- File
Scene in West Kingston last week as the security forces began operations in inner-city communities under a new anti-crime initiative.
Harold Crooks, Contributor
PROFESSOR DON Robotham's suggestions in The Sunday Gleaner of November 24, 2002 entitled, "Waging War Intelligently", are off the mark and his emphasis upon politically well-connected narco-warlords and their current contribution to narco-crime is outdated since the large majority of those who laundered their way into trucking, construction, distribution, real estate and banking sucked enough from the public purse to make them retired respected and rotten rich.
They have been quietly displaced by the "new Turks in tuxedos" on the way up in the world; e-connected, enterprising, fully encrypted, cautious and narco-knowledgeable; perfectly polished with proper values and attitudes, they have decided that richer is better, and rotten rich is best.
Even our local intelligence agencies have not taken this shift into sufficient account much less to begin to target this modern menace. It will be decades too late before we discover that the professor's old stereotypical narco-warlord had disappeared into infirmity, opulence, foreign lands or prisons in strange countries.
The usefulness of most of Professor Robotham's suggestions depends upon his assumption that this so-called "war" against violent crime is being waged with adequate intelligence, which is not the case.
For example, the police must have strong judicially-acceptable evidence to be able to plea bargain with retiring narco-criminals which he recommends.
The fact is that our violence-prone criminal enterprises are winning the battle for information and the professor's solution to manipulate the media is the surest way to lose this "war".
We must instead engage our adversaries by harnessing the influence of the media to win ears and minds.
After all, we are waging a just war, the media are on our side and we are the good guys, aren't we?
A good example is the imagination and genius demonstrated in the media campaign by both political parties during the recent elections. Imagine the impact if this was intelligently harnessed and used against narco-criminals.
The professor's "cardinal tactical principle" of a bipolar division of criminal labour between his corner gang (echoes of Cohen) which has guns and commit quite -"horrendous crimes" but which inexplicably "cannot be the targets of any war" on crime on the one hand, and his warlord-led narco-organizations with international dimensions and local political connections on the other hand, is as false as it is misleading.
This latter category in the professor's typology is the only one "holding us to ransom" and must therefore be the only entity attracting the focus of the police.
According to the professor, "this is a kind of gang" but "is really not a gang at all." They are "criminal organisations" suggesting a higher level of organisation than a gang but which later surprisingly are "loosely organised" and seemingly indistinguishable from a gang.
After erecting such amorphous distinctions, the professor goes on to claim that there is no rigid wall separating these "corner gangs" (which he sometimes calls "groups") from criminal organizations. If this is the case then the police would be remiss not to fully target the professor's weak corner gangs.
Even to stretch the metaphor of a "war on crime" to the extreme, as the army moves towards its strategic objective it has to mop up enemy stragglers who could be spies or night snipers behind the lines. Moreso that such efforts could be rewarded with maximum preservation of assets.
A THIRD THEORY
Curiously, the professor goes on to construct a theory of the transformation of criminal enterprises and magic-like fetches a third category from the hat.
This is his corner group which later becomes a corner gang which is in an evolving Darwinian state always upwardly mobile, becoming either a fully-fledged criminal organisation or a loosely organized one or maybe just a plain gang of criminals which has no place in the professor's academic taxonomy.
Certainly greater precision is required if such theories are to be useful to the police. For example what role does juvenile delinquency play in the corner gang and what is the extent of community toleration or support? Such things would be important features to understand if the police are to design effective intervention strategies.
It is easy to detect in the professor's hypothesis, a dramatisation of the rise to notoriety of two well-known Kingston dons living on two sides of the political divide and then arguing from the particular to the general.
This is why, among other reasons, his divisions evaporated into a single universal category thus destroying his hypothesis of what the police must target.
From a police perspective, the murderous foot soldiers not mentioned are hardly found in any gang (organized or not) and have also to be fully targeted.
These are the prized assets of the new narco-kingpins. They are difficult to recruit and more difficult to control. Perfect nihilists, many have access to and sometimes work for multiple narco kingpins who isolate themselves from criminal events they choreograph when desired.
