Harriott

Jamaican law enforcers can only put a stake through the heart of organised crime by relieving kingpins of their assets, a noted criminology scholar said Tuesday.

Professor Anthony Harriott, director of the Institute of Public Safety and Justice at the University of the West Indies, Mona, suggested that one of the first steps towards crippling many of the successful local criminal networks was to take away their main sources of power.

He said although money and wealth were not the only sources of power and influence for the criminals, it was their primary foundation.

"Separated from their wealth and sources of illegal income, the dons would no longer be the attractive models of success they are now," he argued.

Harriott was speaking to a packed house at the GraceKennedy Foundation's annual lecture titled 'Controlling Violent Crime: Models and Policy Options', held at the Little Theatre in St Andrew on Tuesday.

Not taxing

The university professor said confiscation of dons' wealth did not require a lot of state resources.

"Indeed, if successful, the wealth of the dons could add to the resources available to the state," he said.

Already, Parliament has established legislation providing for forfeiture, through the courts, of all property and accumulated wealth that cannot be explained by legitimate activity. Since the Proceeds of Crime Bill was enacted in 2007, the police have commenced investigations into two cases that could lead to assets being forfeited by accused drug kingpins.

On Tuesday Harriott further suggested that weakening the relationship between criminals and the political bureaucracy was a platform for destroying the stronghold of the underworld.

He said this could be undertaken by targeting the sites of access and partnership that are used to raid resources of the State via contracts.

"I believe that this is a more productive way of dealing with the relationships between state actors and criminal networks than to focus on the social ties between these two sets of actors," Harriott told the audience.

Isolation strategy

He said if this was successful and the enterprise activity of the networks was disrupted, the relationships with their base communities might deteriorate and some of these groups could become more predatory.

"Predatory criminality isolates the criminal networks, depending on the targets, while enterprise criminality embeds them," he said.

The professor argued that the goal would be to shift the power balance against the organised crime networks, nationally and within their host communities.

Consolidation of these new power relations in which organised crime groups are subordinated would involve expunging their representatives from the local and national power circuits and would require additional measures, some of which might be best achieved by political rather than legal measures, Harriott further argued.

"In this context, social intervention projects and programmes that target the host communities are potentially more helpful in further weakening the power and influence of the crime networks," he added.

athaliah.reynolds@gleanerjm.com