It’s amazing how many intelligent Jamaicans go around claiming that our murder rate really isn’t that bad since violence has increased all over the world. Well anyone who pays the slightest attention to world affairs knows this is rubbish. As a brief international comparison of homicide rates shows, the violence we take for granted would be accounted astonishing in all but a few countries.

A breakdown of Jamaica’s 2000 murder figures tells an even more revealing story.

These figures clearly dispel a number of the comforting lies with which some try to justify our situation. Guns, while obviously a big part of the trouble, are not the only problem. Our non-gun murder rate alone is greater than Trinidad’s total rate. And it’s not “just politics and drugs”, because our domestic murder rate alone is over ten times Britain’s overall rate. Nor is murder only a big problem in the corporate area. Our homicide rate outside of Kingston and St Andrew is still higher than all of supposedly crime plagued Brazil’s and nearly four times America’s.

What is frightening about Jamaica is how all pervasive violence has become, how readily murder is accepted as a part of daily living, how cheaply life seems to be valued. Already it seems the shock over the 27 killed in three July days in Tivoli has worn off. Yet 27 dead in a population of 2.5 million is the percentage equivalent of over 2,500 in the United States or 13,500 in China.

Now probably less than 1,000 died in the Tienamen Square massacre that caused worldwide revulsion. But so inured are we to our daily diet of bloodshed that some of us wonder why the BBC and CNN are making such a big thing about us killing proportionately 10 times this number and accuse them of “exaggeration” when they show bullet riddled bodies rotting in the sun.

And this is the most depressing thing of all. That Jamaicans as a whole have become so used to living in fear that we can no longer conceive of places or times where people are not and were not afraid to venture out of their homes after dark.

Because Jamaica was not always a violent place. In “A Century of Murder in Jamaica 1880-1980” [Jamaica Journal : Volume 20#2, May – July 1987] Michelle Johnson shows that up until about 1955 our murder rate was lower than that of the United States, comparable with Barbados and only slightly higher than Britain’s. Even in 1965 Morris Cargill could write in Ian Fleming’s Jamaica that “…we [Jamaicans] hate violence”. So far from being an indelible part of our heritage as some would have us believe, the nearly all pervasive violence we have become used to is really an anomaly when viewed in historical perspective.

But over the years our murder rate has risen dramatically, not only in absolute terms but also when compared to the USA’s, as the following chart shows.  

(JA 2001 projection based on the 17% increase in murders to date over 2000.)

So while the Jamaican murder rate in the early 1950s was significantly less than the US’s and as late as 1974 did not exceed it, last year it was over six times as great.

What has caused a country ostensibly at peace to go from having a relatively low crime rate to having one of the world’s highest? That is the great question facing Jamaica. For if we managed to figure out where we went wrong we could try to correct our mistakes, or at least stop repeating them.

I have no better idea than the next man of just what has contributed to perhaps the greatest explosion of violence any nation without significant ethnic, tribal, linguistic or religious differences has ever undergone. Maybe it was the breakdown of our family structure which some say began with mass emigration to Britain in the 1950s. Other factors may have been the unemployment increase caused by the UK emigration curtailment after independence, the political guns which reportedly first surfaced in the mid 1960s, the ideological extremism of the 1970s, and the drug culture of the 1990s. But those who claim that the present violence is primarily a result of poverty and lack of education need to explain how it was that the much poorer and less educated Jamaica of 1880 to 1955 was so much more peaceful.

One thing is certain. Our present horrifying murder rate is a creation of our own making. It is we Jamaicans by our lifestyle choices and our preference in politicians and our lack of revulsion who have allowed the cancer of violence to grow so inexorably. And it is only we who can say no more.

(Sources: US murder rates: US Department of Justice. Early Jamaican murder rates are tricky to pin down. The 1950-1965 figures used above come from Jamaica Constabulary Force annual reports at the UWI library courtesy of Ms. Rao. The 1965-2000 numbers were supplied by the Constabulary Communication Network courtesy of Constables Garrick and Henry. Thanks also to Ms Haughton from the National Library and Mrs. Bruce from Statin. No thanks to the senior official from the Interpol branch of the JCF who told me that he not only had no comparative international murder figures but did not care what the crime situation was in Britain or South Africa and anyway it was not his job to supply the media with such.) changkob@hotmail.com