EDITORIAL - What lessons from Tivoli?

If at any time, in many decades, Jamaicans were optimistic about gaining the upper hand against crime, it was in the aftermath of the 2010 operation by the security forces into Tivoli Gardens, hoping to arrest, for extradition, the politically connected mobster, Christopher Coke.

And with good reason. Crime declined precipitously, especially homicides, which particularly concentrates minds in this country.

For instance, after a sharp rise in the first four months of that year, Jamaica recorded 1,428 murders for all of 2010, translating to 55 homicides for every 100,000 persons in the country. That kept us near the top of the league table of the world's most murderous countries.

Yet, the figure for killings, as bad as they were, represented a 14 per cent decline, compared to the previous year - when there were 1,662 murders and the homicide rate was 64 per 100,000 - and one of few drops in two decades. The momentum continued into 2011. Year-on-year, there was another 21 per cent decline.

Since then, the downward momentum first slowed, and then reversed: murders declined by two per cent in 2012, but rose four per cent last year.

On the face of it, there is a correlation between the May 2010 operation in Tivoli Gardens - and the state of emergency that supported it - and the decline in crime that followed. Peter Bunting, the security minister, when the positive trend still held, used to argue that the difference was the dislodging of Coke and the disruption of his criminal enterprise, thus ending its capacity to franchise its operation across Jamaica.

Probe the issue

Perhaps Mr Bunting was right. But there were deeper insights to be gained, and more to be learned, from the Tivoli Gardens experience than Peter Bunting presumed. Circumstances have provided an opportunity to probe the issue.

An unfortunate outcome of the Tivoli Gardens event, in which Coke's gunmen engaged the security forces, were the deaths of at least 76 civilians, of whom 44, or 58 per cent, Earl Witter, the public defender, believes were the subject of arbitrary killings by either police or soldiers. A commission of enquiry is to probe those claims, the general conduct of the operations and whether information may have been exchanged between Coke and state actors.

In recent days, one of the commissioners, Velma Hylton, who the Opposition has branded as biased, has withdrawn. That is fortuitous.

While enquirers may legitimately be able to broach the issue, their terms of reference do not explicitly require them to consider the Tivoli incident's direct contribution to the reduction in Jamaica's crime and the lessons to be learnt therefrom that may be sustainably applied. That, in retrospect, was an error which should be corrected.

Our suggestion is that while the Government scouts for, and consults on, a replacement commissioner for Ms Hylton - presuming that is its course of action - it simultaneously upgrades the commission's terms of reference to reflect the matter we have raised. That should not be difficult to do. Nor should it add to the time in which the commission was asked to complete its task, or the cost of the effort. In any event, it would be worth the effort and the expense.

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