For nearly 4 many years, Jamaica has ranked among the many nations with the best murder charges on this planet. However since 2022, because of concerted authorities efforts, its homicide charge has been falling: first by practically 8 % from 2022 to 2023, adopted by an 18.7 % decline from 2023 to 2024. Within the first seven months of this yr, the island has registered an unprecedented 43 % drop in homicides in comparison with 2024.
If the development holds, Jamaica’s homicide charge for this yr may fall beneath 25 per 100,000 folks. That’s nonetheless excessive, nevertheless it’s a degree that the nation has not recorded since 1991. The development has turn out to be a rallying level for the incumbent center-right Jamaica Labour Get together forward of Sept. 3 common elections. The decline in Jamaica’s homicide charge is a direct results of Prime Minister Andrew Holness’s strategic focus on dismantling organized crime since he took workplace in 2016, which accelerated into an aggressive crackdown earlier this yr.
Throughout the Caribbean, although, different nations are nonetheless experiencing an increase in lethal violence, principally within the type of shootings attributed to gangs. Barbados noticed a 138 % surge in its murder charge from 7 homicides per 100,000 folks to just about 18 per 100,000 between 2023 and 2024, for instance. In 2023, seven of the ten nations with the highest murder charges in Latin America and the Caribbean had been English-speaking Caribbean states.
Interventions administered by overseas companions, together with the USA, haven’t helped. The U.S. Company for Worldwide Improvement (USAID), which the Trump administration massively drew down this yr, funded a plethora of violence discount and prevention packages all through the Caribbean for many years. However information reveals that they didn’t have an effect on nationwide homicide charges anyplace within the area.
In contrast to Holness, USAID averted confronting gang violence head-on. USAID’s rebranded operation below the State Division doesn’t seem to have discovered from previous errors.
Over the previous 25 years, USAID’s violence prevention tasks within the Caribbean have had names as formidable as their objectives. The Peace and Prosperity Undertaking (2001-2004) centered on neighborhood policing, battle decision, and expertise coaching. Group Empowerment and Transformation, generally known as COMET (2006-2012), mixed civic engagement with neighborhood policing. Its second iteration, from 2014 to 2019, directed small grants to youth golf equipment and citizen journalism, tacking on local weather resilience and catastrophe threat discount.
Then got here Shoot Hoops, Not Weapons (2020-2025), a basketball-based initiative aimed toward stopping gang recruitment by constructing life expertise via sports activities. The ultimate USAID-funded initiative earlier than its abrupt closure was Empower, a five-year, $3 million program to help at-risk youth via training and job coaching.
A few of these endeavors might have benefited people or communities quickly, however none had a measurable nationwide affect. Jamaica’s homicide charge in 2000 was 34 folks per 100,000; in 2024, the final full yr of USAID programming, it was 41 per 100,000.
These tasks shared a number of options: catchy branding, implementation via U.S.-based intermediaries, and an insistence on addressing violence with out confronting the forces that drive it: armed territorial competitors between felony organizations that proliferate in undergoverned areas. In Jamaica, this primarily means casual communities which might be maintained by clientelist politics. Casual communities are these whose residents lack entry to fundamental companies in addition to property titles.
U.S.-backed programming additionally made no distinction between various kinds of violence—home, interpersonal, violence towards youngsters, or gang-related—in a context the place 70 % to 80 % of murders are attributed to gangs. USAID’s packages in Jamaica had been the overseas help model of safety theater: measures that give the looks of bettering safety with out really decreasing threat.
America was not alone on this strategy. The Citizen Safety and Justice Program—funded by the UK, the Inter-American Improvement Financial institution (IDB), and Canada between 2001 and 2020—was one among Jamaica’s largest and longest-running safety initiatives. Regardless of practically twenty years of funding in parenting packages, entrepreneurship initiatives, expertise certification, battle decision, and violence interruption, it produced no measurable discount within the nation’s homicide charge, nor that of the communities the place it was carried out.
Nor ought to it have been anticipated to: Knowledge from Jamaica and different nations with excessive homicide charges reveals that unemployment, inequality, and low training ranges aren’t the main drivers of gang violence. In some circumstances they could correlate weakly, however extra decisive components are gangs’ political patronage and territorial management, in addition to the state’s low detection charges of gang exercise and tolerance of casual settlements.
Between 2007 and 2017, overseas donors and Jamaican taxpayers spent roughly $2.5 billion on social interventions aimed toward diverting youth from gangs. These included college security efforts, life expertise coaching, psychosocial help, job placement, entrepreneurship teaching, and parenting packages. Jamaica’s homicide charge in 2007 was 58.64 deaths per 100,000 folks; in 2017, it was just about the identical, at 58.65.
