On the evening of April 14, inside a quiet residential lane off Bridgetown’s Spruce Street, a family gathered to celebrate a quiet milestone: Daquan Robert’s grandmother had just turned 63, and the room filled with the sound of birthday singing. Daquan, 26, was a final-year law student at the University of the West Indies Cave Hill campus, poised to continue his legal training at the prestigious Hugh Wooding Law School. Before the song ended, a white van slowed at the edge of the lane, and multiple gunshots rang out. Daquan fled down the lane alongside his father, but he collapsed before he could reach safety. His grandmother watched him take his last breath, on her own birthday.
By the time a reader finishes this column, another family across the Caribbean will already be walking through the same unthinkable grief. What was long framed as a localized problem confined to a few nations has spread into a systemic crisis across the region, turning what is globally known as a paradise into one of the deadliest areas on Earth.
For generations, Caribbean leaders and publics framed widespread violent homicide as uniquely Jamaica’s challenge. Then Trinidad and Tobago saw its own grim surge, climbing from just 97 murders in 1998 to 625 by 2024. Today, the violence touches every corner of the region. Saint Vincent closed out 2024 with a homicide rate of 53.7 per 100,000 people. Barbados, long held up as the regional model of public safety and order, saw its murder count jump 138% in a single year, rising from 21 to 50. The Turks and Caicos Islands now hit a rate of 103 per 100,000, the highest in all of Latin America and the Caribbean. Across the region as a whole, homicide rates are many times higher than the global average of roughly 6 per 100,000; only Antigua & Barbuda and Grenada stand out as exceptions with consistently low murder rates, per 2023 UN Office on Drugs and Crime data.
Firearms are responsible for the vast majority of these killings, and investigative tracing shows the overwhelming majority of these weapons flow into the region through illicit channels originating in the United States. Daquan’s death was not an isolated, random tragedy: it was the product of a regional system that is armed from outside, enabled by local complicity, and normalized by leaders who dismiss each killing as an individual tragedy while refusing to acknowledge the larger pattern of systemic collapse.
Every homicide, at its core, is an attack on the legitimacy of the modern state. The foundational promise of any sovereign state is a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence: it asks citizens to surrender personal weapons, abide by the law, pay taxes, and trust its judicial systems, in exchange for guaranteed protection. Across the Caribbean, that promise lies broken. When a gunman opens fire on a grandmother’s birthday celebration from a moving van, he is explicitly declaring that the state’s authority does not extend to that space. He is building a parallel system of order, and he rules through fear. His own justice system has only one sentence: death. He takes life with impunity, with no regard for his own future or the lives of his victims.
The damage of this crisis extends far beyond the human cost. The Inter-American Development Bank and World Bank estimate that violent crime costs the Caribbean region 3 to 4% of its total GDP every year. A state that cannot deliver basic law and order loses the moral authority to make any other demands of its citizens. How can a government tax a small shopkeeper, a public school teacher, or a hotel worker, when men with no verifiable legal income are able to build large homes, import luxury vehicles, and operate violent criminal networks in plain sight? Law and order is the foundation on which every other function of the state rests; without it, all other governance claims collapse.
But it is wrong to frame this as solely a failure of the state. The killers are not foreign invaders: they are young men raised within our own communities, shaped by homes, schools and neighborhoods where authority, guidance, economic opportunity and accountability all failed at once. Many grew up in neighborhoods where the most visible, successful adult men were armed, feared, wealthy from crime, and never held to account. The collapse of Caribbean family structures, the systemic exclusion of young men from economic and social life, and the rising homicide crisis are not three separate problems. They are three symptoms of a single, interconnected national crisis.
This is not a matter of blaming overstretched single mothers or romanticizing absent fathers. The home is the first and most effective crime prevention institution a society has. Consistent parenting, guidance, healthy boundaries, affection and accountability are not private, personal luxuries: they are core matters of national security. And communities can no longer afford to stay silent. A neighborhood cannot shelter a known shooter on Monday, turn out for his victim’s funeral on Friday, and then complain that the state has failed. Silence is not neutrality: when everyone in a community knows who carries the guns, who is protecting them, and how they fund their lifestyles, looking the other way makes the community complicit.
Caribbean nations have a long, strong tradition of social democratic policy, but these existing programs were designed to address poverty, illiteracy and systemic exclusion, not the specific crisis of retaliatory gang violence, the drift of young men into criminal networks, witness protection, disruption of illicit financial flows, or rebuilding healthy male authority in communities. The existing social agenda is not obsolete, but it is incomplete. The traditional welfare state must evolve into a violence-prevention state: it must provide not just school meals and free education, but systems to flag at-risk young boys before they become homicide statistics, trauma care for survivors of violence, and support for children who grow up surrounded by fear before they ever learn basic math.
