Cop Killings Fuel Fears as Crime Wave Closes In on Jamaicans

KINGSTON, Jamaica —  Few outside the Jamaica Constabulary Force took notice when the cop killings began early last month.

Constables Horace Naughton and Neville Parry were on foot patrol near the downtown police station in this capital when two gunmen opened fire, killing Naughton and seriously wounding Parry.

In an island nation of 2.6 million people, where 953 men, women and children were shot, stabbed or chopped to death last year, the attack merited just a few paragraphs in the next day’s newspapers.

In the days that followed, however, gunmen wounded police officers with disturbing abandon. Then, on Feb. 14, Det. Sgt. John Thompson was gunned down execution-style while buying fish at the Greenwich Farm beach. The gunmen stole his squad car and then robbed and killed a former constable nearby.

The toll in two weeks’ time: four current and former officers slain and six more wounded.

The cop killings, even amid a slight dip in the nation’s staggering homicide rate, have added to the public perception that there is an ongoing wave of violence and fear in the capital, shocking even by Jamaican standards: lynchings, armed robberies, carjackings and slayings that business and religious leaders say are tearing into the country’s social fabric and shaking its democratic institutions to the core.

The killings come as violent street crime--much of it driven by powerful and well-armed drug gangs moving cocaine and heroin through this region to the United States--appears to be overwhelming many of the Caribbean’s otherwise pristine islands--tourist-dependent countries where image is a national security issue.

Violence Seen as Challenge From Criminals

Officials acknowledge that prisons are overflowing throughout the islands. Courts are hopelessly backlogged. Reports of public corruption are on the rise. And so are public fear and outrage, climaxing in a clamor to override human rights concerns and court appeals that have blocked implementation of the death penalty here and elsewhere in the Caribbean.

Against this backdrop, the rash of police killings here is seen by many as a gauntlet thrown down by criminals in a nation that traditionally has led not only the region but also much of the world in homicides and other violent crime.

Homicides occurred in Jamaica last year at the rate of 38 per 100,000 residents; in contrast, Los Angeles logged 11.2 per 100,000 people. Already this year, police say, more than 140 people have been slain in Jamaica. Police and government officials are quick to stress that more than three-fourths of those killings occurred in metropolitan Kingston--far from the largely peaceful and booming tourist resorts on the north and west coasts of the island. What is more, the number of homicides dipped last year from their all-time high of 1,038 in 1997.

“What is actually happening is crime is going down, while fear is going up,” said National Security Minister K. D. Knight, who attributed the phenomenon to an increase in the number of Jamaican media outlets in recent years.

“People are more aware now of what is taking place in areas far removed from them because they’re actually seeing these things on the television screens in their living rooms several times a day,” Knight said. “They get the feeling it is all around them. That fuels the fear.”

But other security officials and civic activists say the violence--long confined to the urban war zones of Kingston’s inner-city slums--is expanding geographically, closing in on the capital’s suburbs and its more affluent citizens.

“The crime is getting closer. It’s becoming more personal and affecting the lives of the middle class and the rich as it never has before,” said Msgr. Richard Albert, an American Roman Catholic priest who has lived in Jamaica for 23 years and runs social programs in the capital’s inner city.

“Now a lot of people are thinking, ‘If the cops are getting bumped off, then what’s going to happen to us?’ ”

Senior police officials and local crime reporters say they do not believe that the city’s organized gangs--which run drug rings and extortion rackets and provide killers for hire in pockets throughout Kingston--have declared war on the constabulary.

Said one Jamaican reporter: “If they did, a whole lot more cops would be dead by now.”

“We rule nothing out,” Knight said. “But, at the present time, what is being indicated is there’s a certain fearlessness on the part of the criminals now, even when confronted by armed police. I can’t give you a scientific reason for that, but drugs really do cause vicious things in a person.”

Knight said the criminals’ newfound brazenness is a factor in the increasing number of police killed on the job. And police officials say recent attacks on officers have set a pace to outstrip last year’s constabulary death toll of 14, which was a record for this decade.

That trend also helps explain new signs of vigilante justice in and around the capital, according to senior police officials, intellectuals and social activists here.

Slayings Lead to Mob Justice

They say the killings are feeding into a reservoir of mob justice, born largely out of popular frustration over a perceived powerlessness on the part of the criminal justice system and the 6,300-member constabulary against gangs bristling with sophisticated automatic weaponry largely smuggled in from the U.S.

The most dramatic of the recent reprisals occurred in January in the town of Mandeville. Police responding to a reported robbery shot and wounded four suspects. The officers then were forced to watch as a mob of 200 residents hacked and beat the suspects to death with machetes and clubs.

“Everybody was intent on killing, so the police had to take evasive action,” Senior Police Supt. Lester Howell told local reporters at the time. “They had to protect their own lives.”

Trying to Allay Public’s Fears

Other vigilante acts followed, and an editorial in the Daily Gleaner newspaper last month concluded: “These incidents suggest a society coming apart at the seams. There seems to be scant respect for law and order; the jungle instincts of knee-jerk vengeance appear to be taking hold.”

Social activists such as Albert have gone so far as to suggest drastic measures to allay public fear and cow the criminals.

“I think we have to double the number of policemen, extend their education, go into limited curfews and [create a] presence of the military that will make the criminal uncomfortable on the streets of Kingston,” the American monsignor said. “We’re at the point where we’re fighting for our survival.”

Prime Minister P. J. Patterson has approved adding more than 2,000 officers to the constabulary, and Knight has announced that he will deploy a limited and what he termed “discreet” contingent of soldiers from the Jamaica Defense Force in tourist areas to prevent a spread of the violence there. He has vowed to start bringing the level of fear down along with the number of crimes.

‘It Can’t Get Any Worse’

Many Jamaicans interviewed in the streets said they can only hope that those plans succeed.

“It can’t get any worse. If the crime gets any worse, it’ll be like hell itself here,” said taxi driver Barrington Vernon, who knew several of the 15 cabbies slain during robberies last year. “It’s already terrible. I see only one solution: Hang the criminals. Hang them all.”

Fineman was recently on assignment in Kingston.