The Jamaica Constabulary Force is dependent on deadly force

Part of the danger that police officers face rests in the structure and original purpose of the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF) that many in the society are slow to change. From the Victorian period to the present, the British used the police as the most visible symbol of colonial rule. The structure has been a blending of military and civilian roles into one police service. With the establishment of the Metropolitan Police in London in 1829 came a shift from military- to community-style policing as the primary way of dealing with social order. The many police forces formed in the colonies in the 19th century were not allowed to model the New Police in England.

In the late 1990s, the JCF started to make an obvious shift away from reactive, paramilitary responses to crime and disorder and began to openly embrace community-based policing. Nonetheless, there has not been enough of a culture shift within or outside the JCF to significantly reduce the dependence on deadly force.

Every country has a measured policing efficacy; and usually, this is by conviction and/or clear-up rates. In this article, we examine the relationship between the clear-up rate and murder rate between 1960 and 2007 for Jam aica. It is fair to expect a country to clear up at least 50 per cent of its murders. However, this is not always possible in certain unstable environments. The data allow us to make three conclusions that are comparable with trends in other high-violence Caribbean countries such as Trinidad and Belize.

First, there is an almost mirror-perfect inverse relationship between clear-up and murder rates – as murders increase in numbers, the capacity (especially if unchanged in tooling and operation) to clear up murders falls with comparable velocity.

STRUGGLE TO CLEAR UP MURDERS

... Community policing in Jamaica has been quietly rejected as feminine by many police officers and society on the whole.

Second, most security forces struggle to achieve even the base clear-up rate of 50 per cent once the murder rate exceeds the civil-war benchmark of 30 per 100,000. The dataset shows that just before Independence, the homicide rate was below five per 100,000, comparable with the world’s average; and hence the country had a clear-up rate above 95 per cent. Independence usually comes with unrealistic demands from the populace and political struggles to seize leadership. Our transition was problematic; we quickly became segmentary factional – Comrades versus Labourites. Within 10 years of Independence, our murder rate jumped beyond 10 per 100,000 and the clear-up rate dropped dramatically below 70 per cent. Nonetheless, up until the political tribal war of 1976-1980, national security was able to achieve at least the minimum 50 per cent clear-up rate.

In 1976, Jamaica’s homicide rate was 20 per 100,000 with a clear-up rate of 62 per cent. The following year, the homicide rate climbed slightly to 22 per 100,000 and the clear-up rate slipped to 52 per cent. In the middle year (1978), homicide stabilised somewhat at 21 per 100,000, and the clear-up rate climbed back correspondingly to 54 per cent.

The following year (1979) can be described as the calm before the storm. Homicide dropped to

Independence usually comes with unrealistic demands from the populace and political struggles to seize leadership. Our transition was problematic; we quickly became segmentary factional – Comrades versus Labourites.