CAYMAN ISLANDS – The most popular but least successful law enforcement and political tool in the Caribbean must be the emergency powers declared by a ruling government without the consent of the people or opposition. This has been most frequently used in Trinidad and Tobago as well as Jamaica.
The basic policing model has remained the same in the Caribbean and elsewhere for decades with a strategy that centers on law enforcement not crime prevention. It all starts with the crime but can end before the crime. Beat patrol, motorized patrol, aerial patrol, sector administration, hot spot reactions, intelligence, phone taps, cooperating witnesses, more laws, more penalties, nicer uniforms, unused body cameras.
The more things change the more they remain the same. Ask any retired or veteran cops for the truth.
Positive but misplaced political press releases. Murder rate down, people insecurity up. No single women walking from Beverley Hills or Upper Saint Andrew to go home safely after a hard day, at night. No bodyguard, no gate security, no cameras, just one foot in front of the other.
Jamaica has some history in this regard during the Seventies, while the entire Caribbean associates the misery of this failed strategy with the frequent oppression of the colonial era. One would have hoped that post independence, not an island would ever see this again.
From the stark nightmare of the hundreds of political prisoners in Grenada during the quasi revolution to the dissection of Trinidad and Jamaica into emergency zones and mass detentions, where there is no unrestricted movement by citizens, a state only familiar to their parents during the time of overseas rulers.
Monkey see monkey do.
Strangely, and despite the profusion of academic thought, peer review or empirical data available, no one has been able to come up with the conclusion that a return to the darkness of colonial suppression of freedom is the best crime fighting tool.
Even the tiny Cayman Islands as well as some others have found emergency powers under the costume of crime fighting a bridge too far.
Preventative detention usually follows emergency laws that mostly detain young men from poor neighbourhoods but Trinidad has upset the apple cart with the arrest of a prominent, ill businessman and government critic, his wife and her old aunt, under the worst conditions.
It has uncovered the emperor’s new clothes as old and the plan to move from democratic to autocratic. The Jamaican leadership must be cursing that their business community, critics and opposition have now been forewarned. It may not save them.
Perhaps it is because Trinidad leadership considers they have faux empowerment by their association with the Americans and are now erroneously encouraged to wield the judicial proceedings of their emergency laws as a hammer not a balance of scales. Giving the USA a bad name.
For evil to prevail and all that.
