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Jamaica's 'born fi dead' culture

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Toronto is awash in the blood of gun-related ghetto crime in a year in which barely a week has passed without adding to this year's homicide total, currently at 64 deaths, with 44 of them involving guns. Almost all of the victims and perpetrators are young black men.

The city is traumatized, the country concerned, and Paul Martin has raised the crisis with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice since most of the weapons used are U.S.-made.

What nobody is talking about, however, is where those involved in violent crimes are predominantly coming from. While we know that the vast majority of Toronto's killers and victims are black, our multicultural hyper-sensitivity forbids any further racial or national breakdown. But even with a lack of statistics to prove it on paper, it is widely -- if quietly -- acknowledged that a disproportionate number of criminals and victims hail from Jamaica.

To understand why that is, it helps to understand the place that they come from.

By early September, the Caribbean island --with roughly the same population as Toronto, had recorded 1,157 murders, almost all of them involving guns. It was the country's highest ever by that date, and well on track to top 1,500 by the end of the year, eclipsing last year's total of 1,469.

It's staggering. In June alone, just when Toronto was beginning its long, hot summer, there were 115 killings in Jamaica.

But while these figures are shocking, they are not that surprising. The beautiful island of Jamaica has always been that way, right back to the days when its capital of Kingston was pirate-infested Port Royal, and the colony was torn apart by slave rebellions.

I've been there many times, loved its beaches and mountains, its laid-back, friendly people, and I'll never forget the caring angel who nursed me through a stay at Toronto General Hospital.

But it's still a fact that since independence in 1962, when the murder rate was 3.8 per 100,000, Jamaica's crime rate has been getting steadily worse. By 1976, it had risen to 17.6, and by 2001 jumped dramatically to 43. Domestic killings remained relatively stable, but gang killings had increased five-fold.

I can remember, in the early 1970s, being escorted unceremoniously to the airport by two detectives and ordered on the next flight off-island after visiting Kingston to do a story on the island's crime epidemic, rather than the delights of its life-blood tourist industry. Perhaps understandably, the government will do almost anything to avoid bad publicity in Canada, the United States and Britain, its main sources of tourist-industry revenue.

Just what it is about Jamaica that begets this extraordinary level of violence has baffled criminologists and sociologists for years. It's clearly connected to the island's crushing poverty and its location between the South American drug producers and their North American market. As Anthony Harriott points out in the book Understanding Crime in Jamaica: New Challenges for Public Policy, Jamaica is increasingly exporting its violent crime -- and that means New York, London and Toronto.

The respected Council on Hemispheric Affairs warns that while crime is threatening its tourism, "a worst case scenario for Jamaica would be if its inability to maintain its borders against the movement of drug smugglers causes a descent into anarchy which could eventually result in a failed state."

It paints a grim picture of 15% unemployment, high availability of firearms, the drug culture and political tribalism, communities turned into warring factions, and the failure of Prime Minister P.J. Patterson "to stem the crescendo of violence ... his only strategy has been to create committees and make a half-hearted attempt to follow the least offensive of their recommendations."

The Council further warns of "poverty as a major cause of gang violence ... children as sex slaves in the island's tourism centres ... juveniles transporting drugs on behalf of South American cartels."

It sounds a lot like the gangsta rap culture that dominates ghetto areas of Toronto -- a cultural style born of a bitter hopelessness that leaves many young blacks convinced they are "born fi' dead," as British criminology professor Ben Bowling points out in his review of Understanding Crime in Jamaica.

Sadly this is the dominant fact of life for many thousands of Jamaicans, and one which some carry with them when they escape the hell-holes of Kingston. It is not the dominant fact of life in Canada, neither for Canadians nor hard-working, law-abiding Jamaicans who have found a better life. But even a small taste of this near-anarchy is too much, and despite the over-reaching dictates of political correctness and multiculturalism, we deserve to at least know from whence it came.