Editorial | Yes, to targeting dons

An analysis last week by Prime Minister Andrew Holness of the key drivers of criminality in his parliamentary constituency, should increase confidence that the Jamaican State can deal with the island’s crime problem without draconian measures that threaten individual rights and freedoms.

In other words, given Mr Holness’ conclusions, there is no need – notwithstanding Jamaica’s high incidence of mass homicides – for the detention of mainly young men, who are suspected to be perpetrators of crime. Taking the PM’s analysis to its logical conclusion, what is required is the specific targeting of a handful of gang bosses by the security forces.

At last count, there were little over 30,000 registered voters in Mr Holness’ St Andrew West Central constituency, where last Thursday, on Olympic Way, he presided at the groundbreaking of a multi-use community centre.

Of the people who live in the constituency, Mr Holness asked his audience rhetorically, “How many of them do you think are criminals, are murderers?”

His answer: “I can tell you, no more than 20.”

Once these hard cases are removed, Mr Holness reasons, their hangers-on will dissipate and their gangs will crumble.

The prime minister explained further: “You have some jingbangs (hangers-on) that follow them around … . When the dons are gone, the jingbangs will run away.

“But the real hardcore criminals, there are no more than 20 … . If you were able to target those 20, it would release the 30,000 people who are suffering under them – people ...captured by them, destroying the community.”

CRIME-SUPPRESSION STRATEGY

Jamaica’s problem of crime, especially homicides, is well known. Indeed, while reported murders have declined by 17 per cent so far this year, the police, up to December 7, had logged 1,085 killings. The murder count for all of 2023 was 1,393. This level of murder gives Jamaica one of the world’s highest homicides rates, at 51 per 100,000 in 2023.

The police attribute around two-thirds of these killings to gangs, which are primarily based in inner-city areas like Mr Holness’ constituency, where they run extortion rackets, including the lottery scams in which foreigners, mostly elderly Americans, are told that they have to send money to Jamaica to pay domestic taxes and other expenses before their winnings can be released.

The gangs fight over turf, or for access to the so-called ‘lead sheets’, documents with the biographical information of potential victims. Scores of gangs, the police say, operate across the island.

While the constabulary has in recent times used a special anti-gang legislation to gain long jail sentences for several gang members, the Government’s primary crime- suppression strategy for the past six years has been the localised declaration of states of emergency (SOEs), giving the security forces sweeping powers of arrest and detention.

A number of detainees have challenged, and won, the application of those powers in early SOEs, but now the political Opposition has asked the court to say that states of emergency were not intended for use as an ongoing crime-fighting tool.

However, the question of how the Government confronts the problem has taken a new turn in recent months in the face of a rash of shootings, with multiple victims, at community events.

INTERESTED IN MASTERMINDS

While Prime Minister Holness has in the past said he had no intention of emulating El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele in using emergency powers to detain tens of thousands of suspected gang members, recent remarks by leading government officials have caused questions of whether the administration might be changing its mind.

After one multiple shooting last month, Justice Minister Delroy Chuck said: “There comes a point when you have to make decisions. And if the gangs of this country feel that they can take control of communities and kill as they feel, then the government of this country, the prime minister, the minister of justice and the minister of national security minister, will have to lock up a whole heap of people, using the state of emergency, if we are to ensure that people of the country are protected.”

In El Salvador, the homicide rate, according to official data, has tumbled to 2.4 per 100,000 since President Bukele’s imposition of the state of emergency in 2022, detaining, human-rights groups say, between 78,000 and 102,000 people, or between 1.2 per cent to 1.6 per cent of the country’s population.

He has also removed experienced judges and stacked the judiciary with government-friendly judges and prosecutors, scrapped freedom of information laws, as well as an anti-corruption agency.

While lowering the crime rate has been popular, helping to win Mr Bukele a second term as president, Salvadorans have a complicated relationship with the measures. Up to two-thirds believe that large numbers of innocent people are detained. Many admit to fear being carted off to detention innocently, and human-rights groups say that at least 40,000 children are effectively orphaned and left in precarious family care because both parents are, or one of their parents is, in detention.

If Jamaica were to follow El Salvador and detain people in the same ratio, it would mean taking between 32,000 and 42,000 in custody. But the impact would be even more exaggerated, given that the vast majority of the detainees would likely be young men.

Happily, Mr Holness does not seem to see El Salvador as a viable model for solving Jamaica’s crime problem. He said last week: “Who we are interested in are the masterminds, the people who pull the trigger. Those are the ones we want.”