Horace Levy | Social intervention, regular policing crucial to solving crime problem

The disagreement last December between the governing Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) and the Opposition People’s National Party (PNP) may have appeared to be merely a matter of interpretation of the Constitution or of popularity between the parties. However, as it may well return, it will be useful to consider, from a historical perspective, the deeper and potentially dangerous implications that it harbours.

Back in 2010, after the nine-month delay in the Dudus extradition, there was unity between the two parties over the necessity for a security operation and the six-week state of emergency (SOE) that followed. The entire country was behind that unity.

This agreement represented a complete turnaround from the violent clash between the parties in 1980. In the 1980 election, which was over the broad issue of management of the country, the salient feature was the deep division between parties and every sector – communities, civil society, business, security forces, even the Church.

The meaning of this remarkable 2010 turnaround must not be overlooked. It was recognition by the parties and country that they must never again come so perilously close to party quest for power by the use of violence, overturning the party’s role in securing democracy. These were the two sides, negative and positive, of the two-party management of the country from 1944. But the near-overturning was what logically followed in the 1980 virtual civil war from two decades of the negative side – driven by ideology, the use of violence to gain ruling power.

In 2019, party alliance with violence and ideology are absent. Still, JLP and PNP again face not only 50 years of endemic and worsening violence and murder, they also face the management challenge of a wide difference between their positions on how, without threat to rule of law and democracy, to tackle the problem. The PNP holds that further SOE extensions were lacking in the constitutionally required conditions. While to many persuasive, this argument was not confirmed by being carried to and approved by the courts.

The JLP’s proposal of further SOE extensions raises the possibility, on the other hand, of it being continued right up to the next general election. If this were to be the plan or the case, then given the popularity of this approach to the murder problem, the JLP will be assured of an election victory.

Given the fact of alternatives, the JLP would open itself, however, to the accusation of playing partisan politics with national security. This is the very dangerous implication of the party disagreement with which I opened this column.

NECESSITY OF SOCIAL MEASURES

The 50-year failure of the SOE method does not exactly commend its continued use, though this has not apparently troubled the parties’ leaders. However, more and more I see and hear, in the press and on radio, people asking them not just to stop the carnage, but to make the stoppage lasting. And more and more people are seeing the necessity of social measures to achieve sustainability.

Put these views and pleas beside the positive data coming from communities around Spanish Town, previously the most violent in the police division of North St Catherine. These communities, 10 of them, include De La Vega City, Jones Pen, March Pen, St John’s Road/Job Lane, Tawes Pen (but not the bus park in the town centre). For the three months, February to April, SINCE THE ENDING of the SOE, these 10 have recorded only TWO shootings and THREE homicides.

This has been the doing of the violence interrupters and community builders of the Peace Management Initiative (PMI) working alongside community-based police. It has been achieved AFTER the SOE ended, whose operations perhaps contributed to putting the leaders of the two Clansman factions behind bars. The Clans continues to function, all the same, in those communities.

Social intervention of the PMI kind, coupled with regular policing, is what the two parties should be considering as they debate their next moves.

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