Christopher Charles | Jamaica’s homicide epidemic and shortsighted analysis

To the short-sighted analysts among the political class, the media and the police service, I am very happy, and always will be, for any decline in the homicide rate in Jamaica.

However, their myopic analysis of the homicide rate is bounded in the difference in the rate between this year and last year, and you ignore the exponential increase in the homicide rate from 1962-2024, which is the meaningful context in which the Jamaica’s homicide epidemic must be understood, interpreted, and publicly articulated.

The bar graph shows the homicide rate and how this rate changes across the years from 1962 to 2024. Each year has a column with the homicide at the top for easy comparison across time. The column for each year gets taller as the homicide rate increases over time, with up and down movements in the later years, with taller and shorter columns indicating an increase and decrease in the homicide rate for these years. In 1962, the homicide rate was 3.7 per 100,000, and in 2024, it was 40.2 per 100,000, a more than 10-fold increase. The long view indicates that we have a national homicide crisis in Jamaica that we are struggling with as the bar graph shows.

TRENDING EXPONENTIALLY

The homicide rate has been trending exponentially upwards since 1962. However, you can clearly see an appreciable drop in the homicide rate from 49.3 in 2023 to 40.2 in 2024. Please note that not because two things occur together (police actions and the drop in the homicide rate), does it mean that one causes the other (police actions cause the drop in the homicide rate). Correlation is not causation. Moreover, this drop is nothing new. We have had comparable drops in the homicide rate before followed by increases, most notably so between 1997 and 2004, as the bar graph indicates. This fluctuation shows that the police, for the most part, do not control what is happening because if they did, the homicide rate would continue dropping rather than moving up and down and would remain very low.

The myopic approach of looking at this year’s rate versus last year’s rate is a strategic one to bamboozle the public. This one-year-difference analysis masks the fact that we have seen similar drops of the homicide rate in the past, and homicide remains a major problem in the country. In fourth form at Kingston College, decades ago, I was taught that this kind of data analysis requires a minimum of five years to see the trend in the data. We tend to use much more than five years.

However, if the doctorates and PhDs in the government, the civil service, and the police were using the five year-analysis, we would have a better understanding of the homicide monster we are facing. These degreed people are not dumb, so the obfuscating one-year-difference analysis is deliberate. We cannot protect our women and children in particular and Jamaicans in general until we succeed in the colossal task as a nation of reducing the homicide rate to what it was in the 1960s and early 1970s and keep it there. We have a very, very long way to go.

TRENDING DOWNWARDS

I have mentioned the homicide rate only because although crime overall is trending downwards, the high homicide rate is still a millstone around our necks. It is cold comfort to the tell the family of the policeman shot and killed recently, the family of the eight-year-old girl raped and murdered, and the family of the female University of Technology student abducted and killed, among other victims of violent crimes, that overall, crime is trending downwards. We are very, very far from being a safe society.

Criminals do not commit crimes because there are no states of emergency (SOE). Therefore, while we have used the SOE at times to suppress crime, we cannot have permanent SOEs because they are not fighting the causes of crime and so are insufficient stopgap measures that violate citizens’ constitutional rights as the court ruled recently. The Government’s desire to frequently use SOEs is evidence of a failure of governance. Rampant lawless and public disorder stalk the land. The Government has lost most, if not all, of the constitutional challenges in court because it feels it can violate the Constitution to get things done.

We have murdered more people than some countries that have been at war. The criminals kill people they suspect of violating their codes, and some police kill people they suspect of violating the law. Some citizens support the extrajudicial killings of suspected criminals, and other citizens block the roads in protest against these killings. The police are often jeered, encircled, and menacingly heckled by some people when they try to arrest citizens on the street. We are in a law-and-order pickle that the public relations governance and the murderous showboat policing cannot solve.

We should always acknowledge any decrease in homicides in particular and crime in general. However, we should avoid premature celebrations of success and twin effective policing with scientifically driven interventions to tackle the conditions that create the criminals. This is the only way to create a safe society.

Christopher Charles is a professor at UWI and a Columbia University-trained data scientist and epidemiologist. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com