Global IssuesViolent Crime Surge in the Caribbean Takes Heavy Toll
Helen Clarke, the former prime minister of New Zealand, recalled a situation a few years ago when within the less affluent suburbs of her country, youth gang violence had become a serious problem.
'We had to scramble to develop new initiatives,' she said, adding 'it is not easy, (but) where there is a will there is a way.'
It is this same approach that Clarke, the first woman to lead the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) as its administrator, is hoping that Caribbean Community (CARICOM) countries will adopt as they seek to deal with the persistent issue of violence and insecurity.
The price-tag is high not only in human but also economic terms. According to Caribbean Community (CARICOM) estimates, gang-related crime causes the loss of between 2.8 percent and four percent of gross domestic product. Crime in Jamaica, one of the most murder-prone countries in the world, amounted to 529 million dollars a year in lost income.
In its first-ever Caribbean Human Development Report 2012, 'Human Development and the Shift to Better Citizen Security,' UNDP provides a snapshot of the region, as well as actions and policies to address the problem in Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Guyana, Jamaica, St. Lucia, Suriname, and Trinidad and Tobago.
The report noted that with the exception of Barbados and Suriname, homicide rates, including gang-related killings, have 'increased substantially' in the last 12 years across the Caribbean, even as they have been falling or stabilising in most other parts of the world.
The violence is undermining the region's socioeconomic development, Clark said, creating 'a negative cycle of underdevelopment and insecurity'.
A team led by Professor Anthony Harriott, the director of the Institute of Criminal Justice and Security at the Mona Campus of the University of the West Indies (UWI) in Jamaica, surveyed 11,555 persons in the seven countries and held consultations with 450 experts in 2010 in preparation of the report. Official statistics were also used as part of the analysis.
'The elevated rates of violent crime in the Caribbean may be taken as evidence of social inequalities that restrict the choices to large sections of the vulnerable population,' the report says.
'Crime may thus rightly be regarded as being a profoundly developmental problem,' it states, proposing a variety of measures which acknowledge that 'human development, human rights and citizen security are interdependent.'
Although murder rates are exceedingly high by world standards, the report said that Caribbean governments can reverse the trend, calling for regional governments to beef up public institutions to tackle crime and violence - including the criminal justice system -while boosting preventive measures.
The recently appointed regional director for UNDP in Latin America and the Caribbean, Heraldo Muñoz, said while Latin America and the Caribbean accounted for 8.5 percent of the world population, it has about 27 percent of the world's homicides.
The total number of murders in Jamaica dropped after the report's completion to 1,124 in 2011, a seven-year low, but the country has the highest homicide rate in the Caribbean and the third-highest murder rate worldwide in recent years, with about 60 murders per 100,000 inhabitants.
'This is surpassed by only two Central American countries, El Salvador and Honduras, with 66 and 82.1 murders, respectively, per 100,000 people,' the report said, citing U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime figures.
In Trinidad and Tobago, the report said that murder rates increased five-fold over a decade, to more than 40 per 100,000 in 2008, and then declined to 36 in 2010.
'People's lives and income are lost, productivity, investment and consumption deteriorate, social capital diminishes and of course the undeniable strengthening and survival of democracy across our region...tends to weaken,' Munoz said. 'In other words, Latin America and the Caribbean is the most violent region of the world.
'That is a distinction we do not want to have,' he said. 'We have to prevent youngsters from entering the criminal chain.'
Trinidad and Tobago's Prime Minister Kamla Persad Bissessar, who has responsibility for security within the 15-member regional grouping, said that the regional focus of the report presents 'a very unique and crucial opportunity for our countries to engage with each other based on shared experiences and in order to emulate the best practices to be found within the region'.
'Will we continue to move two steps forward and one step backward? We must be guided by the findings of this report and the central message of this report focuses on the necessary transformation of the relationship between citizen and state and the adoption of a citizen- centered approach to security,' she told the ceremony that was attended by several Caribbean government ministers, including Dr. Errol Cort, the chair of the CARICOM Council of Ministers for National Security and Law Enforcement.
'This constitutes a fundamental shift from the state centric status quo and this shift is absolutely essential for the developmental process,' said Persad Bissessar.
Overall, the report says Caribbean countries need to build more capacity to response to the problems of street gangs and organised crime as well as to address gender-based violence.
It argues that security efforts will be more effective when the rights of people are respected and when communities are themselves involved as active agents of their own security.
The main recommendations include actions to reduce risk and build youth resilience, control street gangs and organised crime, transform the police, reform the justice system and build capacity for 'evidence based policy'.
The recommendations are supported by public approval of five main 'social interventions' that will have an impact on crime. These include investing more in education, with 87.1 percent support; programmes for young people (91.7 percent); job creation (92.5 percent); in poor communities (87.7 percent) and in reducing poverty (88.8 percent).
'There is a demand for change that calls for greater attention to crime as a social problem and for the recognition that security cannot reliably rest on the capabilities and performances of law enforcement,' the report stresses.
© Inter Press Service (2012) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service