Orville Taylor | Long-drawn battle with homicides

And the winner is ... COVID-19. Literally, hindsight is 2020 vision and for years, we shall feel the effect of job losses, lay-offs, decreased earnings and myriad economic spills. On the social side, in some industries more than 60 per cent of the workforce now works from home. This has led to domestic tensions, intra-family violence, and depression among the 29 per cent of the population which lives alone, and who find work to be a place of social respite. The full socio-psychological consequences of the physical distancing and reduced earning are yet to be felt, and 2021 might be the start.

True, the story of 2020 has been COVID-19, but here is a reality check. In the one year of COVID-19, just around 300 Jamaicans have succumbed to the illness it causes. This is from a total of around 13,000 diagnosed cases, a pool which is likely to be even five times the number, given that we are testing the iceberg’s tip. Signs are good that we are winning the fight. Doubtless, we have the lawless and brainless, who keep flouting the regulations but there does appear to be high levels of compliance, although the enforcement is believed to be correlated to melanin, money and social status. An example has been the tourism resilience corridor, which, with all its protocols, seems to have achieved the balance between the economics of keeping the industry open and the protection of health and life. Add the vaccine later in the year and the expectation is that the virus will be collared and restricted like a dark-skinned crackhead who jumps your back wall.

However, on this little piece of rock, we have averaged around 1,300 murders per year since the 2000s began. Despite a few dips in the numbers, the figure has not returned to the hundreds since half of the current population was in grade two.

MORE LIKELY TO DIE FROM GUNSHOT

The reality is that based on the frequency, you are more likely to die from a gunshot wound in 2021 than from this coronavirus.

For good measure, Americans kill approximately 15,000 of themselves each year, including 2020, 10 times our total, but with a homicide rate around a tenth of ours. COVID-19, on the other hand, took 344,000 American lives last year.

In real terms, we, with far less testing and thus more COVID-19 cases than we report, are actually doing much better than the Americans in keeping people alive, who have the virus. However, our homicide figures are embarrassingly scary in comparison.

So, is this a mutual teaching moment? Behavioural scientists have long moved in the direction of considering homicide as a disease, and thus a public health issue. As with all other social phenomena, there are some clear correlates of homicidal behaviour. Of course, we all know about individuals who are abused or tortured by parents being very likely to become multiple killers. Less is known about detachment, poor labour practices and indecent work. Evidence is also imposing regarding being associated with a murder victim, a killer or proximity to a gun. In other words, as with medical diseases, where the ailment is associated with microbes, toxins, vectors and other physiological variables, there are sociological variables which can predict with statistical accuracy the spread of homicide.

If 300 people die and it is a pandemic here, why isn’t murder an epidemic? Far more than the 13,000 COVID-19 cases, the murder virus is endemic in Jamaica and generally among black post-colonial populations.

Somewhere in our sociocultural and psychobiological histories there is this kind of resilience. It is the same combination which led to the British crying ‘Cree!’ in 1739, Tacky almost routing them in the 1760s and ultimately the rest of our heroes, both unsung and recognised, winning our freedom.

Yet, there are even more elements here. True, Jamaicans are a different kind of African-derived population. A synthesis of European and Asian elements into the African gene pool, we demonstrate a kind of hybrid vigour. So, unlike the Africanists, including some of my beloved Rastafari who keep telling us to abandon ‘I land’, we are not simply photocopied, watered down diaspora Africans; we are a different, though deeply related people. It is not dissimilar to what has happened to some wolf populations in the USA. They have hybridised so much with coyotes and even feral domestic dogs that they are virtually a different species but more dangerous.

Therefore, among this hybridised population, the antecedents and correlates of murder are amplified. With COVID-19 and the negative social effects, such as isolation and abuse, we had better not start celebrating.

Let’s be warned, COVID-19 and its measures are like manure and the seeds of increased violence have been sown.

Happy New Year, but ‘Tikya!’

- 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.