For almost four decades, Jamaica has ranked among the countries with the highest homicide rates in the world. But since 2022, thanks to concerted government efforts, its murder rate has been falling: first by nearly 8 percent from 2022 to 2023, followed by an 18.7 percent decline from 2023 to 2024. In the first seven months of this year, the island has registered an unprecedented 43 percent drop in homicides compared to 2024.
If the trend holds, Jamaica’s murder rate for this year could fall below 25 per 100,000 people. That is still high, but it’s a level that the country has not recorded since 1991. The trend has become a rallying point for the incumbent center-right Jamaica Labour Party ahead of Sept. 3 general elections. The decline in Jamaica’s murder rate is a direct result of Prime Minister Andrew Holness’s strategic focus on dismantling organized crime since he took office in 2016, which accelerated into an aggressive crackdown earlier this year.
Across the Caribbean, though, other countries are still experiencing a rise in deadly violence, mostly in the form of shootings attributed to gangs. Barbados saw a 138 percent surge in its homicide rate from 7 homicides per 100,000 people to nearly 18 per 100,000 between 2023 and 2024, for example. In 2023, seven of the 10 countries with the highest homicide rates in Latin America and the Caribbean were English-speaking Caribbean states.
Interventions administered by foreign partners, including the United States, have not helped. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which the Trump administration massively drew down this year, funded a plethora of violence reduction and prevention programs throughout the Caribbean for decades. But data shows that they did not affect national murder rates anywhere in the region.
Unlike Holness, USAID avoided confronting gang violence head-on. USAID’s rebranded operation under the State Department does not appear to have learned from past mistakes.
Over the past 25 years, USAID’s violence prevention projects in the Caribbean have had names as ambitious as their goals. The Peace and Prosperity Project (2001-2004) focused on community policing, conflict resolution, and skills training. Community Empowerment and Transformation, known as COMET (2006-2012), combined civic engagement with community policing. Its second iteration, from 2014 to 2019, directed small grants to youth clubs and citizen journalism, tacking on climate resilience and disaster risk reduction.
Then came Shoot Hoops, Not Guns (2020-2025), a basketball-based initiative aimed at preventing gang recruitment by building life skills through sports. The final USAID-funded initiative before its abrupt closure was Empower, a five-year, $3 million program to support at-risk youth through education and job training.
Some of these endeavors may have benefited individuals or communities temporarily, but none had a measurable national impact. Jamaica’s murder rate in 2000 was 34 people per 100,000; in 2024, the last full year of USAID programming, it was 41 per 100,000.
These projects shared several features: catchy branding, implementation through U.S.-based intermediaries, and an insistence on addressing violence without confronting the forces that drive it: armed territorial competition between criminal organizations that proliferate in undergoverned spaces. In Jamaica, this mainly means informal communities that are maintained by clientelist politics. Informal communities are those whose residents lack access to basic services as well as property titles.
U.S.-backed programming also made no distinction between different types of violence—domestic, interpersonal, violence against children, or gang-related—in a context where 70 percent to 80 percent of murders are attributed to gangs. USAID’s programs in Jamaica were the foreign aid version of security theater: measures that give the appearance of improving security without actually reducing risk.
The United States was not alone in this approach. The Citizen Security and Justice Program—funded by the United Kingdom, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), and Canada between 2001 and 2020—was one of Jamaica’s largest and longest-running security initiatives. Despite nearly two decades of investment in parenting programs, entrepreneurship initiatives, skills certification, conflict resolution, and violence interruption, it produced no measurable reduction in the country’s murder rate, nor that of the communities where it was carried out.
Nor should it have been expected to: Data from Jamaica and other countries with high murder rates shows that unemployment, inequality, and low education levels are not the primary drivers of gang violence. In some cases they may correlate weakly, but more decisive factors are gangs’ political patronage and territorial control, as well as the state’s low detection rates of gang activity and tolerance of informal settlements.
Between 2007 and 2017, foreign donors and Jamaican taxpayers spent roughly $2.5 billion on social interventions aimed at diverting youth from gangs. These included school safety efforts, life skills training, psychosocial support, job placement, entrepreneurship coaching, and parenting programs. Jamaica’s murder rate in 2007 was 58.64 deaths per 100,000 people; in 2017, it was virtually the same, at 58.65.
