In 2025, Jamaica recorded its lowest homicide rate in over three decades — a 43 percent reduction from the previous year's already-declining figure. January 2026 recorded the lowest monthly homicide figure since records began in 2001, a 55 percent reduction. The official who reported these gains — drawing on his experience as Jamaica's Commissioner of Police from 2018 to 2024 — described the result plainly: "What you are seeing is the result of political focus, sustained strategies, and consistent investment in a security architecture tailored to our realities. We decided as a country to take ownership of our problem. No one is coming to fix it for us."
That statement — no one is coming to fix it for us — is the premise on which ISPI was founded. Island security problems require island-calibrated solutions built by people who understand island operating environments. Jamaica's 2025 progress is the most encouraging documented evidence in recent Caribbean policy history that this approach works.
What the evidence says about what worked
Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago both declared states of emergency in 2025 to address gang violence. Both saw violence decline. Independent research — including analysis published by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project — found no direct causal link between the SOEs themselves and the reductions. The evidence more consistently attributes Jamaica's sustained progress to community policing relationships built over years, not months of emergency powers.
This finding is consistent with what ISPI's community policing research documents across island jurisdictions worldwide: the interventions that produce sustained community safety improvements in island environments are the ones that build the officer-community relationships that make crime reporting socially viable, not the enforcement-intensity measures that can suppress violence temporarily while eroding the trust that prevents it long-term.
In a small island community, the officer whose community relationships are strong enough to generate proactive crime intelligence is the officer who has been present, consistent, and trustworthy for years — not the officer deployed under emergency powers for weeks. That officer's effectiveness is built through community policing investment, not emergency legislation.
What remains to be solved
Jamaica's homicide rate, while at a generational low, remains among the highest in the Caribbean. The structural drivers — drug trafficking networks, gang organizational resilience, inequality and limited economic mobility in certain communities — have not been eliminated by the policing improvements that produced the 2025 reduction. Sustaining and deepening Jamaica's progress requires the evidence-based community alternatives that ISPI's community policing research and at-risk youth intervention research address.
ISPI's regional page on Jamaica covers the full scope of applicable research. CARICOM member state governments and U.S. Caribbean Basin Security Initiative program partners are invited to contact ISPI at ISPIGlobal@proton.me.