What causes the effect?

Life in this world is complicated, and it is a tricky business to figure it out and get it right. Take cause and effect cause must come before effect, but just because one thing happens before another does not mean that the first thing caused the second thing. Take, for example, schooling and illiteracy: about half the children who attended primary school in Jamaica cannot read and write, while the other half can. Is it true to say that school attendance is the cause of illiteracy in Jamaica? Is it true to say that school attendance is the cause of literacy in Jamaica? Both could be true. Or neither. Life in this world is complicated!

Maybe the cause is not school attendance but the quality of teachers in school. Or maybe it is the quality of the home and family which does not support what the teachers are trying to do. Or maybe it is poor policies in the Ministry of Education. Or maybe the problem lies in the Ministry of Finance and the school infrastructure the Government is not able to afford.

Life in this world is complicated! Most problems have multiple causes, and most causative factors are not fully independent of each other but reinforce or counteract one another. This is why most scientists (physical or social) are often very cautious and, indeed, reluctant to state categorically that one thing is the cause of another.

Strong opinions

Very rarely in veranda talk do we get adequate analysis of causation, but this does not prevent strong opinions being expressed. Jamaica is now under a state of emergency, and there has certainly been a reduction in the number of reported murders, but is the one the cause of the other?

Many people say decidedly yes, and therefore the state of emergency should be extended and widened so that more illegal guns and ammunition will be taken off the street and more criminals captured. Others, like myself, are rejoicing in the reduction in murders and other crimes, and the guns and ammunition taken off the street, but do not believe that the state of emergency is to be given the credit.

At the beginning of the state of emergency very few illegal guns and bullets were recovered. It was only after the security forces began to place cordons around areas of interest, and to search them thoroughly house by house, that numbers of illegal weapons were recovered. The Government does not need a state of emergency to implement cordon-and-search tactics. Before the state of emergency was extended to St Catherine areas there were cordoned and searched; and even though the present state of emergency does not extend to Clarendon, areas there have recently been subject to cordon-and-search. If there was no state of emergency, but the same cordons, the same number of illegal weapons and ammunition would have been recovered.

Without the extreme measure

Has the state of emergency led to the reduction in the number of murders? Or was it the incursion by the security forces into the mother of all garrisons which, it is said, removed a number of murderers off the street? The recent Tivoli invasion is the third in recent memory, and the only one during a state of emergency; it does not require that a state of emergency be in place for the security forces to enter any part of Jamaica. In my opinion, the capture of Tivoli could have been achieved just as easily outside a state of emergency, and the other garrisons can be transformed without such an extreme measure.

What the state of emergency does allow is for the security forces to scoop up hundreds of young black men off the street without any warrant or particular suspicion falling on them, and to detain them indefinitely for "processing". This was commonplace under the infamous 'Suppression of Crime Act', which led to so many human rights abuses that it had to be repealed; but not before a whole generation of cops grew up under that unjust law and became comfortable with it. What the state of emergency does is recreate the same sort of environment Jamaica had during the bad old days of the Suppression of Crime Act.

But then again, the new so-called "anti-crime bills" may be an effort in the same direction, and under them it will become normal and everyday to detain persons without charge for long periods of time.

The state of emergency may be a good thing or a bad thing, but it may not deserve the credit it is getting in some quarters for reducing the number of murders.

Peter Espeut is a natural scientist, a sociologist and a Roman Catholic deacon.