JAMAICA | The ZOSO Paradox: Why Granville Succeeds Where Mount Salem Struggles

By O. Dave Allen

MONTEGO BAY, Jamaica, February 7, 2026 - A double murder in Norwood has once again shaken St. James, landing squarely in the heart of the constituency of the Minister of National Security and Peace, St. James North-West. 

The incident dominated The Western Mirror's Wednesday edition and stands in stark contrast to official police optimism about falling crime rates. According to the commanding officer for St. James, SSP Eron Samuels, the parish has recorded a dramatic improvement in its crime clearance rate—reportedly up by 124 per cent.

The police have also set themselves a target of keeping murders below 50 for 2026.

As of Sunday, only four murders had been recorded in the parish for the year—representing a 43.9 per cent reduction compared with the same period in 2025, based on figures cited by Clinton Pickering in The Western Mirror of February 4, 2026.

However, a troubling and unavoidable question arises: Is the four-year-old boy who was shot and killed in his bed during the New Year's incident in Granville included among those four murders? If so, what does that say about how success is being measured—and presented—to the public?

This question goes to the heart of public trust, especially when crime statistics are being used to justify extraordinary security measures such as Zones of Special Operations (ZOSO) and repeated curfews.

In Mount Salem, where a ZOSO has been in place since 2017, a further 48-hour curfew was imposed beginning Sunday, December 7, 2025, and ending Tuesday, December 9, 2025. This is on top of long-standing crime suppression measures, heavy police presence, and restrictions on movement.

Yet violent incidents continue to occur, prompting legitimate concern about the long-term effectiveness of ZOSO as a crime-fighting tool rather than a short-term containment strategy.

The contrast with Granville is striking.

Granville was once described—by police data itself—as the murder capital of St. James. In one year alone, the community recorded over 40 murders in a population of fewer than 6,000 residents. By any international standard, that rate of violence bordered on conditions associated with civil conflict.

Yet today, Granville has experienced a reported 74 per cent reduction in violent crime—and this has occurred without a police station for more than three years, without a ZOSO designation, without repeated curfews, and without any extraordinary social intervention programme over the past three years.

There have been no highly publicised "don takedowns," no mass detentions, and no prolonged suspension of civil liberties. Still, violence has declined sharply.

These contradictions demand serious examination.

What has driven this extraordinary reduction in Granville? Community fatigue with violence? Informal conflict mediation? Demographic shifts? Economic migration? Or forms of social regulation that are not being recognized or studied?

Conversely, why do communities under long-term ZOSO and curfew regimes continue to experience violent shocks that require ever-more restrictive measures?

It is therefore understandable that on the first day of the year, residents of Granville took to the streets in protest following a police shooting in which two young men were killed and a four-year-old child lost his life in his bed.

That protest was not an endorsement of violence; it was a cry against inconsistency, opacity, and the apparent normalization of lethal outcomes in the name of security.

If ZOSO, curfews, and aggressive policing are to be defended as effective tools, then they must be subjected to transparent, comparative, and community-level evaluation—especially when non-ZOSO communities are achieving better outcomes under far less coercive conditions.

Crime reduction cannot be reduced to headline percentages alone. It must be measured against human cost, civil liberties, community trust, and sustainability. Until that happens, Jamaicans are right to question not only the numbers—but the strategy behind them.

-30-