Blood on the
Balance Sheet

In December 2025, Prime Minister Andrew Holness and Police Commissioner Dr. Kevin Blake stood before the nation and delivered what they called a historic achievement. Jamaica had recorded 673 murders for the year — the lowest figure since 1994. A 43 percent reduction from the year prior. Shootings were down 32 percent. The JLP's youth arm, Generation 2000, gushed that it represented "strategic leadership" and "unwavering commitment to public safety." Champagne was practically flowing from Gordon House.

I am not here to dismiss those numbers. Lives were saved. Real, breathing human beings who would have been buried in 2024 went home to their families in 2025. That matters. Full stop.

But I am here to ask the question that the JLP does not want you to ask — the question that the headline-writers have largely failed to ask — the question that will define whether Jamaica emerges from this era as a safer democracy or slouches toward something far more sinister:

If the State kills 311 people in a single year — more than in any year since the 2010 Tivoli massacre — and records exactly zero body-camera footage of any of those incidents, are we actually safer? Or have we simply changed who is doing the killing? — Shaquille Ramsay

I. The Government's Narrative — And Why It's Half a Story

The JLP's account of 2025 is seductive in its simplicity: they came, they planned, they conquered crime. Senator Christian Tavares-Finson boasted that the administration had "embarked on one of the largest crime management strategies this hemisphere has ever seen." The JCF's "intelligence-led policing," gang suppression operations, and firearms interdictions were credited with driving the 43 percent murder decline. And indeed, 17 of Jamaica's 19 police divisions recorded year-on-year drops in homicides.

These are facts. They deserve acknowledgment.

But governance is never measured by one metric in isolation. A doctor who eliminates a patient's fever by stopping their heart has not achieved a medical success. A government that reduces civilian murders by empowering its security forces to kill with near-total impunity has not achieved a safety success. It has achieved a redistribution of violence — from criminal to State. And the State's violence, by definition, carries the full weight of institutional legitimacy behind it, making it far more dangerous and far harder to resist.

II. The Year Written in Blood — 311 Killed, Zero Cameras Rolling

Let's talk about the number the JLP is not celebrating: 311.

According to data compiled from INDECOM and the Jamaica Constabulary Force, 311 people were killed by members of Jamaica's security forces in 2025 alone. That figure represents approximately 22 percent of all security-force fatalities recorded in the entire eight-year period between 2017 and 2025. In a single year. No other year has come close.

To contextualise that horror: this is the highest death toll at the hands of Jamaica's security forces since 2010 — the year of the Tivoli Gardens incursion, in which a military assault on a Kingston community left over 70 civilians dead and drew international condemnation. We compared 2025 to that. Absorb that.

The trend line is not a blip. It is a trajectory. From a post-2019 low of 86 police killings that year, the figure climbed 16 percent in 2022, 24 percent in 2023, and then exploded by 64 percent in 2025 compared to the prior year. This is not policing. This is escalation.

Even more damning: INDECOM confirmed that in the 12-month period from July 2024 to July 2025, not a single one of the 288 fatal shootings involved the use of a body-worn camera — despite the cameras having been procured and the infrastructure being in place. Zero. Out of 288 deaths.

Not one operation that led to a civilian fatality involved the use of body-worn cameras. Not one. — INDECOM, 2025

The JCF's explanation? Operational impracticality. INDECOM's response, shared in its October 2025 Special Investigative Report: that claim is inconsistent with established international policing practices and is not supported by global experience. In plain terms: every other serious police force in the world has found a way. Jamaica simply has not chosen to.

The consequences of this opacity are not abstract. Consider Jamar Farquharson — a 22-year-old man shot and killed inside his own home in Cherry Tree Lane, Clarendon, on September 15, 2025, during an operation involving a 23-member police team. No camera. Conflicting accounts. Public outrage. Commissioner Blake called it "most regrettable." INDECOM said the volume of deaths has slowed the investigation. Jamar Farquharson's family is still waiting for the truth. How many more families are waiting?

