The Collective Security Plan
There were 1,618 recorded murders in Jamaica last year — an increase of about 20 per cent over the 1,350 reported in 2016. The vast majority of killings were by the gun.
Last June, National Security Minister0 Robert Montague, seemed to have recognised the dire need for a new approach to tackling the crime monster and invited “all Jamaicans with workable ideas and solution to come to the table as we remain committed to working with everyone who has Jamaica’s interest at heart.”
In response, veteran journalist Ben Brodie drafted a well-researched Collective Security Plan and made it public in the August-September issue of the community newspaper — The News.
Brodie tells the Jamaica Observer that copies of that issue of the paper were presented to senior politicians on both sides of the House of Parliament at the sitting on Tuesday, October 17 and to Senate members that same week. To date he has had no response from the Government nor the Opposition.
In an effort to generate public discussion on the need for a crime plan, the Sunday Observer is presenting this summary of the Collective Security Plan and inviting the response of readers.
The Plan
“It is about working together on a sustainable anti-crime plan conceived by the community and implemented at the community level, as opposed to ‘solutions’ conceived and imposed on the community from outside.”
(1) AIM: To reduce crime in Jamaica by 70 per cent over the next five years.
(2) STRATEGY: The establishment and maintenance of a clear, sustainable, all-encompassing national crime-prevention programmes throughout the island
(3) TACTICS: Focus on crime-prevention in all communities with such intensity that communities become inhospitable and unaccommodating to criminals and crime becomes unattractive option to the youth.
(4) Increase government support to enable community organisations to initiate and implement anti-crime initiatives.
(5) Government, the largest employer of labour in the island, should set the example you immediately ensuring throughout all ministries, agencies and entities under its influence place crime-fighting at the top of their agenda and implement, monitor and maintain plans to achieve a crime-free work environment.
o The immediate establishment of a land-based Border Patrol, incorporating soldiers and recruits in the National Youth Corps to consistently monitor all 145 illegal sea ports of entry around the island. Main focus will be on guns, ammunition and drugs.
o Intensification of Customs checks at legal ports of entry and the start of discussions with trade unions on a programme to sensitise all workers at all levels at these ports of entry as to how they can assist in the collective security process at the workplace.
All useful existing anti-crime initiatives at the national level, for example: Get the Guns Campaign, are to continue. However, at the community level, the tactic would be to turn over leadership of the JCF-manned community programmes, like the Safe Schools Programme, to responsible community organisations like the Parent Teachers Associations. This would help to free up the JCF to put its house in order and refocus on scientific crime prevention and detection.
H
(1) Establish a sub-committee of The National Security Council (NSC) headed by an established criminologist. Its main activity would be to review community security plans ”for legality, sustainability and effectiveness and pass them on to the National Security Council for its stamp of approval.” The subcommittee would also be required to give guidance and to present periodic assessments as to the overall progress being made.
(2) Embark on a National Community Sensitisation and Mobilisation Programme spearheaded by the Social Development Commission (active in 775 of the 783 communities in the island and the Citizens Security and Justice Programme (CSJP). Community development officers would be schooled in the new approach to tackling the crime monster and the role that communities will now have to play. The Church, NGOs and other community-based organisations like the Jamaica Teachers Association, the Nurses Association of Jamaica and the Jamaica Agricultural Society would also be encouraged to fully participate in the process. The campaign would be centred on the question:
HOW CAN I HELP TO PREVENT CRIME IN MY COMMUNITY?
Assigned organisation would be responsible for raising and discussing the question with community residents, especially the youth, throughout the island.
(3) Gather, process and implement plans
After the individual and collective responses are gathered from residents, they are then made the basis for discussions at meetings of the main community organisation(s). When a consensus is reached as to what are the top suggestions, this is passed on to the NSC subcommittee for ratification. Once approved, the community decides on how and when the measures would be implemented.
The whole process from Step One to Step Three may well take a year, but one should remember that the preconditions outlined would be implemented as soon as the government decides that it will adopt this approach-an approach that fulfils the objective of Vision 2030, which outlines one of its aims as “to strengthen the capacity of communities to participate in creating a safe and secure society.” The Government says it fully supports Vision 2030.
The Plan points to the failure of anti-crime measures since Emancipation and the historical evidence of how communities organised themselves to deal with crime and other socio-economic problems in the immediate post-Emancipation period.
It recommends that custodes and justices of the peace play an active role in this process, and that National Hero Marcus Garvey and Bob Marley be used as the patrons of the Plan, which is grounded in the tenets of justice, peace and love.
The Plan, which seeks to be ‘all-inclusive’, rules out the politicians, private sector or security forces from playing the leading role in this anti-crime Plan. This decision, it says, is based on their track record of failure over the years; the tarnished image of politicians and the Jamaica Constabulary Force, and the Private Sector’s fixity of purpose in pursuing its natural priority — profits.
It suggests that during the five-year period in which the leadership of the crime-prevention fight will be in the hands of communities throughout the island, politicians and the security forces focus on shedding the image of skulduggery and corruption, beginning with the passage of the floundering Integrity Commission Bill, and with a total cleansing, reorientation and transformation of the Jamaica Constabulary Force. This should include new recruiting methods and serious attention to human rights in the training of the Jamaica Youth Corps and other recruits by the Jamaica Defence Force.
For the politicians and police, it also suggests a supporting role at the community level, while for the private sector, the Plan suggests increased and targeted community financing. For example, the Plan calls for the resuscitation, national expansion and refocusing of the abandoned National Best Community Competition.
“A new top prize of $100 million from the financial sector and Community Development Fund would be quite attractive and a sound investment in Jamaica’s future,” says the Plan. Top prize for winners in Treasure Beach in 2012 was $2 million.
Brodie says, “The Plan certainly won’t cost anything near the $2.6 billion price tag on the Special Zones package…” and told the Sunday Observer that financing has never posed a problem for far less urgent projects.
He noted that another “Concerned Jamaican”, John Mahfood, in a full-page advertisement in the Daily Gleaner on December 10, 2017, has suggested some specific sources of funding for a five-year plan.
Mahfood’s suggestions include $45 billion from dormant accounts in banks and “the transfer of funds in life insurance policies that have matured and have remained unclaimed for five years”.