Many of these foot soldiers travel abroad and sometimes go off on a frolic of their own, killing, extorting against the wishes of their leaders and sometimes stealing a few Ks of the boss's sh-t.
These special people are more at risk, can lead intelligence operatives to the boss's door and must be intensely targeted. Few if any of the narco-kingpins work in these killing fields and this is why the police have to engage in multiple-targeting contrary to the professor's police mono-targeting theories.
The professor's statistics on criminal gangs has a gaping hole. His estimate of 40 to 60 criminal gangs includes corner groups and narco-enterprises was apparently lifted from a four-year-old study.
But while he estimates that there are between 500 and 1,000 narco-kingpins, he does not provide a number for the narco enterprises they lead.
Other sources suggest that his lower estimate of 500 narco-kingpins is far too high and to further claim that they are all affiliated to political parties overstates his case.
Additionally, to ask the police to target 500 kingpins is unrealistic when for years all they have is a list and rumours of names while there are no more than eight who manage narco-enterprises with strong Colombian-US-Europe and local political connections.
If our intelligence services can begin to penetrate even one, thus enabling police operations to degrade their assets and lock them up it would create a domino effect and give us some breathing space.
A LEGAL REGIME NECESSARY
The professor is right, however, (and, at long last,) that this is not likely without a well thought-out legal regime, which would compensate for present intelligence inadequacies. This should not require a state of emergency if crime control planners begin to think outside "the box" which is so small.
Since the professor raised the important issue of the political affiliation and role of narco-kingpins, it is curious that he has not ventured further into the politics of /in crime control.
He would have discerned that it would help if the security of tenure of the Commissioner of Police and his deputies was made as constitutionally secure as their counterparts in the Bahamas.
The fact that such a move is resisted and overshadowed by brokered political agreements to share the power to appoint members of a more empowered Police Service Commission illuminates the crime control landscape.
It reveals an emerging shift led by the JLP and private sector interests which dangerously delegates parliamentary authority over public safety policy and permits shared political oversight euphemistically labeled as "bi-partisan" to replace the current partisan political ability to interfere with the authority of the Commissioner of Police to manage his department and shield it from further crippling, and corrupting influences from the top much less the pernicious bottom.
Our elite insist on keeping alive the old dictum that "the favourable opinions of those in power are the opinions which favour their own power."
Of much concern is the likelihood that the inheritors of the ideals of Locke, Dicey and Blackstone must be sorely troubled to be called in aid by the professor who would ban the right to demonstrate even for a just cause because of a crime wave.
More consistent with his solutions to suppress violent crime and manipulate the media, he has, as his saving grace, invoked the philosophy of the Hobbesean state governed by a sovereign whose power over men is absolute.
It seems the fatted calves and green pastures in the land of muck and honey has hardened the heart of this former humanist of the tarnished left.
The professor is a widely-respected Jamaican anthropologist whose frequent contributions to The Gleaner has curiously not proposed any alternative ways in which mass society in Jamaica could be re-organised without a journey down the old doctrinaire pathways.
For example, in a society where the private sector has been so heavily underwritten by our taxes, private/public sector distinctions are losing their salience.
This along with the growing concern of our private sector leaders for social welfare improvements, could signal a government/private sector consensus to create in the name of larger social values near-full national employment programmes which are community administered and underlaid by generous but well thought-out unemployment benefits without subsidized dependency.
There is no shortage of work to be done and to leave employment levels to the vagaries of market forces and Washington is a minority position among Jamaicans which our government must nor forget because it will be our undoing.
SOCIO-ECONOMIC POLICIES
Lastly, it is no coincidence that Holland, the Scandinavian countries and many other European nations which are the world's most advanced welfare states with very narrow spreads of income inequalities, also have very low levels of criminal violence.
So improving conditions in the inner cities must be accompanied by changes in societal structures and socio-economic policies which addresses pervasive segmentation and our underlying social pathology enabling social and economic justice to follow more closely the achievements of legal justice in our country.
It is in these endeavors rather than convoluted treatises about Jamaican narco-enterprises that our respected professor must apply his considerable intellectual gifts.
Harold Crooks is a former advisor to the Ministry of National Security and Justice.
