Caribbean & Central America - March 2014 (ISSN 1741-4458

Four years after the arrest and extradition of gang leader Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke, Jamaica is on the point of enacting The Criminal Justice (Suppression of Criminal Organizations) Bill.  Having been passed by the House of Representatives on 18 February, the bill was approved by the Senate on 7 March with three amendments.  It has been a two-year battle to get the bill approved, with opponents saying that it will serve mostly to criminalize vulnerable youths.

It was the Dudus Coke episode that brought to crisis point the issue of Jamaica’s gangs.  More than 70 people were killed in the battle to arrest Coke.  But it was a problem that long predated the battle to arrest the gang leader in 2010, and it was a problem that was intricately bound up with the politics of Jamaica.  The gangs emerged in post-independence Jamaica to control ghettoes which they then delivered at election time to their favoured political party.  The Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) and the People’s National Party (PNM) were both complicit in what became known as the system of “garrison politics”.  The gang leaders delivered votes, the politicians delivered money and projects.

Coke was leader of the ‘Shower Posse’ which controlled Tivoli Gardens in West Kingston, an area which regularly voted for the JLP as instructed.  This link between Coke and the JLP became embarrassingly obvious as then Prime Minister Bruce Golding (2007-2011) refused to comply with the US’s 2009 extradition request.  It was not until May 2010 that US and opposition pressure on Golding proved too much for him to resist.  But his compliance led to an outburst of violence from Coke supporters which in turn led to the imposition of a state of emergency and the deployment of the military.

Sceptics argue that the new legislation will have little effect unless this nexus between the gangs and politics is broken, but the passing of the new legislation and the crime figures both suggest progress is being made.  In 2009, for instance, there were 1,683 murders in Jamaica.  In 2011, the year after Coke’s arrest and extradition, the figure was down to 1,113, although this bounced back to some 1,200 in 2013.  Another positive is that no dominant criminal figure has appeared to take over from Coke.

The US endorses the progress made by Jamaica in its latest International Narcotics Control Strategy Report (INCSR), released in March 2014, stating that: “Through strong leadership, stable democratic institutions, and support from the United Sates and other international partners, Jamaica continued to make slow but steady progress in combating narcotics trafficking, corruption and organized crime in 2013.”

The report pointed to progress made by the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF) Anti-Corruption Branch “in eliminating corrupt and unethical police officers”, but it tempered this by added that “corruption remains entrenched, widespread, and compounded by a judicial system that has a poor record of successfully prosecuting corruption cases against high-level law enforcement and government officials”.

The criminal justice system is also noticeably ineffective when it comes to gaining convictions for murder.  The INCSR describes it as being “underfunded, overburdened, and sluggish”, but given a conviction rate for murder of only 5%, this would seem to be an understatement.

• “The US endorses the progress made by Jamaica in its latest International Narcotics Control Strategy Report (INCSR), released in March 2014, stating that: ‘Through strong leadership, stable democratic institutions, and support from the United Sates and other international partners, Jamaica continued to make slow but steady progress in combating narcotics trafficking, corruption and organized crime in 2013.’”