Inner City Reprisal Homicides: A Case Study

• Author: Horace Levy
• Pages: 383-396

Horace Levy 383383

383383

383

Inner City Reprisal Homicides:

A Case Study

H O R A C E L E V Y

University of the West Indies, Mona

25

Jamaica has a crime problem. Rather, it

has a homicide problem, since property crimes

have been steadily declining over more than

two decades,1 while over the past 14 years

the murder rate has steadily grown. It is not

simply the gross numbers — which climbed

in 2001 to 43.7/100,0002 — but the way

they occur. And the occurrence is not only the

five or seven across the island in a single 24

hours but the bursts of three, five, seven in a

single place and episode, massacres in short,

sometimes involving women and children.

What accounts for this situation is a matter

of some debate, into which this paper cannot

enter — for one thing, it has a history. We will

only say, in passing, that some put the main

current blame on drugs, not as openly

responsible for specific homicides, a small per

cent by police statistics,3 but as the underlying

tap root of the money, guns and psychology

driving a ‘criminogenic’ process. To this source

a prominent criminologist4 attributes as much

as 40 per cent of major crime. Reprisals that

stem from community conflict is another major

category, accounting for perhaps 30 per cent,

domestic conflict similarly. These are, however,

only guestimates and they are made with full

recognition of the connection and overlap

between categories.

Formation of the Peace

Management Initiative

However, it appears to have been none of

this thinking or estimation that led to the

establishment of the Peace Management

Initiative (PMI) in January 2002 by the Minister

of National Security, Dr Peter Phillips. Neither

was it, in his mind, the elections slated for

later in the year. It was more simply the severity

of the problem, especially as expressed in the

‘massacres’, and the desire to avoid the

spilling of more blood by ‘hard’ police

responses.5 The idea of a PMI grew, he says,

out of a series of discussions over the previous

year between the ruling People’s National

Party (PNP) and the Opposition Jamaica

Labour Party (JLP). It was to be given the task,

acting independently, of heading off or

defusing potential or actual explosions of

violence in capital city Kingston and adjoining

urban areas. Those were, in fact, its essential

terms of reference.

The precise form given to the Initiative came

out of consultations held by the Minister with

academics and experts in criminology and

policing, some even before he took up the

portfolio of National Security. The PMI was

given a membership of civilians, half (six) of

them without political party affiliation or

position in any state entity. This meant in effect