Orville Taylor | A question of human wrongs and rights

Last week, the United Nations Human Rights Council’s Universal Periodic Review Working Group dug into Jamaica’s records and made some scathing remarks. As expected, our neighbours to the north bemoaned our homicide rate and the ‘insufficient response’ by the Government to end the violence and hold the perpetrators responsible.

There is little to disagree with here. We have to figure out what are the reasons behind us Jamaicans killing ourselves and why, in the middle of a pandemic, there is lawlessness, disorder and impunity. A big country on a little island, according to American Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, we have led the global anti-apartheid struggle, non-aligned movement, track and field, netball, the International Court of Justice, created an indigenous religion which has grown faster than Christianity or Islam did at the same age, and we have helped to reshape the cultural identity of Africans. Yet, we are the most murderous English-speaking country in the world and have a paradox of being one of the most robust of democracies.

Add to that an emerging sense of impunity among not just hard-nosed criminals but exhibited by ‘normal’ citizens. In the middle of curfews, there have been illegal dances and parties where the spectre of violence continues to rear its head. Among these are the gun killings in Westmoreland and a bizarre incident in Barbican where a teenage girl was set upon and savagely beaten. Worse, members of the security forces have been attacked, service vehicles damaged and officers killed.

There is simply too much violence. With a homicide rate of 47 per 100,000, there are simply too many of us killing each other. True, it is mostly young men killing young men; that 70 per cent of youth who are victims, who are perpetrators of violence and who are missing from tertiary-level institutions. But we need a solution to the deep social pathologies which feed the crime factory.

Nevertheless, my mother used to say, “If you can’t do better yourself or if you can’t help, then it makes no sense if you criticise!” The uncomfortable truth is that the homicide rate we have here in Jamaica is not too far from that of other black youth in the hemisphere, including the USA with a gazillion more stacks of dollars and technology than us. For example, and this is no Bulls, Chicago’s homicide rate is around 21 per 100,000 and they may have a lesson to teach us, because, three years ago, they were closer to 30.

Yet, Baltimore Maryland, just a stone’s throw away from the White House in Washington DC, comes in around 50 per 100,000, Washington DC itself is at 21, Detroit is in the mid-40s, as is New Orleans, and Newark, New Jersey over 30. So, the US has not quite figured out how to reduce the problem, right in the legislature’s own front yard, just as our local politicians have not managed to handle homicides in ‘Killsome’ City and Montego Bay.

NEED HELP

We need help, truth talking and international cooperation, because neither country can criticise the other in this regard. Interestingly, most of the killings are by America- originated guns.

The other criticism is regarding the prison population, and I agree wholeheartedly. The American representative stated, “While we commend the efforts taken thus far to remedy the life-threatening conditions of Jamaica’s prisons and detention centres, the Government must continue to improve conditions and protect the human rights of those detained.” Here, we defer to the expertise of the Americans and I recommend their direct assistance. With a prison population larger than Jamaica’s total adult residents, it has a lower murder rate within the penal institutions than in the society at large. Moreover, with 20 per cent of the world’s prison population being ‘hosted by the state’ America is well suited to give us technical assistance, especially given that large numbers of Jamaicans have been deported here in the past decade.

Finally, the grand narrative regarding ‘extra-judicial’ killings by our cops must end. Between 2000 and 2016, the ratio of Jamaican police officers killed versus those killed by police officers was 1:18; exactly the same as the US. This is in a country with a homicide rate which is 10 times that of America, and where Jamaican police fatal encounters are more from planned operations and have higher weapon recovery. In the US, the encounters are more routine policing and have low weapon recovery.

Indeed, we have more police officers facing charges and even INDECOM, which has no equivalent in the USA that reports directly to Congress, admits that the overwhelming majority of police killings in Jamaica do not meet the legal standard of ‘extra-judicial’ killing.

So, in going forward, let us call spades pitchforks and work closer as brother nations. We can’t do it alone.

- Dr Orville Taylor is head of the Department of Sociology at The University of the West Indies, a radio talk-show host, and author of ‘Broken Promises, Hearts and Pockets’. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and tayloronblackline@hotmail.com.