I noted Prime Minister Andrew Holness’s explication on January 2 of his Administration’s proactive use of states of emergency (SOEs) to combat organised crime, which included a recollection of how the People’s National Party (PNP) betrayed the bipartisan consensus on the approach at the end of 2018.

This would not be the only time the Opposition withheld support for the use of SOEs. In 2010 then Opposition spokesman on National Security Peter Bunting refused to give critical votes for the then Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) Government to extend SOEs in place over parts of Kingston and St Catherine, which would have probably eroded both the Klansman and One Order gangs.

The Opposition’s lack of cooperation has meant that SOEs could only be used as an extremely short-term reactive response to violent flare-ups.

The prime minister should explain why his Administration did not make greater political efforts to rally public support against the Opposition’s stance. As communicator-in-chief he must convey to the public that Jamaica is in a state of armed conflict with gangs, evidenced by the multiple-victim killings last year, including the Cherry Tree Lane massacre of eight innocent lives. With over 150 armed gangs terrorising communities, capturing and corrupting public institutions, and directly challenging security forces, it is clear that the Government is in an undeclared war with these groups. In war, it is standard practice to detain combatants and other threat actors for the duration of the conflict, and they may not face any trial throughout that time.

The virtue of SOEs is that they allow for pretrial detentions of known gang members — enemy combatants — under parliamentary and quasi-judicial oversight. This does not amount to totally abridging the rights of the individual. I have heard the PNP say they would take a public health approach to violence, SOEs are the ultimate public health tool, quarantine the violence producers!

In January 2024, the Ecuadorian Government officially declared its country was in a “state of internal armed conflict” with organised crime after the homicide rate in Ecuador rose from five to 46 per 100,000 between 2017 and 2023. The gangs, whose ranks number 20,000, were declared terrorist organisations, and the armed forces fully mobilised with the authority to engage them as combatants. By the end of February, the Ecuadorian Government had detained over 10,000 individuals, along with 3,040 firearms, nearly 20,000 explosives, more than 214,000 bullets, and 1,353 magazines. Between January and April, the number of homicides in Ecuador dropped by 27 per cent.

The threat posed by Ecuadorian gangs was obvious both locally and internationally. The population overwhelmingly endorsed the new paradigm by supporting the enhanced security measures via referendum in April, and even the foreign policy chief of the notoriously squeamish European Union acknowledged that the increased gang activity was a “direct attack on democracy and the rule of law” in Ecuador.

The only relevant difference between Ecuador’s situation and that of Jamaica is that we have been a frog in slow-boiling water and have failed to act. Our homicide rate has risen gradually since the early 1970s, coinciding with the rise of organised crime, and it has exceeded 40 per 100,000 for the better part of the last three decades. Perhaps if we had a sudden explosion in gang violence, such as Ecuador experienced, the need to invoke war-time powers would be self-evident.

There are good reasons for a democracy to avoid declaring a state of internal conflict or equivalent measure, even when they are functionally at war with terrorist groups. The political class would not want to risk disrupting social life and commerce, especially tourism in Jamaica’s case. However, in Jamaica the disruption would likely be minimal, as the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF) has already assessed that removing fewer than 300 identifiable individuals from the streets would be sufficient to considerably reduce violence. From that we can estimate, if we include their close criminal associates, that by detaining fewer than 5000 people we can issue a death blow to organised crime.

We have invested heavily in building the capacity of the security forces to detect, investigate, interdict, and prosecute crimes; however, the criminal threat we face has access to considerable resources, weapons, and manpower that rival the State’s monopoly on force. The existence of this situation is dangerous for any State and is a ticking time bomb. Our politicians and our courts must develop a more sophisticated outlook on national security to understand this threat and put the necessary measures in place to address it.

While Haiti is the extreme example of the threat, it did not happen overnight and it is not far-fetched to believe that the situation in Haiti could manifest in Jamaica, or St Lucia, or Trinidad. The rest of the Caribbean used to laugh at Jamaica’s spiralling crime situation. Now almost every country in the region is facing the threat of gang violence at a level that spreads fear among citizens and captures State institutions.

The alternative is to persist in this mind-boggling sense of moral superiority that underestimates the threat gangs pose to our country and rejects the justification for emergency powers in a free and democratic society. Maintaining this illusion comes at the cost of hundreds of lives sacrificed annually to the organised crime monster.

Ironically, nations we emulate, and whose criticisms we fear, readily employ harsh war-time and emergency measures, even against their own citizens, to combat terrorism. Pre-emptive measures such as enhanced surveillance, watchlists, control orders, financial sanctions, and hate crime legislation — rooted in emergency conditions — have become normalised.

In Jamaica we cling to the false notion that the rights of the individual criminal outweighs the society’s right to peace and security. Whether the solution is invoking war powers to treat the gangs as combatants or to greatly enhance security measures, it is clear that the current conventional strategies will only yield marginal gains and will not root out the cause of the problem. It is evident the PNP will not support emergency provisions or enhanced measures. It, therefore, falls to the Government to lead with strength, educate the public on the reality of the threat, and push through the Enhanced Security Measures Act (ESMA) without delay. Jamaica’s survival depends on it.

briannunes712712@yahoo.com