Imani Tafari-Ama | O for a sustainable crime plan!

Last week, I took a proverbial chill pill for a few days in Ocho Rios. From the room in which I stayed, I had an impressive view, which afforded me the opportunity to watch cruise ships come and go daily. Locals were also prominent participants of paid beach pleasure-seeking activities in my line of vision. The tourism sector is ticking over, and the visitor-arrival statistics look impressive, with two million stopover visitors recorded up to October 2022.

Watching the scenic comings and goings of foreign and local visitors to the tourism hub, I could not help thinking, though, that Jamaica is, indeed, a schizophrenic society. On the one hand, there is no doubt that this internationally acclaimed vacation destination has the attributes of paradise. And while stopover visitors are only exposed to the surface attractions, those who stay for longer trips can concur that the Rock deserves its reputation as a place of complex beauty. But there is another face of Jamaica that is ugly and denotes that there is trouble in paradise.

As 2022 closed, the annual reported murder figure has capitulated to the recent pattern, just shy of 1,500. How did we get here? We can and should connect the dots of the current bloodletting to the unfinished business of four centuries of the Maafa, the Holocaust of African enslavement and its enduring legacy. Prominent psychologist Professor Freddie Hickling was at pains to explain how that unresolved past manifests in present behaviours. He cited indicators of the unresolved trauma, including the inability to support oneself in adulthood, the “gal in a bungle” mentality (as sung by Beenie Man), and the use of violence to resolve conflicts, which results in ridiculously high rates of murder.

UNFULFILLED PROMISE

Over the past six decades, successive governments have proffered manifestos that promise tactics to tackle the crime problem. Present Prime Minister Andrew Holness’ campaign made the as-yet-unfulfilled promise that Jamaicans would be able to sleep with their doors open. This implied that a government led by him would have much influence on improving citizen security. Failure to deliver on this obligation is rooted in reticence to expose the correlation between violent expressions of masculinity and the manipulation of this construction of manhood by leaders of the practice of partisan politics in Jamaica, Land we Love.

Jamaica was jolted when roughly 800 persons were murdered in 1980. This extreme expression of partisan political violence erupted in the run-up to the general elections, which were lost by the Michael Manley-led Peoples’ National Party (PNP) and won by the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP), then led by Edward Seaga. After much hand-wringing and mouthing of philosophical platitudes about developing security strategies to curb the evolving gang and domestic violence, things settled into an ominous pattern. Since 1980, the annual murder rate has consistently exceeded 1,000, the benchmark used by the United Nations (UN) to ascribe war-like conditions to a country’s profile of conflict.

The monotonous regularity with which murders take place in Jamaica has earned it the dubious distinction of being among the top violence producers in the Caribbean and Latin American region. The Jamaica Constabulary Force’s (JCF’s) mapping of the murder rate since independence in 1962 shows the shocking escalation of murders in our modern history (https://jcf.gov.jm/stats/). Although not shown on the JCF graph, figures between 2019 and 2022 continued the trend of exceeding 1,400.

Analysts are today confronted with the conundrum of both attributing causes and conjugating the impact of this human haemorrhage. The productive strategy should be to devise suitable solutions to staunch this dysfunction. However, for over four decades, the pendulum rituals have swung back and forth between partisan models, which end up in divided debates about the effectiveness of Band-aid measures like states of emergency (SOEs). Anecdotal evidence suggests that there was a lull in the bloodletting while the World Cup competition was in full swing. Could it be that instead of or in tandem with SOEs, the state should engage creative measures that can provide alternative focal points for those involved in violent-death production?

IRONIC STORY

In Blood, Bullets and Bodies: Sexual Politics Below Jamaica’s Poverty Line, my thesis-turned-book (https://www.beatentrackpublishing.com/?n1=publications&id=273), I explored the disturbingly ironic story about how violence produced below the poverty line in a tourist paradise has turned a vacation haven into a living hell. It is a compelling story about how black bodies, male and female, of citizens from underserved communities, have become targets for high-powered-killing practice. It is a mystery about how various security plans have failed to find traction and produce sustainable solutions to the relentless flood of blood, bullets, and bodies.

In its analysis of Jamaica’s maelstrom of violence, Blood, Bullets and Bodies traces the knotty integration of socio-political, socio-economic, historical, and contemporary circumstances that has made crime and violence the number-one development problem in late 20th and early 21st-century Jamaica. It addresses the political economy of sex, violence, political intrigue, mass mental (psychosocial) manipulation, and generations of survival by any means necessary. The worst thing about this strange story is that it is indeed fact, not fiction. And at the time of writing, it is all still taking place at an escalating pace all over the breadth of this northern Caribbean island paradise.

This, then, is the dilemma we face: separating fact from fiction. The link between phallic power and the out-of-control murder figures is also directly tied to the curious style of bourgeois democracy practised in Jamaica. There is something fundamentally flawed in the prevailing socio-political psychology that continues to inform the state’s application of colonial-style divide-and-rule mechanisms as the organising principle for governance.

Looking towards solutions, it would be ideal if our leaders could calibrate a human rights-based model of citizenship, which provides resources like land, skills training, housing, and education to those currently excluded from the table-of-growth models. This affirmative action could provide the means to reduce the impetus for those who profit from the violence economy to discontinue this degrading option of achieving status.

A first step for declotting the problematic of divisive governance practices that destroy the body politic should be systemic deconstruction of the interests that converge among partisan politics, community violence, and race-specific representations of the tourism product. A decolonial approach to education and development should follow as prerequisites of transformation.

- Dr Imani Tafari-Ama is a research fellow at The Institute for Gender and Development Studies, Regional Coordinating Office (IGDS-RCO), at The University of the West Indies. Send feedback to imani.tafariama@uwimona.edu.jm.