III. The Architecture of Abuse — SOEs, ZOSOs, and the Constitution Betrayed

The JLP's crime strategy has rested on one instrument above all others: the State of Public Emergency. Deployed as a scalpel in theory, wielded as a sledgehammer in practice.

Between 2018 and 2023, the Holness administration issued SOEs across Jamaica with increasing frequency — giving security forces the power to search without warrants, detain without charge, and restrict freedom of movement across entire communities. The justification was always the same: crime is a national emergency.

But in May 2025, Jamaica's Constitutional Court delivered a landmark judgment that the government would rather you forget. A three-judge panel ruled that 15 separate SOE declarations issued between 2018 and 2023 were unconstitutional — not demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society. The court further found that three "rolling proclamations" from late 2022 breached the separation of powers by effectively bypassing Parliament's constitutional oversight role.

Read that again. The government's primary crime-fighting tool for five years has been declared unconstitutional. Fifteen times over.

The implications are staggering. At least a dozen lawsuits from persons detained unlawfully under those SOEs are now pending in the Supreme Court. Constitutional attorney John Clarke — chairman of Jamaicans for Justice — has urged every detainee from the SOE era to seek legal counsel. The Attorney General's office called the ruling potentially "crippling." Not because it was wrong, but because the bill for five years of unconstitutional detention is about to come due.

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has itself expressed concern over Jamaica's repeated use of States of Emergency, noting that under international human rights law, such measures require strict justification, proportionality, and the maintenance of indispensable judicial guarantees. Jamaica has fallen short on every count.

And yet — and this is the part that should disturb every Jamaican — the government has appealed the constitutional ruling. Rather than accept the court's verdict and redesign their approach, the Holness administration's legal team has rushed to protect its power to bypass Parliament on national security matters. In a democracy, the Supreme Court's verdict is the final word, not the opening bid in a negotiation.

IV. Who Bears the Cost? Taxpayers, Communities, and the Myth of Safety

There is a financial dimension to unconstitutional policing that is rarely discussed in our national conversation. When the State detains you without legal basis, beats you without accountability, or kills you in an operation that no camera recorded, the resulting lawsuits land on the public purse. The government's recklessness is subsidised by ordinary Jamaicans.

This is not hypothetical. The courts have already ruled and awarded compensation in individual SOE detention cases. Legal experts and rights organisations expect the wave of pending constitutional claims — filed across multiple divisions of the Supreme Court — to result in significant state liability. Who pays? The same inner-city residents whose communities were placed under SOE. The same working-class taxpayers whose children were detained without charge. The same people the government claims it is protecting.

Then there is the social cost — harder to quantify, but no less real. Sociological research is unambiguous: policing that generates fear rather than trust destroys the community cooperation that underpins long-term crime reduction. When communities in Clarendon, St. James, and St. Andrew watch their sons, brothers, and fathers killed in operations, then watch those operations proceed without cameras, without transparency, without consequence — they do not become partners of the police. They become adversaries. The very intelligence networks that "intelligence-led policing" depends upon are corroded by every unjustified killing and every unaccountable operation.

A country is not safer when the State becomes the primary source of fear. Reduced murder statistics mean nothing to the mother in Cherry Tree Lane who buried her son after a 23-member police team came to her community and left with his body. — Shaquille Ramsay

V. The Planned Operation Problem — Where Killing Is Policy

Perhaps the most alarming finding of 2025 is not the headline number of 311 deaths — it is how those deaths are being produced. INDECOM's October 2025 Special Investigative Report on Planned Police Operations revealed a trajectory that should haunt every Jamaican who believes in the rule of law.

In 2021, planned police operations accounted for just 9 percent of security-force fatalities. By the first seven months of 2025, that figure had risen to 51 percent. The instrument of choice? Area Fugitive Apprehension Teams — AFATs. In 2022, AFATs were involved in only 5 percent of planned operation deployments and 3 percent of related deaths. By mid-2025, they accounted for 51 percent of deployments and 47 percent of fatalities.

