It is apparent that sicario-style and drive-by murders have become embedded in Jamaica's violent-crime landscape, the former method learnt through our cocaine connections with Colombia, and the latter brought back by deportees from the United States.

The role of the sicarios (young assassins riding motorcycles) in Colombia's contract-killing industry has been well-documented by such authors as Francisco E. Thoumi, Mark Bowden, Guy Gugliotta and Jeff Leen, and other experts on Colombian cocaine trafficking. As Prof. Thoumi put it in Political Economy & Illegal Drugs in Colombia, the sicarios who have established links with the drug industry "dispose of the industry's enemies, settle accounts with business partners, or eliminate competitors."

With the "Colombianisation" of the Jamaican drug trade, the sicarios are very much a part of the island's violent-crime landscape, operating with chilling efficiency and barefacedness as was displayed in the case of Ranil Senaka Wijesekera who was slain on October 9, 2000 as he stopped his jeep at the traffic lights at West King's House and Waterloo roads in St. Andrew, not far from where SSP McDonald was assassinated.

There is no doubt that the international masterminds of the drug industry ­ cocaine and ganja ­ in Jamaica, and their cohorts in other criminal activities, are willing and able to kill.

They use their vast resources and murderous machinery to protect and expand their interests, silence their enemies and competitors, and at times simply drive fear into the law-abiding among us.

PLATA O PLOMO STRATEGY

Plata o plomo is an integral part of globalised drug traffickers' strategy. Remember the murders of narcotics divers Carl Lubsey, Aubrey Farr and Donovan Henry? They had repeatedly refused the drug traffickers' plata (silver) and were, in typical Colombian fashion, given their plomo (lead), instead.

The plata o plomo strategy, executed by sicarios, is frightening, terrifying even, and it takes the bravest of the brave to even think of defying it. Drive-by shootings are not a new phenomenon to Jamaica, having been used over the years in some of our most violent election campaigns in the Corporate Area.

In the last few years they have been increasing as deportees from certain inner-city neighbourhoods in the United States implement here their tried and trusted method of settling drug-turf war. Indeed, in some of those American 'hoods, the drive-by gangsters' automobiles of choice are those with sun roofs, the better to shoot from.

Senior Supt. Lloyd Anthony McDonald was buried on Sunday, March 7. At the funeral service, a colleague, Senior Supt. Leon Rose, on behalf of the Police Officers' Association, warned criminals that the police would not relent in the fight against crime. "We will never surrender, we will never give in to criminal activities," SSP Rose vowed.

Good. But the police need to do even more if they are to prevent the sicarios, and other violent criminals, from growing into an outlaw industry.

USE THEIR HEADS

They have to be cool and calm and think outside of the box. They have to use their heads instead of their hearts and, too impulsively, their guns. They have to work their sources the way the best of reporters do theirs, and with a lot of legwork thrown in too. They won't have the money and high-tech resources the international drug traffickers who run the cocaine and ganja command and control centres here have.

But they can use human intelligence to win in the end. And they have to be as patient as they are painstaking, as professional as they are flexible.

The police expressed outrage at SSP McDonald's assassination, but how many police personnel, not assigned to the case, have tripped in to offer their time and their services, maybe to do the boring time-consuming job of going through records or follow up on some not-too-exciting leads? Or how many have been passing on routinely, any information they pick up in the course of their unrelated work?

The last thing the public wants to hear, a few days or weeks or months from now, is that "John Brown, who was wanted for the assassination of SSP McDonald, was killed in a shootout with the police this morning". End of chapter.