Matthew Kopka, Contributor
Dr. Anthony Harriott is Jamaica's leading expert on crime and the police. He has authored or edited four books and several scholarly articles about crime in Jamaica and the Caribbean, including Police and Crime Control in Jamaica: Problems of Reforming Ex-Colonial Constabularies (University of the West Indies Press, 2000).
THIS INTERVIEW took place against the backdrop of a soaring murder rate and Hurricane Ivan. While Harriott makes no attempt to minimise the scope of the problem, he remains optimistic about Jamaica's ability to significantly reduce crime if real action is taken soon in such areas as public education, youth employment, police reform, and greater citizen oversight of police practices.
Gleaner: Jamaica is in the midst of a crisis an unprecedented crisis with regard to its murder rate. What are the features of the crisis that make it different from the past?
AH: Perhaps one of the most important developments is the rise of organised crime, a phenomenon that emerged in the early 1980s. In its enterprise manifestations the engagement in drug trafficking and construction rackets, for example it presents many successful models for other criminals to follow. In order to communicate the true import of this development, let me clarify what I mean by organised crime.
The important thing about organised crime is not simply that it is group activity, but the relationships it establishes. What characterises organised crime what distinguishes it from other categories of crime is its relationship to power and to key institutions, conventional institutions.
Organised crime brings the underworld into a mutually beneficial corrupt relationship with powerful upper-world actors and institutions. This is what makes it so corrupting and dangerous. It proceeds to hollow out or make ineffective the key institutions, including those responsible for controlling crime.
In most countries where there has been a development of powerful organised crime syndicates, this has been facilitated by often complex relationships between ordinary criminal gangs and the major political institutions. The gangs become key players in the process of political mobilisation, in securing electoral victories and consolidating power often because of their hold on communities of the urban poor. Once in power, this relationship tends to lead to a flourishing of corruption and the plunder of the resources of the state. This is usually done via construction contracts, garbage disposal contracts and contracts for other services provided to the state. Of course, at this level, organised crime never presents itself publicly as organised crime. It is presented as legitimate business. And as others model their success, there has been a spread of the problem to other cities and towns.
ENTREPRENEURS OF VIOLENCE
A particularly troubling variety of organised crime is the violent entrepreneurial type. This is led by the man of violence, the type who may be properly called a 'don'. For this type violence is a business, or rather a business asset. This is what extortion and protection rackets are all about cashing in on one's reputation for violence. And to build and maintain such a reputation one must actually be more violent and more ruthless than one's competitors.
This is where all the talk about being 'dawg-hearted' comes from. Even the language associated with violence has changed. In earlier periods, gangsters would use words such as 'dussing out' or 'making a duppy', phrases that soften the moral responsibility for killing. Now they just speak of murder - there is no attempt to soften the description of the act. And it is deliberate reputation-building in a new situation where a reputation for violence is a bankable asset.
Another feature which did not develop overnight but whichI think is taking on a new character is the rootedness of organised crime in some urban communities. Both varieties of organised crime both its enterprise and violent entrepreneurial forms are deeply entrenched. We would be fools to think that they run these communities based on fear alone. One only has to attend the funerals of these dons to see ample evidence of their support, which is anchored in their provider and protector roles.
Finally, crime including its violent forms has become more overt. The dons and shottas are very open about their murderous activity. In the communities gunmen openly display their weapons and admit to violence. Overt displays of violence may be taken as an indicator of impunity, which is another feature of the situation.
Our conviction rate for murder is below 20 per cent. These features are expressions of a new maturity of the crime problem, and I believe that we are in a process of transition to a culture of violence. Cultures of violence develop where the state is unable to protect its citizens and to ensure justice citizens therefore resort to self-help justice. Overt violence is a sure sign that we are advancing along this path.
