SOE only thing in the toolbox to stem crime – Kerr-Jarrett - St James stakeholders call for drastic measures, social justice to bring law and order to tourism capital
Published:Sunday | February 7, 2021 | 12:15 AMMark Titus - Senior Staff Reporter
Business leaders in the tourism-dependent parish of St James are ready to support the resumption of a state of emergency (SOE) to stem the surge of crime in the parish, but say legislative changes to anti-crime measures and the bail acts are critical to its recommencement.
The stakeholders also argue that a workable and sustained set of social investment activities are urgently needed to regulate informal communities, to complement the work of the security forces.
“I personally am in favour of it, but it must be part of a more holistic solution to the problems that have been created. We cannot continue to put a Band-Aid on gushing wounds,” developer Mark Kerr-Jarrett told The Sunday Gleaner. “Unfortunately, I believe the only tool in the toolbox is the state of emergency.”
According to the former president of the Montego Bay Chamber of Commerce and Industry, a draft of a new legislation like the Enhance Securities Act – which would have facets of the state of emergency empowering the security forces to apprehend the troublemakers, supported by the amendment of the Bail Act to prevent violence producers from getting bail until trials – must be strongly recommended.
“Successive governments have failed this country and the people of this country, because the requisite social investment in housing, schools, security, health and other welfare was not done. The people have had no choice but to capture land and out of that, especially in Montego Bay, sprung the informal squatter settlements,” the renowned land developer declared.
“The private sector was given the mandate to create jobs and we did it. But no social development was done by the government of successive administrations all these years. We have failed to serve the underprivileged in this country, and just as how the possession of land is outside the tenets of law, these communities establish their own justice system to keep order.”
HIGHEST HOMICIDE RATE
Jamaica now has the region’s highest homicide rate at 46.5 per 100,000 people, with gang-related activities accounting for 80 per cent of murders across the island. The perpetrators of most of these crimes can be traced directly to these unstructured communities, especially in Montego Bay that was dubbed the country’s murder capital in 2017, with 342 persons losing their lives violently, a per-capita murder rate of 137 per 100,000, or almost three times the national average.
A state of emergency imposed for 2018 resulted in an encouraging 102 fatal killings, but that was short-lived as 152 homicides were committed the following year.
Last year, 120 killings took place in the parish, but a dissatisfied Senior Superintendent Vernon Ellis, who heads the St James division, wants the security forces to be granted more powers to fight the violence producers.
St James has the largest squatter development across Jamaica, with some 22 informal communities birthed by the need for housing, as jobseekers left the rural communities in search of employment in the tourism sector from as far back as the 1960s. The constituency of St James North West, represented by National Security Minister Dr Horace Chang, has 19 of these communities – including Rose Heights, Green Pond, Canterbury, Mt Salem, Quarrie, Bottom Pen, Flankers, Glendevon, and Norwood.
The suspected shooter involved in the heinous killing of banker Andrea Lowe-Garwood at the Agape Christian Fellowship Church service in Trelawny last Sunday is a resident of Rose Heights.
“These areas pose a special challenge to the police, especially at nights. The absence of easy access makes them difficult to police, and criminals tend to gravitate towards these areas,” said former Assistant Commissioner of Police Denver Frater, who described the communities as a breeding ground for criminals in 2006.
STRAPPED FOR CASH
In 2009, the Housing Agency of Jamaica received a $1-billion grant from the Tourism Enhancement Fund to develop infrastructure in Lilliput, Flankers and Norwood in St James, but Managing Director Gary Howell says funding is an issue.
“Regularising these communities helps to reduce crime over time because it allows easier access for police and other emergency services to drive through these areas,” said Howell. “We are seeking funding at this time, we still have some sections of Norwood to sort out, but we are strapped for cash.”
In 2000, during his tenure as president of the Montego Bay Chamber of Commerce, Kerr-Jarrett proposed that employer contributions from the National Housing Trust be used to regularise the settlements, to include putting in infrastructure. Thereafter, he said the lands should be transferred to the residents for the cost of the infrastructure, plus an administration fee.
“Unless you get people living in a more humane and civilised environment, you are not going to be able to fight crime. Crime thrives in chaos. That is what we have got up there in a lot of these communities,” Kerr-Jarrett said.
“You give people a title, proper roads, an address; you put them on the government payroll for taxes and start to formalise the economy, then they are going to now use the legal means to enforce their tenancy.”
He added, “With no proper structure in how the communities were being developed and impossible to police, the garrisons developed their own justice system, they have their own culture and for all intents and purposes, they have their own government.”
PAY GATEKEEPERS WELL
Businessman Davon Crump, a former chamber boss and a player in the business process outsourcing sector, believes that residents of inner-city communities will not trust the police until there is equity in the service offered to all citizens.
“They face it when seeking a job, making a purchase or even relating to the police, while the privileged is respected, so even if a development is good for them, they might put up resistance,” said Crump.
“So the man in the garrison wants it to be done with the same intensity and alacrity that is seen when it affects international visitors and persons with influence. This must become the new norm.”
He added, “The inequality between the rich and the poor is self-evident, the same way we undervalued the people who live in places like Salt Spring and the majority of the average Jamaican, and that is why they are living in this squatter settlements. As a Jamaican in a position of privilege and protection, I will continue to challenge governments that it is their responsibility to provide the social framework and infrastructure that Jamaicans deserve.”
Crump also believes that in order for corruption to be rooted out, police, immigration officers, soldiers, and nurses must be properly remunerated. “We need to pay the gatekeepers of this country well, so that corruption becomes a moral question and not a financial one, there cannot be any question,” he stressed.
However, first-time parliamentarian and former mayor of Montego Bay, Homer Davis, is ready to cast his vote for a sustained SOE, and he thinks such an exercise over a 60-month period should see a reduction to 50 homicides or fewer annually.
“We need to have something in place to restrict the appetite of crime, this murder appetite of these young people who are going around and doing all these shootings,” said Davis, member of parliament for the rural St James Southern constituency.
“We need sustained crime-fighting activities, and I think the state of emergency was one such mechanism that kept a lid on murders in the parish.”
He continued, “I am still committed to the task of seeing the declaration of the state of emergency for the parish of St James, but I am not talking about where members of the security forces go into a community and brutalise our citizens, that is not what I am supporting, but I need for our security forces to have the additional powers which the state of emergency provides.”