Dear Editor,

Did Minister of Security Dr Horace Chang’s statement in Parliament Tuesday deepen our grasp of the problem and move us forward? One affirmation was incontrovertible — we need a strong police force to cope with an older, “unschoolable” set (ages 25 to 44) of seasoned killers.

Another assertion, the boast that the number of murders this first quarter is at the lowest in seven years, has a negative side as well — I will return to this in a moment. The third component was Chang’s reading of history and mix of statistics that base his assumption about the future and his slap at past social intervention.

The boast that murders are down these past four months is, on the face of it, legitimate. I’m certainly glad for it. However, it also means that the murder rate is back to where it was seven years ago when Andrew Holness and Chang took office in early 2016. It means that the country did a circle in which murders climbed to almost 300 more (end of 2022) than they were in early 2016. We’re back to our starting point then. In a sense, except for those added 300 deaths and the suffering they brought, we’ve stood still.

So, not really that much to boast about there. But it allows the good doctor to make another of his reassuring predictions — that murders will be down this year by one-third. That would indeed be wonderful if it were to happen. But how likely is it? And even if it happened, would it last?

Chang cites the example of the 2010 incursion into Tivoli Gardens that gave the criminal gangs a serious blow. They recovered, though, as he also acknowledges, after going underground for a while. What he fails to grasp is why they were able to recover. It is the simple fact that repression does not cure, it only pushes out of sight for a time. His medical profession should have taught him that. Evidently, he has not learnt that lesson. The states of public emergency is his off-the-shelf remedy.

After stating how the gangs, instead of warring among themselves, are forming alliances to hit high-value targets, Chang then has very little to say, apart from a mention about rehabilitation of those imprisoned or about social efforts to reach the younger age group, ages 15 to 25, who, he admits, can be rescued by “schooling”.

There is a failure to understand how systematically addressing these groups reaches to the root of the problem of violence and offers long-term solution.

On the positive side, I want to acknowledge the great advance of having a Counter Terrorism and Organised Crime Investigations Branch (CTOC), its achievements, the reasonable success of the police force in bringing members of the Klansman gang to convictions, and the current community policing drive of the Jamaica Constabulary Force. These deserve to be celebrated and built on, scaled up, as Professor Anthony Harriott argued so well in a recent lecture. He pointed out that these are the democratic strategies for advancing crime control, as distinct from the heavily authoritarian and repressive favoured by the present Administration.

Horace Levy

halpeace.levy78@gmail.com