FURTHER MATURITY OF CRIME
Having said all of this, a point that I want readers to understand is that not only are the conditions for further maturity of crime favourable, but conditions for the development of particularly pernicious forms of criminality and violence are also favourable. Garrisons facilitate territorial control. Territorial control allows for protection rackets. Corruption favours impunity for those engaged in high-end crime. And so forth. Like the hurricane which needs warm seas and other conditions to develop, our crime problem has the conditions that favour it. We must begin to systematically alter these conditions, not just on the social side by reducing youth unemployment among other things but given the specifics of our situation also improving police effectiveness and ending impunity.
Gleaner: The Prime Minister recently said that criminals are waging a 'campaign' to stop Jamaica's development. Is there evidence of an organised effort by criminals to disrupt the country's affairs?
AH: I don't believe that the Prime Minister thinks there is a criminal conspiracy to disrupt our day-to-day affairs. This would suggest that ordinary criminals have a coordinated political agenda. If this were true then we would not be dealing with ordinary criminality but rather a variety of terrorism.
What I would interpret the Prime Minister as saying is that, objectively, crime has been eroding our best efforts at development, to build a civilised society. Violence is the antithesis of a civilised society. It reduces trust and confidence in each other. It is a drain on the economy, on the budget, and it is demoralising the population.
In 2002 a group of us at the University of the West Indies did a study that was sponsored by the World Bank which sought to look at the impact of crime on the economy. We did a survey of some 400 firms and asked many questions about the extent to which they were criminally victimised how much they were spending on security, the extent to which their confidence in doing business in Jamaica had been shaken by the crime problem and so forth.
Some five per cent of the firms in the sample admitted to regularly paying extortion fees. Some 60 per cent of large companies are forced to hire armed guards. Many companies are forced to close before dark, thereby leaving plant capacity idle in the nights. And we estimated the total economic cost of crime at $12.4 billion or some four per cent of the Gross Domestic Product this was for 2001. So there is a real problem here, even in the absence of a conspiracy.
Gleaner: There seems to be a conviction that Jamaican criminals are particularly bloodthirsty. Do you think that's the case?
AH: In my view this idea has external and internal sources. It is overblown but has some grounding in reality.
You may recall that not long ago, at the high point of the drug-trafficking and drug-dealing activity of the Jamaican posses in the United States and yardies in the United Kingdom, the press in both countries made quite a bit about their murderousness. There were stories of Jamaican criminals spraying public places with bullets and killing indiscriminately. It made for good anti-migration politics and for the deportation policy that was to follow. It also made for good sensational press and a series of Yardie novels.
I believe that this is the external source of the reputation for violence. But here in Jamaica it is not unusual to see stories in the press such as 'Man Kills Friend Over an Orange' this is the idea that the Jamaicans will kill over trivial things. Where there are deep problems and histories of conflict in relationships, however, trivial things may precipitate violence. This even happens sometimes in wars between nations-there was, for example, the so-called 'Soccer War' in Central America.(Ed. note: The four-day 1969 war between El Salvador and Honduras, which involved long-simmering disputes over immigrant labour and the two countries' shared border, left 3,000 people dead). But no one would sensibly claim that thousands were killed because people did not like the results of a soccer match.
Here, our journalists do not always probe the real reasons for such killings. I have examined a few of these 'trivial' cases especially those involving family members and sometimes the assailant is mentally unstable. There are other seemingly trivial cases that are not trivial at all. Their presentation as trivial makes good headlines, but they mislead and blur our understanding of what is actually happening. The external images and therefore the images we have of ourselves become mutually reinforcing.
The reputation is, however, grounded in an ugly reality. Reputations for violence are important for those who are in the business of violence and for those who wish to get in. Some build these reputations by doing outrageous and particularly shocking things. Extreme cases such as killing entire families or mutilating bodies in symbolic ways are usually intended to communicate messages. The point I am trying to make is that with the exception of cases of mental illness there is a comprehensible rationality to these killings.
The issue, I suppose, is whether this tells us something about ourselves as Jamaicans. Is it an expression of our Jamaicaness? I think not which is not to say that aspects of Jamaican culture are not implicated. Nations and nationalities such as the Italians and Irish have similarly been stigmatised as migrant groups in the U.S. Much of this kind of labelling of nationalities is pure nonsense.
See continuation in the Monday Gleaner.
