Police and scientists agree: gangs have become a scourge on the Jamaican society and are at the heart of the vast majority of murders committed across the island in recent times. They also share the view that strong police action is needed to rid the country of this affliction. However, that, they concede, is a short-term remedy which must be followed by a serious effort to deal with the problems that spawn the gangs.

“We have situations in Montego Bay, for example, where I think the short-term solution is going to be rough,” said criminologist, Professor Bernard Headley. “The short-term solution is going to be police intervention.”

“After those police military actions are engaged in, longer term solutions will have to be put in place, which will call upon all the resources of the society to deal with what really causes gangs to spring up in the first place,” added Professor Headley. “The social and community deficit which gives rise to the appeal of gang association will have to be dealt with.”

Deputy Commissioner of Police Mark Shields agreed.

“A high percentage of the murders that are committed are gang-related, and, therefore, we have to ensure that we have a full understanding of gangs and gang culture,” said Shields. “If we don’t understand it, then it is difficult for use to tackle it. We have to look beyond the police disrupting gang activity and recovering firearms. We have to look at the causes of the gang culture and some of the problems of why gangs are formed in the first place.”

The way to do that, Headley suggested, was to revisit the research findings of social scientists.

“Gangs fill a gap,” he said. “What [researchers] have found is that gangs grew up in areas in which there is a void in terms of nurturing institutions and in places. going through tremendous kinds of transitions in the geographic space – families and communities being displaced or uprooted, young men in need of reinforcing kinds of agencies, reinforcing friendship [and] substitute families.”

According to Headley, gangs fulfil this need, giving their members a sense of belonging and purpose, even if that purpose is criminal.

“Gangs fulfil a kind of family. They evolve, depending on what is available. [Some] young men maintain their school contacts and do reasonably well. Other gangs move in the direction of delinquency and deviance. Others get co-opted into the machinations of organised crime, some of them get co-opted in the machinery of politics,” noted the professor, who lectures at the University of the West Indies, Mona.

“We are talking about what clearly appears to be groups of young men gone wild, gone mad. Some of those compelling reasons [for their behaviour] I am not sure some of us in the media or in academia really understand. The level of violence, the level of brutality is just simply baffling, inexplicable,” Headley told the Sunday Observer.

Psychologist Sydney McGill agreed, noting that it was necessary to look at the why of gangs if one is to effectively stave off their emergence. For McGill, gangs give men the chance to affirm and assert their manhood.

“The gang provides a cohesive community where members are affirmed by their performance, and it sets up a pecking order. They (members) receive acceptance and bondedness,” said the psychologist, who owns and operates the Family and Counselling Centre in St Ann.

“They have an overarching cause as to why they function,” said McGill. “It gives the motivation to achieve whatever they want. And that in a sense is a strength that a lot of men don’t have. All of these are components to make this boy feel like a man.”

Shields noted that many of the gangs are at the centre of the crime hot spots on which the police are focusing. “The Joe Benbow gang in Torrington Park and the Stone Crusher gang in St James, those two gangs are terrorising communities in which they exist, to the point where anybody who is suspected of being remotely affiliated to the police is being targeted,” said Shields.

A major focus of the police now, said Shields, is to identify every member of the gangs and their organisations in order to successfully dismantle them.

“You would have seen within the last few months that of the two gangs I have mentioned, some key figures have been arrested for serious criminal offences or have been fatally shot when they have engaged the police when they had attempted to arrest them,” Shields said.

On January 28, police shot dead five alleged gunmen in what the cops said was a gunbattle in Montego Bay. Among the dead were Kirk ‘Joe’ Thomas of John’s Hall, Collin ‘Teacher’ Palmer of Tucker, and Stratty McLeod, also of a Tucker address. McLeod and Thomas were reportedly wanted in connection with several murders and shootings. They were also allegedly members of a gang run by Palmer – the Collin Palmer gang – which is one of the more than five in operation in St James.

Coming out of the January 28 face-off between the alleged gunmen and the police, the cops said they recovered four guns and 31 rounds of ammunition, along with several cellular phones and a mask.

Last Tuesday, the police killed a man, who is alleged to have been one of the primary suspects in the February 12 murder of Detective Corporal Dave Daley in Brook Valley, Duhaney Park. A second suspect turned himself in to the cops on Tuesday, and yesterday Christopher Thomas, who the cops say was the main suspect in Detective Corporal Daley’s murder, was handed over to the police by his lawyer.

