Norman Grindley/Deputy Chief Photographer
Minister of National Security Peter Phillips (right) and Commissioner of Police Lucius Thomas.

Bernard Headley, Contributor

National Security Minister Dr. Peter Phillips recently tabled in Parliament a report, 'A Study on Criminal Deportation'. The study's claimed central finding is deportees returned to Jamaica from the United States, Great Britain and Canada are significantly responsible for Jamaica's horrendous violent crime problem. Whatever other bits of useful information may have emerged from the study (and there are some), establishing criminal causality was clearly its raison d'etre.

The study's principal author is Annmarie Barnes, an employee with the ministry and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Toronto, and listed as one of the study's co-authors is Professor Barry Chevannes of the University of the West Indies, Mona.

But, if I understand well, my respected colleague's direct communication to me, he's been having troubling second thoughts. He makes a convincing case that his contribution to the study was marginal, that he was given unwarranted marquee billing and that substantive criticisms he made to the principal author of the draft were ignored. I suspect, in the final analysis, that my esteemed and unsuspecting friend's recognised academic brand name was used to give cover to a questionable project.

Ever since the late 1990s, when the country's violent crime rate began spiralling out of control, the Jamaica Government and constabulary have been seeking ways to blame away the problem. A dramatic increase in the number of murders, it so happened, coincided with Byzantine immigration measures enacted in the United States, Britain and Canada. These resulted in, and continue to cause, wholesale return to the island of large numbers of Jamaicans whom the Americans and others thought unfit to any longer dwell among them.

The high numbers of persons returned to Jamaica, for varying types of transgressions (including, in the U. S., the crime of "receiving stolen goods"), became a godsend for Jamaican state agencies and the average Joe wanting to find simple explanations for runaway crime. Behind any number of vicious killings "are these deportees coming in here," one police higher-up at the time opined. Commissioner Lucius Thomas would sometime later chime in with: "We see them [those deportees] in the St. Andrew South Division, and it is no wonder that we see the increase in crime [there]".

Of the three classes of citizens targeted for heavy police action when P. J. Patterson created, in September 2000, his Crime Management Unit were, the Prime Minister said on national TV, "Dons, the deportees and other criminals". The CMU's head, Senior Superintendent Reneto Adams, took, as he often publicly said, this as 007-type mandate to "eliminate" all three groups "by any means necessary".

Previous Study

It was all neat, compact "science": violent crime going up; high numbers of deportees coming in. You didn't need Sherlock Holmes to tell you what was happening here. The connection between the two was so elementary that even the blind could see it. Surely a study would document the relationship. And, to its credit, the Government, under the then Ministry of National Security and Justice, did undertake an earlier study, to among other things, investigate the link between deportations and crime.

The results of that study appear in a Ministry of National Security document, 'Deportee Report', dated February 2001. Page 13 of the report states its principal finding and conclusion: All relevant factors considered "the low percentage of deportees being convicted for murder, attempted murder and manslaughter indicates that this group may not be a major contributor to the disproportionately high homicide rate in Jamaica".

But that study/report never saw the light of public scrutiny - "wrong" finding, "wrong" conclusion. I have asked at least two veteran news journalists whether they recall at the time seeing or hearing of the 2001 deportee study. Do they recall it being presented to Parliament? Neither one could. And, rather strangely, the author(s?) of the present deportee study give scant mention of what would seem its progenitor. Be that as it may, five years later, with essentially the same data, same generic pool of subjects, same principal author, but this time with smoke and some mirrors, we are presented with an entirely different finding and conclusion.

There's now, Bada Bing, Bada Bum, "a direct statistical correlation between increases in deportation and increases in the country's murder rate", as Minister Phillips put it. He and his ministry got the result they wanted. The process illustrates how a ruling regime can commandeer the language and semiotics of research science to meet a stated political-ideological objective.

Equally cheering, though, will be every right-wing nut and racist immigrant basher in the relevant metropolitan countries. For them the scripted finding of "correlation" will be heavenly manna, raw meat for heightened propaganda. "That's what we've been trying to tell ya'll: those darkie aliens are nothing but trouble. Why would we want to have them in our country? We're doing the right thing in sending them back to their native lands. And see, down there in Jamaica, they continue to kill, rape, rob and maim. Their own government study says so".

