Dear Editor,

For 56 years the Government of Jamaica has been using states of public emergency (SOEs) to quell violence and crime. With the exception of two that were triggered due to islandwide damage by natural disasters — Hurricane Ivan (2004) and Hurricane Dean (2007) — all other SOEs were inflicted on inner-city communities or slums controlled by dons, gangs, and the two major political parties, which use them as their official base for achieving political power.

The first SOE was in 1966 in Kingston Western, which includes Tivoli Gardens, and that police division was under SOE again in 2010.

The third SOE was in 1976, which lasted a whole year under the Michael Manley regime. It no longer has the status of being the longest since Prime Minister Andrew Holness instituted the January 18, 2018 SOE in the parish of St James, which lasted, in the first instance, one year and 13 days, ending on January 31, 2019.

Three months later on April 30, 2019, SOEs were declared again in St James and communities of the entire area comprising the parishes of Hanover and Westmoreland. The Parliament approved the extension of these SOEs on May 8, 2019 for 90 days until July 29. However, on July 26, a further 90-day extension of the SOEs was declared and approved for these three parishes until October 28, 2019.

On October 1, 2019 SOEs were declared in the parish of St Andrew for 90 days until January 4, 2020, which included the capital Kingston.

SOEs also remained in effect for the parishes of St Catherine and Clarendon until Saturday, October 19, 2019.

On June 14, 2020 SOEs were declared in the Kingston Western and Kingston Central police divisions for 14 days.

On July 30, 2020 Parliament extended SOEs in St Andrew Southern, Kingston Eastern, Clarendon, Saint Catherine, Saint James (including Montego Bay), Hanover, and Westmoreland through September 3, 2020.

On November 14, 2021 SOEs were again declared in seven police divisions islandwide to curtail upsurges in violent crimes until November 27. These were in St Andrew Southern, Kingston Western, Kingston Central, and Kingston Eastern in the Corporate Area, and St James, Hanover, and Westmoreland.

General support for hard policing can be found among the people of Jamaica. According to Mike Hough, author of Good Policing: Trust, Legitimacy, and Authority, “Hard power involves the deployment of deterrent strategies and coercive force that keep a tight grip on citizens’ behaviour.” Culturally, our fondness for hard power is rooted in psychological conditioning from a plantation-enslaved past.

The Jamaica Labour Party will now go down in history as the political administration that imposed the most SOEs on poor inner-city communities.

56 years of oppressing poor people in inner-city/political garrisons in Jamaica have exposed the weaknesses of SOEs like Band-Aids on a gaping wound that needs surgery.

It is time for the Government to explore Colombia’s approach, which treats violence as a public health problem – a disease like any other that needs to be tackled at the root. This means a focus on prevention using a range of public services founded on the epidemiological analysis that public health thinking provides and not just repression by law enforcement, as in the use of SOEs.

We ought to be forthright in championing the liberty of inner-city and economically depressed communities from the chains of political tribalism that has now blighted our nation with hot spots of criminality. All people of goodwill ought to speak out and raise their voices higher than the Blue Mountains of Jamaica so that freedom comes rolling down to a people kept in bondage for too long.

Dudley C McLean II

Mandeville, Manchester

dm15094@gmail.com