Last Thursday, the police raided 13 locations in Hanover and St James, taking more than 30 people into custody in connection with an international lottery scam in Montego Bay that has been blamed for most of the murders in St James over the past 14 months. The operation was carried out jointly by the Fraud Squad, Financial Investigation Division, Special Anti-Crime Task Force, Mobile Reserve, Area One police and the Jamaica Defence Force (JDF).

On Friday, one young woman – Sheneika Headley, 19 – was charged with unlawful possession of property in connection with the lottery case. She was taken before the Montego Bay Resident Magistrate’s Court where she was offered $250,000 bail.

“It is difficult right now for me to say to you whether the murders that we have had [this year] are coming out of the lottery. While I am not ruling it out, we are still looking at cases,” said John Morris, the superintendent of police in charge of operations for Area One – which comprises not only St James, but also Trelawny, Hanover and Westmoreland.

But in the latter part of last year, Morris said they were able to tie the sweepstakes to the murders of at least five people.

Beyond the consideration of whether the lottery scam is directly responsible for the growing murder toll in the parish, the police said the gains from its operation have been used to finance drugs, weaponry and gangs. Drug and gun-running, in turn, fuel the murders.

“We have intelligence that quite a number of the major players may have been financing the guns and ammunition,” said Morris.

The consequences of that, according to the assistant commissioner of police in charge of Area One, Clifford Blake, have been detrimental.

“When you have any illegal activities, drugs, guns, illegal games, and they are being controlled by criminal gangs, then naturally they will want to compete with each other to see who can get the best out of it. This leads to conflict and eventually death,” Blake said.

Superintendent Morris agreed.

“Most of it has to do with people fighting for turf, people having long-standing conflicts. There is a group called Stone Crusher,” he said. “They have been influencing a lot of these murders.”

But the Stone Crushers are not alone in St James. Also among the gangs identified as operating in the parish are the Fresh Roses, Renegades, Killer Bees, Hot Steppers and the Tight Pants crew.

Professor Headley said that in addition to the short- and long-term solutions, the other, and probably more difficult challenge will be dealing with the people who have benefited from utilising and exploiting gangs.

“We are talking about official, organised, high-level criminal networks that have benefited from these street young men doing the dirty, violent work,” he said. “That part of it will have to be focused on.”

Shields also pointed to the need for effective social intervention, such as education and finding work for these people to fill the vacuum that is created.

Shields was quick to add that poverty is no excuse for criminality, but said there were people who were simply “sucked” into the gang culture because of a lack of alternatives.

“Not everybody that lives in poverty becomes a criminal and gang member,” he emphasised. “However, a significant number of young men aged 14 to 24 are sucked into the gang culture because there are no other options. I do not see this as an excuse because there are many other cultures around the world where there are social problems, but it is one of the causes, and therefore we have to find long-term solutions, outside of policing, to solve the problem.”

Headley, meanwhile, said it was also necessary to address the long-standing association between politics and gangs which, up to 1994, numbered approximately 35 across the island.

“There is the symbiotic relationship between the two. We need to bring this to the attention of broad sections of the population that this is still going on,” he said.

“At one point we used to say that the political sway of gangs was anti-society, extra-state, outside the mechanism. But more and more, a number of us are being convinced that in many ways, political parties and violent gangs still have a level of co-existence, which is mostly satisfying. That will have to break and break decisively,” he said.

Gangs and their association with politicians have long been a feature of the Jamaican crime scene. It is against this background, and their increasing brutality in recent times, that Headley said they must be addressed as a matter of urgency.

They date as far back as the 1940s, according to Headley, who pointed to the activities of gangs run by men who went by the appellations Sandokhan, Copper and later Jim Brown.

At that time, he said, their services were utilised by several politicians to gain leverage in their pursuit of power.

“Politicians soliciting gangs would have gone back to the earliest days of our elections, since 1944, utilising street toughs to do some beating up work of the opponents, intimidating and using some sticks and machetes and stones to beat up on the other side,” he said.

To address this element of the gangs, Headley said continued exposure and perhaps a truth and reconciliation initiative would put Jamaica on the right path.

“I think it will have to be continued exposure. I think it is more of this coming to the attention of the entire society. I think people in agencies like the church must continue to scream and protest and bawl out at this kind of inter-connection that is still going on,” the professor said.

“I have called before for some kind of truth and reconciliation as to what has gone on and what continues to go on,” he said. “I think the more public airing and public pressure brought to bear, the more I see some hope of something happening.”