Treat crime like COVID-19

A lack of “appetite” by Jamaicans for the suspension of certain rights is a major hindrance to the country’s anti-crime effort, the nation’s army chief has argued, as the Andrew Holness administration grapples with a near 10 per cent increase in murders.

But Dr Lloyd Barnett, a leading constitutional lawyer and human rights advocate, said Lieutenant General Rocky Meade is treading on a “very, very dangerous ground”.

“We don’t seem to understand that the right to life should supersede all other rights,” said Meade, the chief of defence staff for the Jamaica Defence Force (JDF) during a discussion with some of Jamaica’s senior journalists last week at the army’s Up Park Camp headquarters in St Andrew.

“We do not have an appetite to forgo, temporarily, some of our rights in order to secure the right to life.”

And that’s not the only issue, according to Meade, which he says represents a difficulty by “most” Jamaicans in grasping a “clear sense” of the country’s crime crisis.

“We have some of our citizens, whether unwittingly or deliberately, encouraging or facilitating those who are violent producers. We have a justice system, and notice I say justice system, not the judges, that facilitates what you could argue are inadequate sentences for violent offences,” he outlined.

“It is not so much the criminals and the violent youngsters that are the problem, because there are countries in this world when faced with such a problem, they deal with it. Our greatest problem is, as a country, recognition of the real problem and appetite for a sustainable solution.”

There is some enthusiasm for Meade’s approach, though, as a 2017 Latin American Population Project survey revealed that 59.3 per cent of Jamaicans would support a military coup to address high levels of crime.

881 murders

Meade’s concern comes as latest police data show a nine per cent increase in murders for the period January 1 - August 12, compared with the similar period for 2020. That’s about 881 murders so far this year, 70 more than for last year’s.

The trend is building on 2020, a year in which Jamaica distinguished itself with a homicide rate of 46.5 per 100,000, the highest in the Latin America and Caribbean region. On a per capita basis, Jamaica, for over a decade, has consistently ranked in the top 10 countries for homicides, globally.

Anti-crime efforts took a major turn in 2018 when the Government, along with the police and military, initiated the use of rights-curtailing states of emergency (SOE) in regular policing as a means to stem the bloodletting and disrupt criminal gangs.

Among other things, SOEs, which have popular support, allow for the suspension of rights, give the security forces powers to search without warrants and detain without immediately bringing persons before a judge.

There were howling concerns from rights groups and the Opposition People’s National Party, stating imposition on citizens’ freedoms, which ultimately led to a court in 2020 declaring that the Emergency Powers Act, under which SOEs are declared, was unconstitutional.

The Government is appealing.

Acknowledging that Jamaica is a liberal democracy with a written Constitution that guarantees citizens a range of freedoms that can only be breached on the basis of being “demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society”, the military leader said those freedoms would be meaningless if life is not preserved.

“Yes, we have human rights; we’re entitled to our freedom of movement and all of that. Yes, if you’re not alive, you can’t exercise any of that. And, we are losing over 1,000 of our citizens every year to violence,” he said.

“We go and cry about the little child who has been abused or something by the security forces – the child who had a gun firing at the security forces, but we emphasise the childness as opposed to the violent criminalness.”

Continued Meade: “Yes, we’re in a liberal democracy but …if we insist on all the other rights, we may not be alive to enjoy them.”

His suggestion is that crime and violence be treated similar to how the State responds to health emergencies, such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

“If someone has a seriously contagious disease …not many people would challenge the health ministry’s perspective that that person should be isolated. That person is normally entitled to their freedoms but that person has a condition that empowers them to do harm to others,” said Meade.

“Yet, if we identify someone who is a danger to the population by virtue of having a gun or what they may do with that gun, there’s less of an appetite to prevent that person from harming the rest of the country,” he added, noting that detained persons can seek judicial review of their continued incarceration.

SOES DO NOT WORK

Dr Barnett, the former chairman of the Independent Jamaica Council for Human Rights, said he was distressed at Meade’s views, arguing that the SOEs declared over the last three years did not work.

“I hope Jamaica never gets to the stage where it surrenders the human right of its citizens to militarism,” said Barnett. “There are laws which prohibit illegal activities and the police have the power necessary to arrest persons.”

The determination of whether a person is guilty of an offence is to be made by the courts and not by the security forces, he insisted.

“The control of crime has been dismally inefficient over many years now and we haven’t made much progress in relation to the techniques that we use and all we want to do is to assume greater powers and restrict rights.”

Added Barnett: “There’s a great deal of failure to deal with the crime situation, which, admittedly, has been very acute and serious, but it has become worse because of the ineffectiveness of the measures taken for the apprehension of criminals and wanting to lock up persons who have not done anything wrong.”

YEARS OF SOCIAL DECAY

Sociologists and criminologists have argued that Jamaica’s escalating crime problem is driven by years of social decay and that the solution lies beyond draconian police measures.

Drugs trafficking, economic stagnation, breakdown in parenting, an unresponsive education system and toxic politics are among the factors blamed for the persistent crime problem.

Since 2010, Jamaica has averaged approximately 1,277 murders yearly. Since 2017 – the period since the routine use of SOEs and Zones of Special Operations – murders have averaged 1,412 annually.

The police have argued that murders dropped in areas with SOEs, for example, in St James where murders declined in 2018 by 70 per cent over 2017. However, there were also concerns that criminals migrated to none-SOE areas to continue their activities.

Another issue that featured with the SOEs was detention of dozens of young men, mainly from poverty-stricken inner-city communities, with only a few ending up facing serious criminal charges.

In July, Prime Minister Andrew Holness argued that large-scale detentions were only in the early weeks of SOEs, noting that when the emergency measures were lifted ahead of the September 2020 general election, “only” 200 persons were in detention.

The Government has suggested that SOEs would be pursued for up to seven years.

editorial@gleanerjm.com