Suppressing Violence Without Solving It: Jamaica’s Dangerous Illusion of Safety

By Dr. Leo Gilling

Over the last couple of years, Jamaica has recorded a notable reduction in murders. While this decline is welcome, the strategy underpinning it is not grounded in comprehensive, long-term crime-reduction practices that prioritize community involvement, police legitimacy, and sustained community policing. Instead, the reduction reflects a security-heavy approach that suppresses violence temporarily while leaving its underlying causes largely unaddressed—conditions that risk resurfacing once enforcement pressure is reduced.

Globally, effective policing is rarely anchored in a single method. Modern police forces deploy a mix of complementary strategies, including Community-Oriented Policing (COP), Problem-Oriented Policing (POP), Intelligence-Led Policing (ILP), Evidence-Based Policing (EBP), and Hot-Spot Policing. These approaches are typically used together, each serving a distinct purpose within a broader crime-control ecosystem.

Community-Oriented Policing focuses on building public trust and legitimacy by positioning police as partners with the community in preventing and solving crime. This approach is among the most difficult to implement, particularly in societies where transparency deficits, accountability gaps, and historical grievances undermine public confidence. Without legitimacy, community cooperation weakens, intelligence flows dry up, and long-term crime prevention becomes fragile.

Problem-Oriented Policing, developed in the 1980s, marked a deliberate shift away from purely reactive policing toward proactive problem solving. Using the SARA framework—Scanning, Analysis, Response, and Assessment—police identify recurring problems, analyze underlying causes, implement targeted responses, and assess outcomes. POP recognizes that crime patterns are symptoms of deeper social and situational dynamics rather than isolated incidents.

Intelligence-Led Policing prioritizes the identification and targeting of prolific offenders and organized criminal networks through data analysis, surveillance, and intelligence gathering. Evidence-Based Policing complements this approach by grounding police interventions in empirical research, ensuring that tactics used are proven to reduce crime rather than simply appear tough. Hot-Spot Policing, meanwhile, reflects the reality that crime is highly concentrated in specific micro-locations, leading to focused patrols and environmental interventions designed to disrupt criminal activity in those spaces.

Despite this global shift toward balanced, legitimacy-centered policing, the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF), in collaboration with the Jamaica Defence Force (JDF), has historically adopted an approach that moves in the opposite direction. For decades, the country has relied heavily on a paramilitary policing model, characterized by military-style equipment, tactics, militaristic attitudes by officers, organizational structures, and culture within civilian law enforcement. Often described as a “warrior model,” this approach frames policing as a battle against crime, positioning officers as soldiers and communities as contested territory rather than partners in public safety.

The consequence of this model is the systematic exclusion of communities from the crime-control process and the reinforcement of a deeply entrenched “us versus them” mentality. Over time, this posture hardens social distance and fuels cultural narratives such as “Babylon a wicked people” and “informer fi dead”—expressions that reflect fear, resentment, and mistrust of law enforcement. These beliefs do not disappear simply because murder rates decline; they are social attitudes shaped by lived experience, historical practice, and repeated encounters with coercive policing.

As a result, intelligence is withheld, cooperation is punished, and violence becomes socially regulated within communities rather than collectively resisted. Even when police successfully remove or kill gang leaders, the underlying conditions remain unchanged. Younger men have already been socialized, trained, and positioned to assume leadership roles, ensuring continuity rather than collapse of criminal networks. In this context, enforcement may decapitate gangs temporarily, but without legitimacy and preventative engagement, those structures regenerate—often more fragmented, volatile, and resistant to state authority.

Under the current Police Commissioner, Dr. Kevin Blake, Jamaica has experienced a sharp reduction in murders. The JCF attributes this decline primarily to Plan Secure Jamaica and significant financial investment in security operations. Government reports indicate that over several years, more than J$90 billion has been directed toward intelligence-led policing, States of Emergency, and Zones of Special Operations (ZOSOs). According to official accounts, murders fell because sustained police pressure disrupted gang structures and reduced cycles of retaliatory violence.

Key operational elements included intelligence-driven targeting of known gang leaders, increased night patrols and checkpoints, joint operations with the Jamaica Defence Force, and expanded firearm and ammunition interdiction. Government officials also linked murder reduction to aggressive crackdowns on lottery scamming networks, financial investigations targeting gang revenue streams, asset seizures, and cybercrime enforcement. The prevailing assumption was that many violent gangs were financially sustained by scams and that disrupting these income flows weakened their capacity to organize violence.

From a criminological perspective, this approach aligns primarily with short-term deterrence and incapacitation, not long-term violence prevention. It explains why murder rates decline during periods of intense enforcement yet remain vulnerable to resurgence once extraordinary measures are relaxed. Without parallel investments in legitimacy-building, community trust, procedural justice, youth intervention, and structural reform, reductions achieved through coercive control remain inherently unstable.

In this sense, Jamaica’s recent murder decline should be understood not as the resolution of its violence problem, but as a temporary suppression of its most visible symptom. Sustainable public safety requires a deliberate shift away from a predominantly paramilitary model toward a balanced framework that integrates enforcement with community partnership, transparency, and accountability. Central to this shift must be the routine use of body-worn cameras by police officers to document police–citizen encounters. When properly implemented, body-worn cameras provide an objective record of police conduct, enhance accountability, protect both officers and civilians, and allow the public to see how policing is carried out—not just its outcomes. This visibility is essential for rebuilding trust in the Jamaica Constabulary Force, particularly in communities shaped by long-standing mistrust.

However, continued resistance to body-worn cameras—combined with a rising number of police-involved killings during the same period that murders have declined—undermines claims of progress. Without transparent mechanisms to demonstrate lawful, proportionate, and professional police behavior, reductions in homicide will coexist with deepening skepticism and fear. In such conditions, legitimacy erodes rather than recovers, community cooperation weakens, and the cycle of violence remains intact beneath the surface. Without accountability-driven reforms that make policing visible, fair, and answerable, the structural conditions that generate violence are merely contained—waiting to resurface once enforcement pressure eases.