Some tasks might have made issues worse. A 2019 examine of Jamaica and Barbados discovered that elevated participation in organized sports activities was correlated with elevated delinquency. But Shoot Hoops, Not Weapons—whose underlying assumption was that basketball would divert at-risk youths away from gang violence—went forward, reaching 190 main college youngsters between 2023 and fall 2024 in Jamaican communities which might be gang strongholds.
Proof from different nations, together with within the Caribbean, reveals that such interventions can additional entrench felony organizations. This may occur by flooding a neighborhood with sources—equivalent to cash and job alternatives—that gangs seize, management, and exploit, or by offering subsidies that encourage recipients to depart formal employment, enlarging the pool of recruits for organized crime.
A $1.5 million U.S. Bureau of Worldwide Narcotics and Regulation Enforcement (INL) violence discount challenge in Trinidad and Tobago—generally known as the Gang Discount and Group Empowerment Undertaking, or GRACE—aimed to cut back gang-related crime and strengthen the connection between police and “at-risk” communities. However it was mired in allegations of mismanagement, together with a report that somebody affiliated with a gang distributed the challenge’s sources and gave gang members challenge T-shirts bearing the U.S. Embassy emblem.
None of those initiatives have labored as a result of Jamaica’s terribly excessive homicide charge is a gang drawback. A notable discount between 2011 and 2014 was the results of a state crackdown on gangs with aggressive, focused policing. Murders fell to 1,005 in 2014, down from 1,447 in 2010. However that crackdown had the unintended final result of splintering Jamaica’s felony underworld, producing extra gangs that had been smaller, much less hierarchical, and extra unstable, which led to an explosion of territorial disputes that drove killings.
An analogous resurgence is probably going if Jamaica eases off the gasoline of the present crackdown, an strategy made doable by heavy investments in safety forces over the previous six years. This final result is just about sure if the socialist Individuals’s Nationwide Get together (PNP) wins this week’s election. The social gathering holds a slender lead in some polling, and—like worldwide help donors—is wedded to the idea that socioeconomic circumstances are the first drivers of violence. The PNP’s acknowledged place guarantees to deal with “violence as a public well being challenge formed by poverty, trauma, and exclusion.”
When USAID was dismantled, critics of social interventions noticed it as an opportunity to alter course on funding priorities and violence discount coverage. However proper on the heels of the closure got here the launch of CREATE—the Group Resilience and Transformation Undertaking—a $2 million INL-funded initiative. CREATE goals to strengthen neighborhood safety and scale back gang recruitment, providing “optimistic options” to at-risk youth. In design and supply, it’s indistinguishable from a USAID challenge.
The drivers of Jamaica’s excessive homicide charge aren’t a thriller, even when they don’t seem to be overtly acknowledged in violence discount discourse. Dismantling felony organizations, formalizing weak communities, and strengthening the establishments that ship regulation and justice are key to tackling the foundation causes of violence. But donor funding has constantly favored packages that tackle signs as a substitute.
One clarification for this mismatch is that many approaches are developed exterior of the Caribbean context, based mostly on templates that don’t mirror the area’s patterns of gang-driven violence.
Another excuse is institutional self-preservation. Donor-funded interventions have created an help business with a vested curiosity in sustaining the established order. Worldwide growth contractors, many based mostly in Washington, act as conduits for U.S. authorities cash. Success on this ecosystem is measured not by outcomes, however by securing the subsequent grant.
Additional—in a context the place sources for youth growth, arts, and tradition are restricted—donor funding dynamics create sturdy incentives for organizations to rebrand social or youth packages as violence prevention, no matter their precise affect. The Jamaica Basketball Affiliation might genuinely purpose to help younger athletes however calling it an anti-gang intervention is what unlocks funding. The result’s a cycle of ineffectual programming that reinforces dependency and avoids the structural and political realities underpinning violence.
Political complicity is probably the most pernicious issue. Probably the most violent locations in Jamaica ship the highest voter turnout; casual communities are vote banks for politicians and secure havens for gangs—the ability base of each. Politicians profit from avoiding the disruption of actual reform. Donor-funded packages permit politicians to level to catchy campaigns whereas sidestepping the actual work of dismantling clientelist programs and gang energy buildings that regularizing communities would require.
Even when USAID was unwilling to straight confront the politically delicate challenge of Jamaica’s casual settlements, it may have put its weight and cash behind disrupting the programs that allow political patronage and maintain secure havens of organized violence. Tasks concentrating on land titling, as USAID has undertaken in Tanzania and Colombia, would have gone a lot additional towards addressing the underlying and contextual drivers of Jamaica’s excessive homicide charge, with a far better likelihood of lasting affect.
Support is a device of statecraft. It should be guided by the pursuits of the donor nation and held accountable to the taxpayers who fund it. It’s in the USA’ curiosity to safe its close to overseas, which suggests fixing continual violence and the prevalence of nonstate armed teams. The dismantling of USAID was ostensibly meant to recalibrate its help technique to raised obtain desired ends. As a substitute, the theater continues, with the identical actors studying from the identical ineffectual script.
