Crackdown Lowers Murder Rate in Jamaica

A draconian crackdown on gang-related crime helped Jamaica lower its burgeoning murder rate last year. Just don’t ask Jamaicans to feel better about it.

“I have three guns, and my wife knows how to use them as well,” says David Johnson, who lives in the tony Kingston neighborhood of Beverly Hills. “When I go to sleep at night, I keep a loaded gun in arm’s reach.”

Johnson and his neighbors are still haunted by a crime wave last summer that killed 100 people in six weeks. Some of the violence spilled into the capital’s wealthier neighborhoods, including an 80-year-old former government minister who was slain by a burglar at her home.

To combat what he called a “spate of criminal madness,” Prime Minister P.J. Patterson sent heavily armed police and soldiers into Kingston’s most violent inner city areas. They put up roadblocks, enforced curfews and searched houses for criminals and weapons.

The result: Murders dropped 11% last year, from 953 in 1998 to 849. Other crimes also fell, including incidence of rape and robbery.

“We were able to cripple the movement of gangs, to cripple the movement of migrant criminals,” says Deputy Police Supt. A.J. Forbes. “We were able to cripple the movement of guns from one area to another, and those criminals that we have not taken out, we have destabilized them.”

Although better policing had an effect, analysts say, a truce declared by rival gang leaders in some inner city neighborhoods also cut the number of killings in the latter half of last year.

That hasn’t alleviated crime fears widely shared in this Caribbean country of 2.6 million people. Based on populations, Jamaica’s murder rate is still about five times higher than that of the U.S.

“High-profile murders and increased robberies uptown, where it is heard most, leave the impression of an overall increase and create fear,” says Brian Meeks, a political scientist at the University of the West Indies. “The way Jamaican society is structured, if 10 people get killed downtown or 10 people don’t get killed, no one listens and no one cares.”

While many residents, like Johnson, are arming themselves, others are turning to Jamaica’s nearly 100 private security companies.

“It’s booming. We’re projecting a good year,” says Valerie Juggan-Brown, managing director of Guardsman Group, which provides armed guards, dogs and other security services to homes and businesses.

In Kingston’s poor neighborhoods downtown, there is a deep-seated animosity toward police, who are often seen as agents of the country’s elite.

“The police, they come down here at night and tell I to get off the corner, go inside,” says Lewis Stephens, an unemployed young man with wild dreadlocks standing on a corner in Tel Aviv, a strife-torn slum. “All along I just want to play dominoes, but they just wanta remind I who I am and where I live.”

Police often are accused of resorting to force too quickly. Officers in the capital killed 151 people in 1999, up from 145 the previous year. Those deaths aren’t included in homicide statistics.

“People complain about the police, and they say there are abuses and so on, and I have no doubt there are,” says Jamaica’s national security minister, K.D. Knight. “But remember there are persons within societies who just don’t want any policing to take place.”

A recent editorial in the Daily Observer commended police for the drop in crime--but said the situation remains frightening for many people.

“Declining crime statistics seem counterintuitive to the average Jamaican,” the Observer said. “Almost everyone has been, or knows someone who has been, a victim of crime.”