Prime Minister Andrew Holness came close to boasting about the improvement in the murder rate this year over last year’s. Yet, at November 28, according to police force statistics, murders for the year were 16 (1.3 per cent) fewer than last year at the same time, just two short of 1,200 in all, not exactly an achievement to brag about.

It is why more and more people — not all of them members or supporters of the Opposition People’s National Party, either — are calling for a crime strategy that works better than the current one.

Clearly the new strategy would have to be of a different kind, not just more of the current, which has mainly involved using the police force along with heavy reliance on the Jamaica Defence Force, and not, therefore, just more zones of special operation (ZOSOs), another tool of the same kind.

The line of argument that, in the west and in Westmoreland, people want to have the state of emergency back is very weak. Faced with surging criminal killings, of course they will take the only alternative offered.

At least implicitly this call for a new and different strategy is being driven, I suggest, by the experience of how the present Government treated COVID-19. This has been an eye-opener on how a Government can deal with a national crisis. For years homicides have reached over 1,000 a year and the public has viewed this, according to polls, as problem numero uno, a major crisis. But, compared with the handling of COVID-19, homicide is not taken seriously.

Take note of how COVID-19 has been dealt with:

1) Though having an energetic and competent minister of health and wellness, the prime minister took personal charge with frequent press conferences, almost daily at one stage, and statements to Parliament.

2) The entire State apparatus was mobilised along with health, the ministries and agencies of education, tourism and industry, plus churches and the private sector.

3) The findings of medical science, however new and challenging, were called on to support and defend the policies and protocols required in public conduct.

4) Every effort was made throughout by every minister and health official to explain every step to have people fully understand the process, and to win and persuade, rather than enforce, their engagement in protocols.

What is extraordinary is the completely dissimilar approach to homicide:

1) The prime minister only reports the advice of the security heads.

2) It is a Ministry of National Security matter mainly, with merely routine appeals to other departments and ministries, not a serious mobilisation.

3) There is no reference whatsoever to social sciences, whether sociology or criminology, nor to the recommendations of numerous studies and commissions.

4) There is no analysis of the causes of homicide, only the personal view of the minister of national security that the wrongdoers are murderers who must be dealt with by security forces.

Against this background I am calling for a COVID-like handling of homicides as the only sensible response to the widespread call for a fresh strategy to handle the epidemic of murder in Jamaica. If the prime minister with responsibility for security is to take the homicide crisis in personal hand and mobilise State resources and the country to control it, the first step must be to analyse the problem, apply science in this analysis, and share it with people.

Every illness must be diagnosed before it can be properly treated — that is just common sense. And if science has something to offer in this regard, why has it been totally ignored in respect of homicide?

The analysis offered by sociology and criminology — even though for historical and internal reasons they lack the status of physical sciences — must be consulted. Their research conducted over decades has reached findings accepted in the policies of many countries.

Scientific analysis identifies the components of distinct but linked substantive and psychological aspects.

i) Substantively, homicide is an act of extreme violence, and violence is generally defined as the use of force to harm someone other than oneself. The violent act emerges from a powerful urge or perceived need. Spontaneous and sudden in execution, or calculated and timed, this urge is not a passing impulse. It is a hunger-like drive or pressure that has grown over years, taken complete hold of a person, and become irrepressible.

ii) Violence, according to over 50 studies (Richard G Wilkinson, The Impact of Inequality, 2005, p47), springs from being treated unequally, some having less, much less than others, deprivation and poverty in other words. “Violence is more common in societies where income differences are larger,” which accounts for the Americas having the world’s highest rate of violence. Human development reports from 2005 through 2010, 2011, 2012 up to 2013 from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), as well as reports on Jamaica, and the whole Latin America and the Caribbean region, all carry the same message of the correlation of inequality and violence.

iii) The UNDP Regional Human Development Report for Latin America and the Caribbean 2010 explains further that inequality is the deprivation both of opportunities and of the goods and services required to access them. Opportunities, goods, and services depend, however, on the experiences of every household — its provision of parental love, health, education, security. They also depend on community and wider society offerings as well as the policies and practices enabling training, employment, life expectancy, social life, and status.

