Jamaica and Guyana have become test cases for the efficacy of get-tough policing policies. Jamaica has just scrapped an experiment launched just under three years ago - without full, credible public acknowledgment of what went wrong - while Guyana is trying out something Jamaica had already tried and ditched, before arriving at conclusions from an inquiry into past practices.
Tough élite squad disbanded
Jamaica's Crime Management Unit (CMU), set up in 2000, was disbanded in early June after a raid in which its members shot dead four people - the latest in a string of 40 killings since its creation.
However, police commissioner Francis Forbes stated publicly that this decision had noting to do with the unit's reputation for being trigger-happy. The reason, he told the local press, was that the CMU was not carrying out its assigned task of 'targeting dons and dealing with extortion, carjackings, guns and deportees who were involved in crime". Also, he said, there was 'every sign that [the members of the CMU] were highly stressed, and when an operational policeman is highly stressed, he is likely to make mistakes.'
The CMU's alleged 'shoot-to-kill' stance, it should be noted, was not unique: the police as a whole killed 133 people in 2002 and 56 since the beginning of this year. Police officers have also been killed, but the ratio of civilian police fatalities was 8:1 in 2002 and 11:1 this year.
What makes this worse is the fact that the effect of this approach on the rate of violent crime has been negligible: the number of murders fell by less than 8% in 2002, to 1,045 (0.4 per thousand inhabitants).
In the Personal Safety Survey conducted by Mercer Human Resource Consulting, Kingston has one of the worse ratings in the region (only Bogotá, Medellín and Rio de Janeiro appear further down the scale).
Sending in the soldiers
In Guyana the authorities appeared to be pursuing two very different tracks in its response to violent crime. One the one hand, under pressure from the opposition, the government agreed to open an investigation into allegations of 'extrajudicial executions' by the police, which have arisen from the low ratio of arrests to deaths of suspected criminals. On the other, it did what Jamaica had tried earlier to scant effect: order the Guyana Defence Force (GDF) to join the police in an all-out offensive against Buxton, a criminal stronghold east of Georgetown which had become a no-go area in which criminals move around freely, often displaying fairly heavy armament, such as Rumanian-made assault rifles recently seized in a police raid.
The GDF's initial prudent approach was publicly criticised by prime minister Bharrat Jagdeo. A stronger offensive in June, which claimed nine lives, was widely applauded - not least by the US embassy, one of whose diplomats had recently been kidnapped and briefly held for ransom. There is no clear evidence that Buxton has been 'cleaned up'.
Also, past harsh police methods have singularly failed. Guyana's rate of violent deaths, 0.3 per thousand inhabitants, is approaching Jamaica's. Moreover, the number of murders has been rising astronomically: last year's total was five times higher than in 2001. And fatalities among the police are higher than in Jamaica: 24 since the recent crime wave began in February 2002.
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