By Anthony Harriott, Contributor 
A resident watches two members of the police force on patrol and (right) Killings are often carried out to terminate a conflict. - File
THE EXTRAORDINArily high level of violence is linked to the participation in violent conflicts as collectives and in individuals being treated as representatives of these collectives ("family"/kinship networks, community, and party) regardless of whether they act on behalf of or in the interest of these collectives or not.
The protection of the group allows for entrepreneurs involved in the manipulation of violence to successfully engage in protection and extortion rackets. These latter are especially indicative of the changes in the society as they involve making a business of the use of violence. Moreover, the entrepreneurial manipulation of violence is not just the business of large and powerful networks, but of almost every petty criminal who controls a bit of turf.
The recent case of the "Taliban" of Lawrence Tavern in rural St Andrew is an example of the prevalence of this activity. Extortion is usually upwardly directed, that is, directed at members of groups who enjoy considerable social power in the society (and thus are, for example, able to mobilise police and political support). For street criminals to successfully victimise the socially powerful, they too must have accumulated some power. This power is based on the protection of the group.
In turn, this protection that the group provides is the source of the overtness that is displayed. Overtness implies impunity with respect to State punishment. It is largely the fear of State punishment that makes serious social violence a covert activity. Overtness is thus symptomatic of the decline of the disciplinary authority of the State and the increasing reliance on self-help violence and community self-regulation. Indeed, self-regulated violence requires overtness. Unlike the State, the individual does not have the resources to investigate and detect covert violence. The offender must be known. This allows the community to judge the justness of any action and thus to regulate the conflict, but more importantly, it serves to protect those that are not involved in the conflict from becoming targets.
In this way overtness facilitates community self-regulation and control of the use of violence. Self-regulation is based on rules. These are communicated by overt violent action such as the killing of those who show solidarity with persons who are party to a violent conflict. The now accepted rule of non-collaboration with the police was established by the use of communicative violence, by simply killing informers. Until the pattern of informer killings was established, I am sure that this was seen as "senseless violence," not patterned, norm-sending violence.
The next step in this process is the acceptance and institutionalisation of these norms. Once this occurs, the criminal justice system becomes virtually irrelevant with regard to homicides. I do not believe that we are at this point in the process and that a culture of violence has already developed. We are exhibiting key elements of an urban subculture of violence but the process has not yet matured to the point of institutionalisation. We are at a turning point; we have not yet turned.
RETALIATORY VIOLENCE
The high level of homicides and chaos of seemingly indiscriminate mass killings and endless cycles of retaliatory violence is based on the nature of the current unsettled stage of this process - where the norms are being negotiated and are not yet accepted and institutionalised. As discussed earlier, the absence of termination rules, for example, accounts for the killing of whole families in an effort to terminate a conflict. This is the method of no dejar la semilla or "leave no seeds" - which is an attempt to ensure that there is no one left to retaliate or carry on a vendetta. In this regard, readers may have heard of the Fatherless Crew, which is said to be a group of teenagers all of whom lost their fathers to violence when they were much younger, and some of whom, on growing up, still remain fixed on revenge. "Leave no seeds" must be distinguished from "leave no witnesses", as while the former is concerned with the fear of revenge by persons with attachments to the victim (kinship, gang and otherwise), the latter is associated with fear of punishment by the state.
Our gunmen seem to be less concerned with the latter than with the former. Mass killings are brutal efforts to terminate conflicts in a context where the State agencies are ineffective as a termination devise and where there is an absence of norms governing self-termination. If we may go back to the example of the killings at wakes, it is only necessary to kill in this seemingly indiscriminate way because the norms or more specifically the solidarity principle is not yet understood and accepted. Once a system of codes or norms is accepted, then the one would expect fewer of such killings. Where institutionalised norms operate, people who understand these norms would tend to feel safer - even in the midst of wars conducted by these rules.
Institutionalisation of the norms associated with a subculture of violence, would thus result in lower levels of violence and lower levels of fear of violence. For example, clear termination rules would make these wars less protracted and end the cycles of retaliation that now exist. In my writing elsewhere, I use the example of Albania, which has had a long tradition of a culture of violence (although this was suppressed during the communist era). There, clear termination rules exist. If you have killed, and you kill the person who is trying to in turn kill you as retaliation for the original killing, then the killings are over.
You are free from any further threat of retaliatory violence. But you may only kill the person seeking revenge while he is actively hunting you, you may not go to his house and kill him - or kill him during an unsuspecting moment; you are obliged to adopt a defensive posture. These codes, norms or rules are highly institutionalised. In cultures of violence, the level of social violence may thus be relatively low (compared with Jamaica), as social violence is disciplined or regulated by these norms. The fear of violence is also expected to be lower, as there is less fear of contagion, of being affected by random violence - as this violence is disciplined by rules governing who may be targeted for violent attack, and when and where they may and may not be attacked.
SUBCULTURES OF VIOLENCE
Having stated what may appear to be approval of subcultures of violence (this is one of the hazards of being a social scientist whereby the reader may confuse your analysis of what is with advocacy of what ought to be; analytic description is mistakenly taken as prescription), let me hasten to add that cultures of violence are very problematic. In cultures of violence, the strong are able to take care of themselves and the weak die. Many simple disputes result in the loss of life. Violence as a way of settling disputes becomes entrenched. There is open disregard for the law and law enforcement. Subcultures of violence tend to emerge in conditions of weakened states, but in turn, they serve to further weaken the state and the rule of law.
FAILURE TO REFORM POLICE FORCE
The features of the current situation in Jamaica, as described above are but adaptations to the conditions of high levels of violence for a period of almost three decades in parts of Kingston - coupled with poor police protection. It is the outcome of a fundamental failure of the state and the failure to reform our police force. Fortunately there are cultural assets that serve to resist the development of a subculture of violence. I do not have the space to discuss this in this series. The point is that it is not too late to abort this developing process. To do this, we need to, among many other things, strengthen the state and its capacity to protect all the citizens of our country. The reason for this follows from the argument above. An accessible criminal justice system that treats the citizens which it ought to serve justly, and therefore have their approval, serves as a termination devise in dealing with conflicts. Strengthening the state and especially the Security Forces therefore does not mean simply increasing the size of the police service, although this should be done. Neither does it mean simply purchasing armoured vehicles for the police. Despite the best efforts of the High Command to develop a new perspective on the modernisation of the JCF, at the core of the weakness and the inability to protect the people are the issues of mistrust, abuse of power, poor service, corruption, poor systems of accountability and other such issues that serve to alienate the people from the police and the state more generally. This is not narrowly a problem of the police but of the entire state. Strengthening the state implies solving these problems - a renewal of trust and authority that does not seem to be realisable without structural changes.
In this series, I have tried to simply characterise the present juncture. Adding my voice in an attempt at further explaining how we got to this point is a matter for another time and place. Understanding how to fix this problem is a challenge for us all.
Dr. Anthony Harriott is a senior lecturer in the Department of Government on the Mona Campus of the University of the West Indies. He is also author of the book, Police and Crime Control in Jamaica. Part one was published last Friday and part two yesterday.
