A Statistical Crime Story

February 7, 2018 Crime , OTHER

AP photo

By

Ricardo Swire

Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF) official statistics, from January to June 10, 2017, chronicled the island’s twenty percent murder increase, a characteristic of Jamaica’s mutated Posse nature. The 2010 JCF arrest of “Dudus Coke,” Jamaica’s biggest criminal boss, was the ignition of the Posse transformation. Such violent national confrontation, between Posses and internal security forces, publicly highlighted the extent to which Posses threatened state power. Continuous JCF offensives caused gangland’s fragmentation. Between 2009 and 2014 Jamaica’s murder rate plummeted from sixty-two to thirty-six per one hundred thousand residents.

However in 2017 JCF’s data recorded thirty-seven double slayings, six triple assassinations, two quadruple slaughters and forty-five multiple murders, part of six hundred and thirty-nine total killings. On March 24, 2017 unidentified gunmen entered a Dias, Kingsvale, Hanover restaurant and committed the triple murder. On December 27, 2017 JCF’s Superintendent in charge of the rural Westmoreland parish confirmed arrest of the quadruple murder suspect. The outlaw was captured during a security forces “Little London” operation. Little London is a Westmoreland community situated between Negril and Savanna-la-Mar towns.

Westmoreland is also one headquarters of aggressive “Lottery Scammers,” a novel Posse initiative. Statistics is a vital tool that helps translate complex figures and graphs. One outlier skews averages. JCF’s 2017 statistics calculated four murders daily as the average. A nineteen percent increase compared to 2016. JCF intelligence officers ascribed seventy percent of these murders to Posses and the “splintered underworld.” Jamaican Posses are renowned organizers and transporters in the marijuana transnational trade, pioneers of a once financially lucrative now defunct Caribbean air bridge.

JCF’s 2017 statistics noted in June thirty-three murders were committed in one week. On June 12, 2017 a family of four that included two children were shot to death in the rural Hanover parish, by gunmen using high-caliber firearms. Twenty-one residents were killed in Kingston’s “Corporate Area” alone. On July 11, 2017 a businessman, with his office in the Corporate Area, was assassinated in a contract killing. At 4:30pm two gunmen approached the businessman’s Mercedes Benz SUV while stationary in a traffic jam on Ruthven Road, St Andrew. The assassins fired multiple shots at close range, striking the victim several times.