Alexander Causwell | The ‘no silver bullet’ fallacy

Ask ChatGPT to analyse any policy problem and it will invariably identify multiple possible “root causes” and recommend a “comprehensive”, “holistic”, or “multifaceted” cocktail of policy solutions. The AI’s training data reflects the bias of contemporary policy discourse: we tend to reason that policy problems that appear complex warrant commensurately layered solutions. However, this logic is flawed, and often employed to dismiss targeted policy proposals as mythical “silver bullets” or “panaceas.”

From 1960 to 1980, drunk driving rates and fatalities in the UK soared, prompting policy change. The government increased breathalyser testing and imposed stricter penalties. Consequently, annual drunk driving deaths fell from 1,450 to 220 between 1980 and 2020, and alcohol-related incidents declined as a percentage of total road fatalities. Analyses show that the policy not only had an immediate deterrent effect but also reshaped societal norms over time. This contradicts academic theories and popularly held notions that cast doubt on the efficacy of “mere deterrence”, advocating instead for broader socio-economic remedies to change norms influencing such crimes.

Such ‘no silver bullet’ thinking masquerades as wisdom, but it is misguided. Effective policy research investigates seemingly complex policy challenges, identifies the critical dimensions policymakers can address in a realistic timeframe, and makes recommendations to concentrate efforts accordingly.

MURDER RATE

The murder rate is Jamaica’s leading policy priority, and it is primarily driven by the prevalence of armed gangs; thus, security policy must focus on degrading their power and numbers. CAPRI’s report, Groundwork for Peace (2024) explicates how gangs are enabled by the structural features of Jamaica’s urban informal and semi-formal communities, which serve as their “safe havens”. Sustained violence reduction, the report concludes, requires eradicating that species of organisation by rendering these environments inhospitable to gangs through community formalisation.

Resources are perennially scarce, so the most effective measures must be prioritised. As such, Groundwork for Peace recommends that ZOSOs – the state’s key homicide reduction initiative – prioritise coordinating security operations, land tenure regularisation, and infrastructure upgrading, and deprioritise the social interventions currently under way. Implementation of these recommendations will constitute a more focused strategy for sustained violence reduction.

The proposed targeted measures strike some as overly simplistic. Sceptics believe armed violence is too complex for community formalisation to have a notable impact. They advocate a “holistic” approach that includes measures such as social interventions to address supposed socio-economic determinants of the problem.

Strategy is paradoxical: supplementing operations with extra elements increases the risk of failure, thus holistic strategies are often flawed by design. Since gang violence has no socio-economic determinants – illicit enterprises are simply pursuing their own interests by lethal means – such social interventions are pointless for this particular type of violence. Further, the additional need to coordinate various implementing organisations increases operational complexity. In a ZOSO, this inevitably prolongs, and eventually paralyses, progress.

SOCIAL INTERVENTIONS

That social interventions account for only 10 per cent of ZOSO expenditure is irrelevant, as each dollar would be better spent on the critical components. Additionally, this 10 per cent does not reflect the billions allocated annually to violence reduction by government, private sector, and international partners much of which is captured by social intervention programmes. Between 2007 and 2018, CAPRI’s report, Testing Testing (2021) revealed, $387 billion dollars was spent on such programmes, with few discernible benefits beyond keeping administrators employed. In an alternate timeline, those funds would have gone a long way to formalising volatile communities.

Targeted prescriptions are not fool-proof; if they fail, policy researchers reassess with the new information gained from failure and explore alternative approaches. It would be a mistake for policymakers to, instead, approach the problem from all angles in a comprehensive manner, and attempt to “fix” several things at once, in hopes that something sticks.

Groundwork for Peace includes case studies of El Salvador, Colombia, and Peru and their internal struggles with armed groups. In each country, policymakers pivoted from multifaceted social strategies to targeted approaches before achieving desired results. El Salvador’s Bukele administration stands out for having reduced its murder rate by 70 per cent one year after implementing its national State of Exception. This approach adopted the simplest solution possible: mass incarceration of alleged gang members. The efficacy of that “silver bullet” is undeniable; this is not a defence of the high cost to that country’s constitutional liberties.

Jamaica saw parallel results during the post-Tivoli anti-gang crackdown, as documented in CAPRI’s report, Guns Out (2020), which brought homicide rates down to the lowest levels of the past two decades. Had those extraordinary measures continued, we would be living in a much less murderous context now.

SIMILAR RESULTS

The challenge is to achieve similar results while working within the law. We cannot lock away all gang members in the short run, but we can deny them the physical spaces necessary for their operations. The experiences of Colombia and Peru demonstrate how implementing structural changes such as land tenure regularisation and infrastructure improvements have near-immediate impacts, as they displace armed groups from treated zones.

Moreover, the literature reveals that investing in land titling offers returns beyond violence reduction, including increased workforce productivity, reduced child labour, enhanced civic-mindedness, greater sense of agency among treated populations, and overall national economic growth.

Armed violence is an intractable knot tying this country down; why we persist in twiddling with the threads through the multitude of social interventions when we have the means to cut through it?

Alexander Causwell is a CAPRI research fellow. Send feedback to communications@capricaribbean.org