Jamaica Police Commissioner Owen Ellington was scheduled to give opening remarks at the Association of Caribbean Commissioners of Police conference at the Wyndham Sugar Bay Resort and Spa Monday, but he was forced to cancel due to a pressing issue at home: the Jamaican capital of Kingston was coming apart.
All day Monday Jamaican police in helicopters and on the ground battled loyalists of accused drug don Christopher “Dudus” Coke throughout the slums of Tivoli Gardens and West Kingston and other blighted neighborhoods, where Coke is viewed as a friend of the poor who spreads his ill-gotten wealth. At least three police officers and a soldier were reported killed in the clashes Monday.
As Ellington led his forces against Coke’s armed mobs in Kingston, his second-in-charge spoke to the group gathered on St. Thomas Monday instead.
Deputy Commissioner Jevene Bent told the law enforcement officials from throughout the Caribbean to take heed of what was happening in her country.
“The world is watching Jamaica right now,” she said. “The game is on,” she said, joining V.I. scholar Frank Mills and psychiatrist Olaf Hendricks in launching the four-day conference Monday.
“The goal post is being shifted minute by minute,” she said. “We have to keep our eyes on the goal post even as we keep our feet and hands on the ball.”
Bent said that in her country, lax enforcement on misdemeanors, such as traffic violations and vagrancy, led to disrespect for the law and “a climate in which people do as they please, often with impunity.”
The “slow but steady accumulation of simple crimes … if left unchecked, they spread and create an atmosphere of social disorder,” she said, adding that Jamaica now has one of the “highest murder rates in the world.”
Whereas once the two warring political parties relied on criminal gangs for their strength on Kingston’s streets, gangs like Coke’s infamous Shower Posse now threaten the state itself. Coke and his supporters are fighting the don’s extradition to the United States on drug charges.
“We in Jamaica at this time are at a tipping point,” Bent said.
As authorities on the local version of the Caribbean-wide crime malaise, Hendricks and Mills both expanded on the theme of little issues growing into big problems. In the territory’s case, they said, that translates as young people brought up in dysfunctional homes developing into criminals as youth and adults.
“Crime is not a police problem. Crime is a community problem,” said Mills, who pointed to sons growing up without responsible fathers as one of the root causes of the current surge of violent crime in the territory and the region. He advocated doing whatever it takes to strengthen those bonds within families.
Warning that we cannot “continue to incarcerate our way out of crime,” Mills insisted on community-based solutions that look for ways to strengthen family and neighborhood bonds.
“We need to go back to what our strong community values and beliefs were,” said Hendricks. After years of working with patients in the territory’s jails, Hendricks said the story of crime is pretty predictable: unhealthy conditions at home nurture criminals and victims.
Asked by Meridith Nielson, director of the V.I. Law Enforcement Planning Commission, what the youngest age group was that he should target with federal funds and programs, Hendricks answered, “Zero.”
“Once a child is born with fetal alcohol syndrome, you’ve got a lifelong problem,” he said. “Once a child is born and starts hearing all those bad words at home, it’s too late," he said.
His point, he said, was not to give up on children, but to mend the parents, the adults, “before a child is born.”
He recounted a story his wife told him of seeing a mother beat, verbally abuse and threaten to kill a two-year old boy for pulling a magazine off a store rack. He said bystanders should have called the police.
“That little child is already in the murder-making factory,” he said.
Both Mills and Hendricks lauded Commissioner Novelle Francis and the VIPD for doing a good job in difficult circumstances that stem from a dysfunctional society caught between northbound drugs and southbound guns – both of which leave their corrosive mark on the territory and region.
“The present structure of the V.I. Police Department is the only version that can deal with this murderous onslaught,” Hendricks said, adding that law enforcement officials should watch Jamaica closely. “There are lessons in that for us,” he said.
“We can’t depend on you alone,” Mills said, addressing Francis. “It has to be a whole community effort.”
As the conference kicked off Monday, so did a federal trial that underscored the shared problems and regional nature of crime that the four-day event was designed to address under the banner, “Violent Crime in the Caribbean – Defining a Regional Response.” Seven defendants, including a VIPD officer, stand accused of involvement is a drug gang that smuggled cocaine from South America to the British Virgin Islands and then to the territory to distribute locally and smuggle into markets on other islands and the U.S. mainland.
The type operation that led to the arrest of the so-called “Red Ball” case, which was spearheaded by the federal Drug Enforcement Administration, will be a topic of discussion as the conference continues Tuesday.
Speakers will include an analyst from the Drug Enforcement Administration, a VIPD ballistics examiner, former directors of FEMA and VITEMA, and an expert of regional law enforcement training.