INDECOM also documented a recurring and troubling pattern: suspects allegedly "accessing a firearm" after already being detained by officers — with no witnesses, no cameras, no independent verification. The commission noted pointedly that "such scenarios present a grave risk of harm to police officers" but also that "there are no witnesses to the shooting incident." In case after case, the only account of events is the one provided by the officers who fired the shots.

Forty-seven police officers have been charged with criminal offences since January 2024, including 13 for murder. The number of charges is notable. But it is dwarfed by the number of deaths that produced no charge at all.

VI. Are We Becoming a Police State?

This is the question that the comfortable would rather not ask. Police states are for other countries. Strongmen are for other histories. Jamaica is a democracy, after all. We have elections, courts, a free press.

Yes. And yet.

The characteristics of a police state are not a binary switch — they emerge on a spectrum. Political scientists identify the warning signs: excessive and unaccountable state violence; the normalisation of emergency powers as routine governance; the suspension of due process for targeted populations; the erosion of legislative oversight over executive security decisions; the absence of independent verification of state conduct.

Check each of these against Jamaica's 2025 record.

Unaccountable state violence? 311 deaths. Zero body cameras. Recurring patterns of "no witness" shootings. Emergency powers as routine governance? Fifteen SOE declarations ruled unconstitutional, spanning five years and multiple parishes. Suspension of due process? Hundreds detained without charge under SOEs; a Supreme Court forced to award compensation for constitutional violations. Erosion of legislative oversight? The government bypassed Parliament on SOE extensions — ruled a breach of separation of powers by its own courts. Absence of independent verification? INDECOM overwhelmed, under-resourced, and watching its own caseload balloon while investigations slow to a crawl.

I am not saying Jamaica is a police state today. I am saying that every institutional prerequisite for one is being quietly, methodically constructed — and dressed up in the respectable language of "Plan Secure Jamaica."

The danger is not that an authoritarian will arrive on horseback and declare himself king. The danger is that we will wake up one morning to discover that constitutional democracy was dismantled piece by piece, law by law, SOE by SOE, while we celebrated a declining murder rate. — Shaquille Ramsay

VII. What Real Safety Looks Like

None of this is an argument for tolerating the gang violence that has claimed too many Jamaican lives for too many decades. The PNP, during its own administrations, failed to produce an effective, rights-respecting, long-term crime reduction strategy. That failure is real and should be acknowledged by every PNP supporter with intellectual honesty — including this writer.

But the answer to those failures is not to trade one form of killing for another. The answer is not to declare victory over crime while normalising state impunity. The answer is not to fight for a safer Jamaica by making the State its most dangerous actor.

Real safety requires: mandatory body-worn cameras on all planned police operations — immediately and without further delay. Real safety requires an adequately resourced INDECOM capable of investigating every killing in real time, not a backlogged oversight body drowning in caseload. Real safety requires a constitutional crime strategy that does not depend on emergency powers that courts have repeatedly struck down. Real safety requires community policing built on trust, not fear — the kind of policing where the murder rate falls because communities cooperate with police, not because communities are terrified of them.

And real safety requires a government willing to hear those demands and respond to them — not one that rushes to the Court of Appeal to protect the power to lock people up without charge.

Conclusion: The Price of the Number

Six hundred and seventy-three. That is the number Andrew Holness will campaign on. That is the number his supporters will wave at critics. That is the number that was supposed to end the conversation.

But democracy demands that we read the full ledger. And the full ledger shows that in the same year Jamaica celebrated its lowest murder toll in three decades, the State killed 311 of its own citizens — without a single body camera rolling — while operating under emergency powers that its own Supreme Court declared unconstitutional.

We are being asked to trade freedom for statistics. We are being asked to celebrate a number while ignoring the human cost of producing it. We are being asked to look at one pan of the scale and pretend the other does not exist.

Jamaica deserves better than that. Our Constitution demands better than that. And the 311 people who did not make it to 2026 to read this article — they demanded better than that, too.

A government that cannot account for who it kills in the dark has not earned the right to celebrate who survived the light. — Shaquille Ramsay