WE UNDERSTAND the frustration of the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), Paula Llewellyn, and colleague prosecutors when they see potentially strong cases slip away because witnesses to crime decide not to testify in court.

However, we suspect that Ms Llewellyn may be incorrectly juxtaposing cause and effect in her recent critique of Jamaica's deeply entrenched culture of silence.

Like the DPP, we believe that engagement of individuals is important to the creation of a whole and wholesome society. So, we are concerned about what appears to be a growing trend in the country of people wanting to privatise/individualise solutions to community problems. It is one of see nothing, hear nothing, say nothing, do nothing. Rather than insisting on better roads, for instance, we see the solution in SUVs or all-terrain vehicles. Or, instead of finding community-centred responses to criminality, we opt for gated complexes and private security systems. In other words, those who are in a position to do so, which translates to affordability, prefer to opt out.

Culture of silence

But that having been said, there is a certain rationality to the behaviour - to opt out and its companion, to adopt the culture of silence to which Ms Llewellyn referred in her recent speech to students in the hospitality and creative studies department of the Montego Bay Community College. While she did not say it, this attitude, in its sharpest manifestation, is significantly a feature of working-class and inner-city communities, that is, areas that tend to experience the highest levels of crime and live with a heightened sense of insecurity.

People, unable to afford the buzzers and guards, keep quiet not because of a compact with criminals, but because of fear. And they have reasons, rooted in experience, to be afraid. They have several examples of witnesses who have talked and/or have testified and then been murdered, or seen family members ruthlessly cut down. They are aware of gunmen, with seeming impunity, intimidating entire communities, enforcing the 'informer-fi-dead' culture, which Ms Llewellyn, like the rest of us, so deeply abhors.

Lack of national security

It may be true that it is an attitude partly rooted into the socio-historic evolution of Jamaica; but this culture of silence, we feel, is held strongly in places by the fear to which she alluded, rather than deep-seated adherence to a code of death. It is reinforced by the state's incapacity to ensure reasonable national security. And that failure is, in part, a failure of policing and of the justice system to perform in a timely and efficient manner.

Take Ms Llewellyn's seeming expectation of, and reliance on, eyewitness evidence in criminal cases. It seems to us that we would have better results and even stronger cases if investigators relied more on forensic evidence, including DNA information, rather than eyewitness accounts, which can be notoriously faulty. Then there is the matter of trust, or lack thereof. People will not speak about what they see, or worse, agree to give evidence in court, if they do not have confidence in the integrity of law enforcement agencies. When those hurdles have been crossed, it is difficult to hold the interest/ commitment of witnesses when cases snail their way through the justice system.

We, too, want people to speak up and testify, but we can do far more to build their confidence.