One of Jamaica’s foremost criminologists and security experts, Professor Anthony Clayton, is supporting Trinidad and Tobago’s move towards adopting the Zone of Special Operations (ZOSO) model that helped reduce violence in some of Jamaica’s most crime-ridden communities.
Professor Anthony Clayton, the lead author of Jamaica’s 2014 National Security Policy and one of the architects of the country’s “Clear, Hold and Build” security strategy, posited the move, as the twin-island Caribbean republic’s Parliament approved a further three-month extension of the country’s State of Emergency (SoE).
Speaking in an interview on TV6’s in Trinidad on Wednesday night, Prof. Clayton, who teaches at the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies (UWI) argued that while emergency powers may temporarily suppress violence, they do not solve the underlying causes of crime. “I really would recommend the ZOSO over the SoE because it doesn’t have the same issues with legality, due process and so on,” the UWI Professor declared.
He added that for context, Jamaica did both SoEs and ZOSOs in parallel, but the latter was controversial saying, “The idea was that whenever the homicide rate in a community went over double the national average, that would trigger a ZOSO.”
Expounding on ZOSO
Expounding on ZOSO, Prof. Clayton explained the security framework “would allow the army to be deployed, not to do normal policing but to secure the perimeter. And then within the perimeter police could operate normally, in a way that was previously impossible”.
He emphasised, “The military are not taking over policing. They don’t have policing powers. The idea is that the military make it possible for the police to do normal policing,” pointing out that gang members will migrate during such operations.
Clayton contended that there are lessons to be learnt from Jamaica, stating, “We made the mistake in Jamaica of using the ZOSO as a short-term measure, so it had to keep coming back to Parliament for authorisation. I feel this was a serious error. We should have gone for the open-ended option from the outset. Because if a community knows you are going to be gone in three months, there is no incentive; they still have to live there and the gang members are still there.”
The UWI academic acknowledged that ZOSO had a substantial effect on Jamaica’s homicide rate, pointing out, “We had an appalling homicide rate. Our peak was 2009, when our homicide rate went up to 63 per 100,000 people. In 2005, for the first time, it went down by nearly half, which was astonishing.”
Continuing, he said, “Several years recently we have had the highest homicide rate in the world, but now we see that inching down from 2020 through 2025. We’re still in the world’s top ten, but we’ve moved from the top of the world’s top ten to the bottom. And that is progress.” Asked whether the model could work in Trinidad and Tobago, Clayton said it could, particularly because violent crime remains concentrated in specific communities.
Prof. Clayton repeatedly emphasised that neither an SoE nor a ZOSO should be viewed as a solution in itself, arguing, “the main point of a ZOSO—and it’s very important to understand this—an SoE and a ZOSO are not ends in themselves. They should not be seen merely as a crime-suppression strategy, nor a permanent solution, because eventually you have to draw back to normal levels of policing and then the crime rate typically goes back up.”
Instead, he argued such measures create a temporary window during which governments must tackle the social conditions that allow gangs and criminal organisations to flourish.
“What you do is you buy yourself a period of time,” Clayton said, adding, “in that period of time, you have to fix the streetlights, fix the roads, fix the schools, fix the clinics and do a lot of social interventions.”
Lessons from Jamaica
With T&T’s Parliament extending the current SoE for another three months, Clayton noted that Jamaica’s courts eventually ruled against the repeated use of states of emergency as a crime-fighting strategy, referencing 2020, when the courts ruled that the authorities couldn’t simply use a state of emergency in response to a crime problem, especially when having to apply them over and over and over again.
The courts, he cited, found that emergency powers were intended for exceptional circumstances rather than long-term crime suppression and expressed concern about prolonged detention without trial.
One of the strongest lessons T&T should learn from Jamaica, he argued, is that sustainable crime reduction requires long-term investment in communities, particularly children exposed to chronic violence.
Prof Clayton pointed to the thousands of children in high-crime communities who have permanent hyperactivity, attention deficit disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder due to witnessing acts of extreme violence and crime from ages three and four.
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