“Street crime” is in the forefront of the news now, and well it might be, given the continuing escalation that is occurring in Belize City. I use the term “street crime” to differentiate between what goes down on the South Side of Belize City from the crime that has hijacked almost all the resources of this country, crime perpetrated by those people who were elected by Belizeans to fulfill their campaign promises that they would make life better for all of us. Of course, so-called “white color crime” and “street crime” are inevitably linked, no matter how politicians try to avoid their share of the responsibility for it.
It is my opinion that the shock and dismay expressed by Belizeans at the sheer brutality of city “street crime” has a lot to do with the suddenness with which it seems to have appeared in Belize. However, brutality and violence have been a part of the human condition throughout man’s history on this planet. Don’t forget that the two World Wars, the most all encompassing and destructive in history, have occurred during the last century. Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot and Idi Amin are all creatures of the recent past. I name them only because they are the more infamous of brutal criminals, and please don’t forget that none of them could have done their dastardly deeds without considerable help; henchmen and women who were prepared to murder and torture in their names.
I don’t know whether there is any easy answer as to why some people gravitate towards violence. There is a program that has been run a couple of times on “A & E”, a cable TV network. It concerns the life of one Richard Koplinski, generally regarded as maybe the most prolific killer in US history. Koplinski grew up in New York City. He described his father as a drunken brute who would beat and kick him and his brother, and who also abused his mother. The early warning signs were there, extreme cruelty to animals among other things. He gave up on animals because, as he said, dogs and cats were no real challenge to him. Human beings were.
So began the “career” of a man who killed his first human at age fourteen. By age nineteen, he began work as a “hit man” for the Gambino crime family in New York City.
He described his introduction to Gambino capo Roy DeMeo, a real piece of work in his own right. According to Koplinski, DeMeo told him that he must be prepared to “whack” anyone he was ordered to “whack”, without question. To test his resolve, DeMeo took him for a ride, pointed to an innocent man out walking his dog, and said, “Whack him.” Koplinski exited the car, walked up to the unsuspecting victim, and shot him in the head. Then he got back into the car, which promptly drove away from the scene. He had passed Roy DeMeo’s test.
Richard Koplinski spent some time working in a Brooklyn apartment rented by the DeMeo crew. This apartment was used to dismember the bodies of victims in the bathtub. The parts were then placed in plastic bags for disposal at a garbage dump. These guys would be cutting up bodies and eating lunch at the same time! Eventually, DeMeo’s body was found in the trunk of his own car. His bosses had decided that he was a “loose cannon” whose love for excessive brutality and violence jeopardized their business!
Richard Koplinski himself doesn’t know how many people he killed; he estimates he killed over 200 in a thirty-year career that ended when he was caught, largely as a result of his own overconfidence. During that time he married and raised a family! Although his family never knew what he did for a living, they were deathly afraid of his violent temper and his sudden mood swings, so afraid in fact that they refused all interviews while the man was alive in prison until they were sure he was dead!
While in custody, Koplinski was interviewed by a psychologist who tried to figure out how a man could turn into the monster that this man obviously was. The psychologist came up with a theory that some people have the genetic makeup to either be oblivious to fear, or to be able to control fears that would paralyze most humans. The suggestion was that if those people are raised in a positive environment, they become jet fighter pilots, race car drivers, sky divers, boxers, etc. If they are raised in the type of environment that Richard Koplinski was raised in, they become killers. Does the theory hold water? I don’t know. I believe that it’s an interesting outlook, but there is too much that we don’t know about the human mind to be sure.
One thing for certain – this kind of violence never existed in Belize before we became a narco-state in the early 1980’s. Put a man into a business that can reward him with unbelievable amounts of money, enough to satisfy his wildest dreams of material success in a culture that sees such material success as the end all and be all of life, make that business illegal so that he can’t go to the authorities for assistance, and you make it easy for him to justify murder as a tool to allow him to succeed in that business.
The irony is that the South Side gang members are not bringing cocaine, the drug that produces this vast wealth, into Belize. In fact, the majority of it simply passes through on the way to the United States where the demand is such that the price of the white powder is astronomical. The South American suppliers have cut deals with people high up in the governments and the security forces of the countries on the transshipment routes in order to facilitate the traffic.
There is simply no way that large shipments of cocaine can pass through a country’s territory without assistance from the powers that be, period. So, while the South Side gangs are making more money than they could make by doing anything else, they are not the real beneficiaries of the drug trade. The real beneficiaries are those in high places who skim off the cream while our young men cut each other down night after night in an effort to maintain or to increase their small share (by comparison) of the profits. The big guys don’t have to worry about being shot. As a matter of fact, they hardly, if ever, even pass through the neighborhoods in Belize City that can become a free fire zone at any time of the day or night. Smokey Joe has been trying his best to educate our young men as to how they are really being used and abused, but it’s really difficult, especially since so many of our young people harbor a dislike for reading or have difficulty with the written word.
The other part of the deal is this. The general public is getting fed up with living in a shooting gallery. Patrick Rogers, whom I respect, by the way, urged the police to “keep it up” on last Tuesday’s Kremandala show. This is the viewpoint that many Belize City residents are gravitating to, with good reason. However, this becomes a no-win situation. Whether you want to accept it or not, the truth is that the police are compromised, not every officer, of course, but enough so that residents of the South Side feel secure in openly making suggestions as to who might be working with whom!
When you add this factor to a police force that suffers from a chronic lack of equipment and training, the temptation to institute a policy of “state terrorism” becomes irresistible.
This is the sort of policy that leads to beatings of handcuffed suspects that result in serious injuries, the locking of detainees in a cell and then spraying them with pepper spray, the death of people in custody, the treatment of an entire community as the enemy, etc. etc. Such a policy will not work in the long run. These young men will fight back, and the end result will be more and deadlier violence along with the increasing polarization of Belizean society. Can Belize come back from the brink? Time will tell, but if policy doesn’t change immediately, the odds are against it.