Gangs did not seize power in a vacuum. Decades of neglect, denial, and active political collusion left public spaces open for criminal control. Reclaiming the state’s monopoly on legitimate force is a process of national reconstruction, not just a military war. Heavy-handed tactics like widespread militarization, curfews and states of emergency have only limited utility. On their own, they increase body counts but do not rebuild public trust in state authority.
What works is far harder, slower, and demands greater accountability: intelligence-led policing carried out by small, trusted local units; expanded forensic capacity to raise the extremely low rate of solved homicides across the region; robust witness protection programs that do not force citizens to choose between staying silent and being killed; and the reclaiming of abandoned, underserved neighborhoods through public investment in street lighting, youth outreach, consistent community policing, recreational programming, mental health counseling and job creation.
This work also requires explicit action to criminalize the links between political actors and criminal gangs. No government can credibly claim to fight gangs when its political culture rewards candidates who “control” neighborhoods through intimidation and violence. The Caribbean Community (CARICOM) must treat the cross-border illicit gun pipeline as what it is: a direct threat to regional sovereignty. Caribbean nations did not manufacture these weapons, but we are burying our children because of them.
Gun violence has a clear financial trail. Weapons are purchased, drug shipments are moved, lawyers are hired, witnesses are bribed, politicians are courted, and legitimate property is bought with illicit proceeds. Any national homicide reduction strategy that does not prioritize following this financial trail is just chasing low-level trigger pullers while leaving the criminal infrastructure intact. Every Caribbean government needs a dedicated violence finance strategy, where tax authorities, customs, police, financial intelligence units, property registries and prosecutors coordinate to map and disrupt criminal networks. Unexplained wealth, hidden beneficial ownership of property, and suspicious real estate transactions all must be treated as core parts of homicide investigations. Al Capone was not ultimately brought down by his convictions for violence, but by following his money trail. If the trigger puller is the hand that pulls the trigger, illicit money is the bloodstream that keeps the entire criminal system alive.
The state holds the monopoly on legitimate violence, but it does not control all the root causes of violence. Those causes take root in spaces that police cannot permanently occupy: family homes, school classrooms, and the silences that communities choose to keep.
Fixing this requires an all-of-society compact. Families must raise boys who do not equate manhood with domination, easy money from crime, or carrying a weapon. Faith communities must refuse to offer moral blessing to politicians, donors and local strongmen who work with gunmen. Schools must stop pushing out at-risk boys who end up in the morgue instead of the graduation stage. The private sector must go beyond hiring private security for their own properties to create large-scale apprenticeship programs for unemployed young people, and stop laundering criminal respectability through awarding contracts to known gang leaders.
Media outlets must abandon the sensationalism of printing daily body counts, and instead focus on investigative reporting that traces guns, follows the money, and holds the entire system accountable. Caribbean diaspora communities must be engaged as full partners in this work, not just asked to send remittances and donations.
None of these proposals matter without accountability. Every Caribbean government must be required to publish a quarterly public dashboard tracking homicide reduction progress. A cabinet minister who cannot clearly explain these numbers and the government’s strategy does not deserve to hold office. A prime minister who cannot deliver sustained reductions in violence does not deserve re-election. This is the most fundamental test of the consent of the governed: if a state cannot protect its citizens, it has no right to ask for their loyalty.
Critics will call this approach too soft, and demand more military helicopters, more soldiers, more curfews, more televised displays of toughness. But what is actually soft? The state that cannot protect a promising law student at his grandmother’s birthday party is soft. The politician who takes calls from known gang leaders before he calls the victim’s family is soft. The church that accepts donations from criminal actors and looks past the blood on their hands is soft. The government that taxes honest working people but fears confronting wealthy violent criminals is soft.
True strength means rebuilding what has been broken: functional, fair courts; accountable, transparent police; schools that do not push out at-risk students; families that refuse to look away; churches that do not bless gunmen; and a region that speaks with one unified voice to demand an end to the illicit flow of weapons from outside. When we can provide safety, healing, opportunity and due process that is better than anything any gang can offer, the state’s monopoly on legitimate violence will be restored not through conquest, but through the consent of the people it protects. Anything less is just another gang, with better branding and nicer offices.
Daquan Roberts should have walked across a graduation stage this year to accept his law degree. Instead, his classmates walked to a peace pole to honor his memory. We owe his grandmother, and every future family that could face this grief, far more than just condolences. We owe them a region where every family, community, church, business and government understands that a coffin in every neighborhood is not an inevitable fate. It is a choice, and it is a failure – one we have the power to fix.