Holness: Jamaica winning gang war, but homes becoming new battleground
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Providenciales, Turks and Caicos Islands:
Prime Minister Dr Andrew Holness believes Jamaica’s war on gangs is entering a new and complicated chapter.
After years of aggressive anti-gang operations and murder figures now falling, Holness says the country is now confronting a different threat, one rooted less in gang warfare and more in the breakdown of social relationships inside homes and communities.
The shift, he warned, will require the Jamaica Constabulary Force to evolve beyond traditional crime fighting.
“As we are making progress in destroying the gangs and gang-related murders have fallen, we see that social violence, intimate partner violence, domestic violence, even violence around how property is distributed, these kinds of socially generated violence are now taking prominence,” Holness said during a visit on Saturday to Jamaican police officers serving in the Turks and Caicos Islands.
For decades, gang violence dominated Jamaica’s homicide landscape, fuelled by turf wars, extortion, lottery scamming networks, political tribalism and the transshipment of guns and narcotics. Entire communities became hostages to criminal organisations which, in some instances, evolved into parallel power structures.
Holness argued that gangs were never merely groups of armed men, but deeply embedded criminal enterprises seeking influence across society.
“They seek to corrupt leaders, they seek to undermine rules, they seek to create divisions in the society,” he said. “They try to infiltrate political organizations and get political support. They infiltrate business communities that get involved in money laundering and illicit and illegal trade.”
He also accused criminal networks of exploiting popular culture to normalise violence.
“They get entertainers to sing about them in glorious ways, to glorify guns and violence, and they create social support,” he added.
Yet, amid the hard-line rhetoric, Holness used the occasion to make a broader philosophical argument about the role of policing in modern Jamaica.
“It is not just the hard kinetic tactical strategies that must be employed. We will now have to, in a sense, become almost social workers,” he said, suggesting that future policing will require greater emotional intelligence, mediation skills, and deeper community engagement.
The comments come as Jamaica continues to record reductions in murders compared with historic highs that once placed the island among the world’s most violent countries.
“There are many who would have thought that Jamaica would not see our murder rate fall below 700 or even 1,000. We did it [last] year,” Holness said.
He added that the Government was now targeting fewer than 500 murders annually.
The setting of the speech was also symbolically important.
The 28-member Jamaican police contingent stationed in the Turks and Caicos has become a visible example of Jamaica exporting security expertise across the region, a dramatic reversal for a country once internationally associated with high crime rates.
Premier Charles Washington Misick credited the Jamaican officers with helping to dramatically suppress violent crime in the territory.
“In 2024, we had 47 murders. In 2025, we had 27 murders. So far this year, ... we’ve had zero murders,” Misick said, noting that major crimes had fallen by as much as 60 per cent.
Governor Dileeni Daniel-Selvaratnam said the Jamaican officers had become “an integrated part” of the territory’s police force while also helping to strengthen local tactical training and operational capacity.
Holness suggested that what Jamaica faced over the last four decades was now spreading across the wider Caribbean and Latin America, citing rising organised criminal threats in countries such as Trinidad and Tobago, Saint Lucia, and Barbados.
But while gangs remain a danger, Holness argued that Jamaica’s next challenge may prove even more difficult because it strikes at the social fabric itself.
“Once we have brought social violence under control, then Jamaica can truly say that it is at peace,” he said.