Some projects may have made things worse. A 2019 study of Jamaica and Barbados found that increased participation in organized sports was correlated with increased delinquency. Yet Shoot Hoops, Not Guns—whose underlying assumption was that basketball would divert at-risk youths away from gang violence—went ahead, reaching 190 primary school children between 2023 and fall 2024 in Jamaican communities that are gang strongholds.
Evidence from other countries, including in the Caribbean, shows that such interventions can further entrench criminal organizations. This can happen by flooding a community with resources—such as money and job opportunities—that gangs seize, control, and exploit, or by providing subsidies that encourage recipients to leave formal employment, enlarging the pool of recruits for organized crime.
A $1.5 million U.S. Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement (INL) violence reduction project in Trinidad and Tobago—known as the Gang Reduction and Community Empowerment Project, or GRACE—aimed to reduce gang-related crime and strengthen the relationship between police and “at-risk” communities. But it was mired in allegations of mismanagement, including a report that someone affiliated with a gang distributed the project’s resources and gave gang members project T-shirts bearing the U.S. Embassy logo.
None of these initiatives have worked because Jamaica’s extraordinarily high murder rate is a gang problem. A notable reduction between 2011 and 2014 was the result of a state crackdown on gangs with aggressive, targeted policing. Murders fell to 1,005 in 2014, down from 1,447 in 2010. But that crackdown had the unintended outcome of splintering Jamaica’s criminal underworld, producing more gangs that were smaller, less hierarchical, and more volatile, which led to an explosion of territorial disputes that drove killings.
A similar resurgence is likely if Jamaica eases off the gas of the current crackdown, an approach made possible by heavy investments in security forces over the past six years. This outcome is virtually certain if the socialist People’s National Party (PNP) wins this week’s election. The party holds a narrow lead in some polling, and—like international aid donors—is wedded to the belief that socioeconomic conditions are the primary drivers of violence. The PNP’s stated position promises to treat “violence as a public health issue shaped by poverty, trauma, and exclusion.”
When USAID was dismantled, critics of social interventions saw it as a chance to change course on funding priorities and violence reduction policy. But right on the heels of the closure came the launch of CREATE—the Community Resilience and Transformation Project—a $2 million INL-funded initiative. CREATE aims to strengthen community security and reduce gang recruitment, offering “positive alternatives” to at-risk youth. In design and delivery, it is indistinguishable from a USAID project.
The drivers of Jamaica’s high murder rate are not a mystery, even if they are not openly acknowledged in violence reduction discourse. Dismantling criminal organizations, formalizing vulnerable communities, and strengthening the institutions that deliver law and justice are key to tackling the root causes of violence. Yet donor funding has consistently favored programs that address symptoms instead.
One explanation for this mismatch is that many approaches are developed outside of the Caribbean context, based on templates that do not reflect the region’s patterns of gang-driven violence.
Another reason is institutional self-preservation. Donor-funded interventions have created an aid industry with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. International development contractors, many based in Washington, act as conduits for U.S. government money. Success in this ecosystem is measured not by outcomes, but by securing the next grant.
Further—in a context where resources for youth development, arts, and culture are limited—donor funding dynamics create strong incentives for organizations to rebrand social or youth programs as violence prevention, regardless of their actual impact. The Jamaica Basketball Association may genuinely aim to support young athletes but calling it an anti-gang intervention is what unlocks funding. The result is a cycle of ineffectual programming that reinforces dependency and avoids the structural and political realities underpinning violence.
Political complicity is the most pernicious factor. The most violent places in Jamaica deliver the highest voter turnout; informal communities are vote banks for politicians and safe havens for gangs—the power base of both. Politicians benefit from avoiding the disruption of real reform. Donor-funded programs allow politicians to point to catchy campaigns while sidestepping the real work of dismantling clientelist systems and gang power structures that regularizing communities would require.
Even if USAID was unwilling to directly confront the politically sensitive issue of Jamaica’s informal settlements, it could have put its weight and money behind disrupting the systems that enable political patronage and sustain safe havens of organized violence. Projects targeting land titling, as USAID has undertaken in Tanzania and Colombia, would have gone much further toward addressing the underlying and contextual drivers of Jamaica’s high murder rate, with a far greater chance of lasting impact.
Aid is a tool of statecraft. It ought to be guided by the interests of the donor country and held accountable to the taxpayers who fund it. It is in the United States’ interest to secure its near abroad, which means solving chronic violence and the prevalence of nonstate armed groups. The dismantling of USAID was ostensibly meant to recalibrate its aid strategy to better achieve desired ends. Instead, the theater continues, with the same actors reading from the same ineffectual script.
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