Murder in the Bahamas

 Crime in the Caribbean has risen dramatically in the past decade. The Bahamas is no exception — but there are two major differences between the archipelago and the most of the rest of the West Indies: first, the Bahamas has been there before; and second, the Bahamas has well-functioning police institutions. In that sense, there is much room for optimism (assuming that the world economy holds up) to predict a significant fall in violence in the near future — if certain fairly simple reforms are undertaken.

We’ll start with the history. From the late 1960s through the mid-1980s, the murder rate (measured per 100,000 people) steadily spiraled upwards as the islands became a center for drug trafficking into South Florida. (The data come from U.N. crime surveys and the Royal Bahamian Police Force, abbreviated RBPF.) Unfortunately, uniform data is not available for 1987 through 1990 (the Bahamas did not take part in the U.N. survey for those years) but the time series agrees with the general impression of that era: once the United States took an active role in suppressing the drug traffic through the archipelago, violent crime fell rapidly. It did not, however, fall all the way back to pre-1970 levels: most accounts pin the continuing level of background violence on the establishment of youth gangs on the islands and the arrival of large numbers of Haitian immigrants.

In the last decade (after a brief spike in 1999-2000) homicide has climbed back up to near its historic high. The reason for the climb is not undocumented immigration from Haiti and Jamaica: between 2005 and 2009, only 12% of homicide victims were Haitian-origin, with another 1% from Jamaica. That is not far off historic norms, and certainly not enough to explain the rise.

Rather, like elsewhere, the cause is probably drug-related, albeit this time for control of local markets, rather than export to the United States. Between 2007 and 2009, the percentage of drug-related killings jumped from 8% to 16%. Put another way, the increase in drug killing accounted for all of the post-2007 increases in homicide. Unfortunately, drug-related crime accounts for precisely none of the 2004-07 jump. (Actually, drug-related killing fell from 9 per year to 6 over that period; their contribution was actually negative.)

The Bahamian police, however, use a very exacting definition of drug-related. There is, however, a looser classification for what are called “retaliation” homicides: “Killing in response or reaction to prior confrontations, altercations, crimes or other issues.” Between 2005 and 2007, retaliation killings rose from 2% to 18% of all homicides, and accounted for 65% of the rise in murders. They since stabilized, but as noted before, murders carried out at the site of drug transactions continued to increase. Since the majority (it isn’t clear how many) of retaliation killings are in fact related to previous narcotics-related crimes, it seems likely that increasing conflict for retail drug sales explains most of the Bahamas’ crime spike.

This pattern provides grounds for optimism. First and foremost, the Bahamas is not a particularly corrupt country. Oh, rumors and complaints abound, but there is little evidence of serious rot. The Wikileaks cables, for example, amply criticized Bahamian officials and they had a field day with the scandals surrounding Anna Nicole Smith, which included a torrid affair with the immigration minister who expedited her residence permit ... but the State Department made no mention of serious corruption impacting American business or security interests. And the scandals that have been mentioned, whether by State Department or the Bahamian press, are pretty small potatoes by American standards ... let alone compared to standard operating procedure in, say, the Mexican prison system.

More systematically, the classifications used by the IMF rank the Bahamas fairly high in terms of control of corruption. The Bahamas’ rating of 1.4 on a scale from −2.5 to +2.5 ranks it with places like Belgium and Chile and far above Jamaica and Trinidad, both of which have negative scores. In short, Bahamian institutions work, and that is a necessary but not sufficient condition for controlling violent crime.

Reports by the Bahamian police make it fairly clear that the criminal justice system suffers from three shortcomings. First, the RBPF is undermanned — a situation made worse by its reluctance to adopt the common American tactic of flooding “hotspots” with police officers when violent crime spikes. Here is a quote from a high-ranking Bahamian police officer: “For policing purposes, the identification of an ellipse defining a hot spot is, alone, useless. The question then becomes: what does a police officer do after finding him or herself in the middle of a designated hotspot. Experts stress that as long as nobody knows what is heating the hotspot, responses may be futile.”

This reluctance to simply flood “hotspots” with officers sounds commonsensical, but it flies in the face of the evidence from American cities that stamping out violence in one area in does not displace it to others: if the opportunity is lost, most killings simply don’t happen. Such tactics would be particularly effective in the Bahamas, where 23% of homicides occur between pedestrians out on the street, and an additional 21% take place inside commercial establishments. Of course, the RBPF might need more officers (it currently numbers about 3,000, which is not small for a country of 330,000) — but the Bahamas is not poor, and it is ridiculously undertaxed.

The second issue is twofold. First, the RBPF is great (on paper) at solving murders, but extremely lousy at managing to convict those it accuses. Its clear-up rate is 73%, which is higher than the 62% rate in the United States, albeit lower than the 78% rate in Barbados, the 82% rate in the U.K. and the 86% rate in Australia. It certainly beats the hell out of the 32% clear-up rate in Jamaica and the 18% rate in Trinidad.

The problem is that murder arrests in the U.S., U.K., Barbados, and Oz overwhelmingly result in conviction, whereas in the Bahamas they do not. Of the 231 homicide charges filed in 2005-09, only 63 had gone to trial by the end of 2009. Worse yet, of those 63, only 18 resulted in conviction. The former is a sign that the court system is overwhelmed, and needs more judges and bailiffs and jails and money. The latter is a sign that the Bahamian police are pretty bad at following through on the second part of a good Law & Order episode, and casts doubt on the veracity of that much-touted clear-up rate.

Still, the Bahamas doesn’t need to massively increase the rate at which it arrests and convict murderers to reduce its incidence, although that would help. They simply need to disrupt open criminal activity (which is highly clustered) and detain people for other crimes. The Bahamas is not at all like Trinidad or Mexico; it’s much more like a high-crime area of the United States. If its voters don’t like the level of criminal activity on the islands, then the solution is pretty straightforward — all it will take is money.

Comments

[Anya Symonette]

This is a very interesting, well researched article.

[Deb]

Maybe the Bahamian should consider changing the way they run the country. Maybe look at all the other countries and how their system works and which one seems to be the best for everyone and reform their gov to that with their own twist to it. That is a beautiful place and it needs to be protected from people who don't care about the islands only what they can take away and form to their own rules. There is a solution to their problem they are just going to have to maybe stop all of the import charges and other things that they charge for that could help the islands. They need to keep it where it will attract only decent good people that either come to live there or visit there. There is so much that could be done there to bring in more people but I think the big companies don't want to have to pay all those high charges they charge for everything that is brought in there. They also need to come up to the 21st century they are a long way off from the US on a lot of typical daily things also you can only travel by a boat that comes by once a week or a air plan which is expensive so you are stuck unless you won your won boat. I have been looking at property there I want to experience living there if only for a year or so I just want to look at all of that wonder and beauty that our Heavenly Father put here for us to enjoy. Deb