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Herbert Gayle
Contributor
O
ur objective here is to respond to
four critical questions:
Definition: Who is a repeat
killer?
Frequency: How popular are they
in our inner cities?
Threat: How dangerous are they?
Neurological issue: Is something
likely to be wrong with their brains?
B
ETWEEN 2004 and 2014,
as part of a large study on
multiple murderers, I
managed to convince 17
dons or gang leaders with
power over 28 inner-city communi-
ties in Jamaica to allow me to pro-
file the young men under their
influence. I have done the same in
Trinidad and Belize. The 28
Jamaican inner-city communities
were broken down into 86 districts
or corners. In each district a single
PEER (participatory ethnographic
evaluation research) session was
conducted in which three to five
young men would sit with me and
profile each young male between the
ages of 15 and 34 (the combatant
years). PEER involves using groups
of persons to provide information
about their peers through ‘reason-
ings’ or group discussions. Over the
period, we profiled 2,316 inner-city
young men. The profiles included:
1) their caregivers, 2) involvement
in killing (how many, if so), and 3)
reasons for the killing (if so).
A repeat killer is a person who has
killed more than once. Three cate-
gories of this group are well-docu-
mented: mass murderers, defined by
the FBI (2005) as persons who kill
four or more persons in a single
event in a single location with no
emotional cooling-off period in
between; spree killers, who kill three
or more persons but in different loca-
tions; and serial killers, who meticu-
lously plan and execute a series of
murders (three or more) in singular
kills in various locations. For those of
us who study gangs, these three cate-
gories are grossly inadequate to
describe the feuding situations where
youth kill more than one person.
Only six per cent of the males
between the ages of 15 and 34 years
in the study had killed anyone (com-
pared to 5.5 in Belize and 4.9 in
Trinidad). While these statistics sug-
gest that it is unfair to view all inner-
city males as murderers or potential
murderers, one killer in every 16 of
the combatant age (15-34 years) is
worth the attention of national secu-
rity and social scientists.
Of those who had killed someone,
almost two-thirds had done so only
once. Nonetheless, of the 2,316
young men studied, 2.1 per cent
could be described as ‘multicidal’ or
repeat killers. Of the repeat killers,
we found a small group that killed
‘professionally’ (defined as three or
more kills). They made up a mere
0.5 per cent (1/200) of the study. We
shall call these young men ‘shottas’
(as the youth in the communities
describe them), most of whom kill
on command or as part of a con-
tract. These young men are treated
PUBLISHED:
JANUARY 30, 2017