Concretely, in Jamaica, given its class and race structure, the meaning of inequality is the different upbringings of a child — decent sanitation, sufficient meals, and quiet surroundings in one case, but effluent on the streets, noise and street fights, hunger, and often cussing and beatings in the other, the provision of Internet, tablet or computer for school work for each child in one case, and in another of these being wholly or partially absent or shared.

Similar differences can be laid out in respect of health, schooling, community, and societal life. They are our “two Jamaicas” — a society of both privileged and very deprived communities, as well as a place of rich opportunities and their very painful absence.

Inequality can be raw and in your face — a hurtful act of racial discrimination or an autocratic command declaring inferiority, or worsened by open displays of wealth as in Jamaica with its numerous sport utility vehicles. Or it can be silent and behind your back, because it is built into the ‘system’; for example, of education or health, offering inferior service to one set of students or patients, ‘good’ schools, and better Miami hospital care to another set.

Disrespect is what links inequality to violence. It makes the connection through human psychology; the impact of inequality felt and understood for what it is.

iv) Psychologically, according to Professor James Gilligan (‘Preventing Violence’, 2001), director of the Center for the Study of Violence at Harvard, and for 25 years as head of psychiatry at Boston’s maximum security prison, it is provoked by disrespect, dissing. This happens where the person disrespected, having experienced only previous similar treatment, has no achievements creating a self-respect that would counter the extremely hurtful shaming or humiliation conveyed in dissing.

Dissing is also perceived to be itself an act of violence since it deprives by force the other person of the respect, standard of living, or other benefit that is their due. Gandhi called poverty the worst form of violence, but violence is provocative. The spontaneous reaction to it is matching violence for the sake of self-protection. The child who has his toy or favourite book snatched away without explanation rebels.

The adult world is not different. The deprivation inflicted on low-income communities by the class structure of society is not met passively by most with acceptance, but with the hustles and bending of the rules needed to scrape together livelihoods. By a minority there is also the reaction of open resistance, in short of rebellion, counter-violence.

v) This rebellion takes in Jamaica two forms. One form is from criminals. They have the prior mindset of willingness to harm others so as to benefit themselves. Initially very few were inclined this way, but the number, although still small, has grown, and with it the goals, range, and viciousness of their actions. Gangs are now much larger. They now target children, women, and the elderly; they spray larger groups with bullets; they threaten and terrorise by beheading — actions that occurs under the mantra that, “If yuh cyaan ketch Quaco, kech im shut”; meaning associates of targets are casualties of the war — all because their ambitions and their scope (inside as well as outside the State) have grown.

This growth, I suggest, stems from the failure of successive administrations to effectively counter exactly what happened in the years leading up to 2010. Then it was the failure to stop the growth of crime in Tivoli Gardens with its ‘State within a State’ mentality. Supporters of Christopher “Dudus” Coke were thus led to dare to actually attack and set fire to police stations and barricade the Tivoli Gardens community, forcing the State to employ the military for its response. Are we now seeing, with military reserves brought out, a more modest replay of that scenario?

The second form of rebellion takes shape mainly among the tens of thousands of youth who experience daily ongoing deprivation. Groups (gangs) of these youth, spontaneously formed for the sake of mutual support of area solidarity, compete with other groups for the scarce opportunities they all crave. These youth are exposed to the influence of the criminals and, armed in their rivalry with lethal weapons, crimes are committed. They are not, however, criminally minded, wanting and determined, that is, to hurt others for self-gain.

vi) The Andrew Holness-led Administration’s treatment of homicide may be driven by the belief, at least subconsciously, that as the economy grows the murder rate will fall. Whatever the validity of this belief, it cannot be — and we only hope was not — the reason for delaying immediate counter-crisis action. The expectation of rapid growth, which the Holness Government was initially so sanguine about, has been dashed for now, and not merely by COVID-19. Meanwhile, 1,200 plus murders a year is intolerable.

Clearly the moment for some COVID- like treatment of Jamaica’s homicide crisis is here. Matching violence with violence by the gun is as ineffectual and a backward step. More police and soldier on the streets is no salve, no curing medicine, to the deep urges to violence in possession of the hearts of men, most of them young, richly gifted, robbed of the chance to live wholesome lives, but not giving up. Time to wheel and come again.

Horace Levy is a civil society advocate who works with the Peace Management Initiative. Send comments to the Jamaica Observer or halpeace.levy78@gmail.com.