Principasl methods

At the heart of the matter, in attempting to link deportations and crime, the study relies on two principal methods. The first is statistically correlating "trends" in a number of deportations with that of crime, particularly violent crime. The reader and the Jamaican public are asked to believe that deportations are linked to murder rates "in terms of the total number of persons deported in any given year." Not wanting merely to draw two lines on a graph showing, over time, the co-varying dips, curves and peaks (which, yea, anybody could do), we are presented with correlation coefficients. The co-relational co-efficient (still two lines on a paper) between deportations and violent crime is "so high" that, gee, the former must have caused the latter. Yea, and if I stepped outside and snapped my fingers and it started to rain, it was I, snapping my fingers, who caused it to rain. One of the first things we teach our undergraduate natural and social science students is that if two things happen simultaneously, it does not follow that one caused the other. Even talk-show host, Wilmot Perkins, a non-university man, knows that!

Why the hocus-pocus with "statistical correlation"? If the study author or authors and the Ministry of National Security are insisting that deportees are disproportionately responsible for violent crime, then tell us in simple arithmetic how many murders have the police actually counted as attributable to deportees. That specific level of information the author or authors had access to; access I was denied (since I did not work for the ministry) in pursuing, two years ago, a U.S. Embassy-sponsored study on deportations from the United States.

Below are the numbers between 2002 and 2005 (critical years for examining deportee responsibility in crime) that the police reported to the Planning Institute of Jamaica (PIOJ). The table also shows the numbers of these murders that the police say they "cleared up". These cleared-up rates, which consistently approached 50 per cent, are, incidentally, impressive - understanding as we do, though, what the police mean by "cleared-up". As far as they are concerned the case was solved, cleared-up; someone, usually a male, was "booked" or named for the crime, never mind that he may not have survived (often because of police action) to have had his day in court.

Nonetheless, what I think the average Joe really wants to know is this: Between 2002 and 2005, we had in Jamaica a horrendous 5,161 reported murders. Mr. Mark Shields and others on the Jamaica Constabulary Force were able to "clear up" an impressive 2,466 (close to half) of these cases. How many of the 2,466 murderers (albeit unconvicted) were deportees? See Table A

No smoke and no mirrors; how many: ten, a hundred, one thousand, all? The police and the Ministry are able to report to the PIOJ several important details, which they have on file for every arrested, including nationality. With the hullabaloo over deportees, going back several years now, certainly law enforcement would have on hand, as additional "background", the deportee status of individuals integral to the "clearing up" of major cases.

The second principal method employed in the study for linking increase in crime to deportation is use of what the study author or authors admit was an unscientific survey of 214 convicted deportees, asking them primarily to report on their criminal habits. Enough said. But, to make it plain: there's good, self-evident reason why researchers wanting to learn the extent of domestic abuse generally shy away from explicitly asking married men, "When was the last time you beat your wife?"

Incredibly confounding

Finally, and incredibly confounding, the report points out, on Page 91, that, in the period January 1, 1990 to December 31, 2005, "deported persons were responsible for 3,073 criminal offences" - a stranger-than-fiction finding that did not escape an astute letter writer to The Gleaner. I have read, re-read and peered every which way at this astounding bit of information, to make sure I understand it correctly. This is what I gather, by extrapolation. The PIOJ reports 50,101 crimes committed at the end of 1990; and 32,777 at the end of 2005. Conservatively that would mean an average of around 41,000 total crimes per year between 1990 and 2005, for a grand total of about 621,000 crimes for the 15-year period.

The study is telling us that (do read the above again carefully), of this estimated 621,000 total reported crimes, deportees were responsible for 3,073, a mere 0.4 per cent, of them. That's lower than for any other jurisdiction in the English-speaking Caribbean! No other distinctly identifiable group in the Jamaican population holds that kind of under-representation in the crime statistics - not even (I'm guessing) regular church folk. Somebody needs to ask: Just how much money did it cost the taxpayer to produce this "study"?

Bernard Headley is Professor of Criminology, UWI, Mona, and author of the 2005 book, Deported.