something else that, perhaps more widely, shapes people’s perception of a state of emergency in operation. They see the deployment of soldiers and police in the communities, searching, and sometimes detaining persons, and generally keeping order. Longer-term arrests and detentions are not in people’s consciousness.

While homicides, after 2019 three per cent rise, are currently running at 10 per cent ahead of the corresponding period in 2019, the authorities say that the numbers are, in fact, down in the police division where states of emergency have been declared. Moreover, they point to the 22 per cent reduction of 2018, led by a 70 per drop in the parish of St James.

What they authorities have not offered is a robust analysis of what in the states of emergency that accounts for the successes in those areas where the successes are claimed. The limited data available suggest that the vast majority of the persons who are detained – more than 90 per cent – are held for mostly insignificant offences. They are released after a relatively short, but socially disruptive, time in jail. These operations, as government parliamentarian Everard Warmington observed recently, may not be as targeted and as surgical as they ought to be.

Moreover, there is the question of whether it is the deterrent effect of additional police and soldiers on the streets that accounts for the reduction in homicides, and other crimes. States of emergency are not required for such deployments. The analysis should be available for discussion and debate.

Prime Minister Andrew Holness has said that states of emergency could be a government policy for up to seven years. But with diminishing returns seeming to set in, a serious review of the strategy, and of the dangers of surrendering constitutional rights, even in benign circumstances, should be on the agenda.