Reacting to murderous gangs, Haiti’s population kills suspected gang members and criminals

Reacting to murderous gangs, Haiti’s population kills suspected gang members and criminals
Haitian police hunt for killers of President Jovenel Moise, Jul 2021. Guardian video, YouTube

Progressives sometimes think that abolishing the police will lead to gentler forms of justice, such as “restorative justice” that involves an assailant apologizing to his victim, and then having a dialogue or making amends for his wrongdoing. But without a police force, perpetrators can’t be apprehended, much less made to make amends. And some of the people they victimize are likely to take matters into their own hands.

You can see that in Third World countries, where the lack of a meaningful police presence often leads to vigilantism, including suspected perpetrators being burnt alive in places like Haiti, South Africa, and Madagascar. Vigilantes are not as good at figuring out who actually committed a crime as trained police. They sometimes kill innocent people by mistake, as when vigilantes in Madagascar killed an innocent Italian tourist who they mistakenly suspected of committing sex crimes, by burning him alive.

In May, groups of Haitian citizens armed with machetes, sticks and other makeshift weapons banded together to root out suspected gang members and try to end the killings, rapes and kidnappings destroying their communities.

The Haitian human-rights group CARDH says suspects, mainly gang members, have been “chased, beaten, decapitated and then burned alive” by members of the grassroots vigilante movement known as“Bwa Kale”, or “peeled wood” in Haitian Creole.

At least 160 suspected gang members were killed between April 24 and May 24, CARDH said in a report this month. Haiti has seen “a dramatic decrease” in kidnappings, killings and other forms of violence linked to the armed groups.

However, Jean said while the vigilante movement has had “considerable” effects, it is not an optimal solution to the violence plaquing Haiti, a Caribbean country with 12 million people. “We’re in a situation in which the population has to defend itself,” Jean, CARDH’s executive director, told Al Jazeera in a phone interview. “Bwa Kale is symptomatic of the collapse of the state,” he said.

“Citizens can’t really protect themselves … It’s the role of the institutions, of the police, of the state – to take steps so that [they] can exercise their mandates.”

The Haitian National Police (PNH) say officers had confiscated weapons from “armed individuals” travelling in a minibus. “More than a dozen individuals travelling in this vehicle were unfortunately lynched by members of the population,” the police said.

Images shared online showed a crowd standing near a pile of charred human remains.

The lynching came after nearly two years of escalating violence in Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, and other parts of Haiti, where armed groups have been vying for control in the political vacuum caused by the July 2021 assassination of former President Jovenel Moise.

Haiti’s de facto leader, Prime Minister Ariel Henry, whom Moise selected just days before he was killed, has failed to instill confidence in Haitians, who do not view him as a legitimate leader.

Haitian state institutions largely do not function, its national police is underfunded and lacks resources, and the government almost entirely fails to hold gang members and their backers accountable for the rising violence.

Against that backdrop, Bwa Kale emerged not as an organized movement, but rather as a “spontaneous” push by residents going around, “looking for known gang members” and killing them, said Louis-Henri Mars, executive director of Lakou Lape, a peacebuilding group in Port-au-Prince.

Mars warned that the wave of vigilante killings could potentially ensnare people who are not involved with gangs, or serve as a means for people to enact revenge for unrelated slights. It also is not a long-term solution, he said.

But Mars says it is hard to blame the Haitian population for “taking matters into their own hands” because the Haitian authorities have failed to protect them. “It’s a testimony to the ineffectiveness of the [police] and to the ineffectiveness of the government to subdue the gangs,” he said.

This also is not the first time that vigilantism has gripped Haiti.

After the brutal reign of former Haitian dictator Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his less brutal son, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, ended in 1986, Haitians sought to rid the nation of all signs of Duvalierism in a process known as “dechoukaj” – uprooting.

The era of political change included lynchings of suspected Duvalier supporters and members of the Duvaliers’ widely feared Tonton Macoutes militia, which killed and tortured thousands of people during the Duvaliers’ combined 29-year dictatorship.

“Beyond advocating political changes, some Haitians periodically attacked suspected ‘Macoutes’ and, in some cases, hacked their presumed former persecutors to death,” Human Rights Watch wrote in a 1996 report marking a decade since the formal end of the Duvalier dictatorship.

It noted that the population’s “frustration with the judiciary’s historic corruption and complicity with the military” had sparked further incidents of vigilante violence, including “public accusations of thievery after which mobs descend on and beat the accused to death.”

Danielle Jung, an associate professor of political science at Emory University and co-author of Lynching and Local Justice: Legitimacy and Accountability in Weak States, said collective vigilantism tends to emerge more often in places with weak police and courts. Jung quoted a Haitian focus group participant saying, “It might not be the best justice, but it’s justice.”

While collective vigilantism is not limited to Haiti – similar movements have emerged in South Africa, Brazil and elsewhere – Jung said it enjoyed relatively high levels of approval and legitimacy in Haiti. She said it resulted from a weak judicial system and dysfunctional state institutions.

Vigilantism is “no one’s first choice. I think in most of these cases, [people] would prefer to turn to state institutions and state courts,” Jung said. “But because they feel like they don’t have that option, communities take this on themselves.”

Defunding the police results in more violent crime and killings. There are areas in the U.S. that are already underpoliced. America spends a smaller share of its economy on the police than the European Union does. A larger police force catches more criminals, which deters crime from being committed in the first place, by increasing the likelihood of punishment for a crime.

It’s common for progressives who hate the police to falsely claim that America is guilty of “overpolicing” and “mass incarceration.” But as criminology professor Justin Nix notes, “Given its level of serious crime, America has ordinary levels of incarceration but extraordinary levels of under-policing.”

America has fewer police compared to its population than most developed countries. It has far fewer police per homicide than most developed countries. America has less than a tenth as many police per homicide as Germany, Italy, Spain, Japan, Greece, Portugal, Austria, and the Netherlands. America incarcerates fewer people per homicide than countries like Australia, Japan, and Switzerland. And it has a lower overall incarceration rate than countries like El Salvador and Turkmenistan.

Incarceration often saves lives. Most murders in Baltimore are committed by people who previously were convicted of a serious crime, but didn’t serve a lengthy sentence for that crime. “You want to see homicides go down? Keep bad guys with guns in jail…The average homicide suspect has been arrested 11 times prior to them committing a homicide,” notes the police chief of Washington, DC. Studies of countries with very low incarceration rates have found that letting criminals out early increases the crime rate, and that higher levels of incarceration are a good investment. As El Salvador increased its incarceration rate, its murder rate fell from the world’s highest to a rate lower than many of America’s big cities (such as Chicago, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Detroit, New Orleans, St. Louis, Milwaukee, and Cleveland).

LU Staff

LU Staff

Promoting and defending liberty, as defined by the nation’s founders, requires both facts and philosophical thought, transcending all elements of our culture, from partisan politics to social issues, the workings of government, and entertainment and off-duty interests. Liberty Unyielding is committed to bringing together voices that will fuel the flame of liberty, with a dialogue that is lively and informative.

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