On 24 September 2026, Prime Minister Andrew Holness stood at a sod-turning ceremony for the Housing Agency of Jamaica's Luana Phase Four development in St Elizabeth and told the country that the state is not above the law. He was answering a question nobody at a housing launch expects to face: why has the number of people killed by Jamaica's security forces kept climbing while the murder rate falls.
Holness cited figures from the Independent Commission of Investigations (INDECOM), the civilian body that investigates police and military use of force. Twenty-five people had been fatally shot by security forces in September alone, as of his remarks. The commission had charged 71 officers between 2024 and 2026 following its investigations. "The State is not above the law," Holness said, "and the institutions that are in place, many of them independent of the government, will execute their duties." He added that police operations are intelligence-driven and that "when the police act, you should know...this is not anything we are hiding."
Ten days earlier, INDECOM had put out a statement that read differently. Sixty-seven people had died in 26 separate multiple-fatality shootings since January, a toll that had already passed the 62 people killed in every such incident recorded in all of 2025. Thirteen of those incidents killed two people each, eleven killed three, and two killed four. The most recent, on 13 September on Knightsdale Drive in Kingston 20, killed three people and was the third triple-fatality shooting of the year involving a woman among the dead. Year to date, 215 people had been fatally shot by security forces, against 217 over the same period in 2025: a toll holding roughly level while the country's murder count falls toward a projected under-600 for the year.
INDECOM's statement made a specific complaint. Body-worn cameras were still absent from some operations, it said, particularly those using unmarked vehicles or targeting people believed to be armed, and that footage is "critical to objectively establishing the circumstances" of a shooting. On the same day Holness spoke, a Gleaner letter argued that reassurance from the prime minister means little if the commission investigating these deaths lacks the staff to clear its own backlog. Jamaica has, in the space of a year, bought a thousand body cameras, wired a national camera network, and built a command centre to watch it all. It has not, on the public record, built the layer that turns that footage into finished investigations faster than the shootings pile up.
The numbers behind the prime minister's assurance
Jamaica's 2026 crime story is two stories running in opposite directions. Murders are down. The country recorded 333 between 1 January and 8 August, a fifth fewer than the 415 over the same period of 2025, and Holness has said the decline is "not by accident," pointing to intelligence-led operations against gang leadership. Fatal shootings by police and soldiers have not followed the same curve. Jamaica recorded 311 in 2025, the highest total since 2010 and a 65 percent jump on 2024. Planned operations, not the chaotic exchanges the public imagines, accounted for roughly half of those deaths.
That last figure matters more than any other in this story. A planned operation is one the police chose the time, place and approach for. It is exactly the kind of incident where advance analysis, staged cameras and a documented plan of action are possible before anyone pulls a trigger, and exactly the kind of incident where, under current policy, a camera may not be running.
The Core Argument
Jamaica has spent the past year buying the hardware for police accountability: a thousand body cameras, a second thousand on order, a national camera network, a new command centre. It has not built the analysis layer that would let that footage clear INDECOM's backlog, flag a dangerous pattern before the next multiple-fatality shooting, or settle the argument over which operations get filmed. AI-assisted footage triage, redaction and pattern analysis can do that work, and none of it requires resolving the political fight over cameras at gun raids first.
Cameras that skip the operations that need them most
In April 2026, National Security Minister Dr Horace Chang was asked at a post-Cabinet briefing about calls from civil society groups, including Jamaicans For Justice, for police to wear body cameras on planned operations against armed suspects. His answer was blunt. "This thing that you must wear a camera when you going to look for a man who has a M16 that's firing 60 rounds per second is a crazy idea," he said, arguing that officers diving for cover during a firefight cannot also manage recording equipment, and that the Police Commissioner, not outside groups, decides how cameras are deployed.
INDECOM pushed back within days, saying claims that cameras create unacceptable operational risk are "not supported by global experiences" and that modern body cameras are built for frontline use. Former deputy police commissioner Mark Shields went further, naming the specific units that have already answered Chang's objection: the New York Police Department's Emergency Service Unit, Los Angeles SWAT and Chicago SWAT all run body-camera protocols during high-risk warrant executions and armed confrontations. Shields also noted that the Axon Body 3 cameras the Jamaica Constabulary Force has already bought include a stealth mode that disables the visible light and sound while continuing to record, which addresses the tactical objection directly. Civil society groups called the minister's comments deeply concerning, and a Gleaner editorial in May called for what it termed a bodycam reset.
Chang's underlying worry is not baseless. An officer under fire does have less attention to spare for equipment, and no camera policy should ask someone to fumble with a device while taking cover. The dispute is over whether that worry rules cameras out entirely, and the stealth-mode feature Shields pointed to exists precisely because manufacturers heard the same objection from police unions elsewhere and built past it rather than around it.
The practical result of the standoff is that the highest-risk half of Jamaica's fatal police shootings, the planned operations, remain the category least likely to be filmed under the minister's stated position. INDECOM's May 2026 call to rethink deployment was aimed squarely at that gap.
What Jamaica is building, and the layer it left out
The government's own account of the camera programme is detailed on hardware and thin on analysis. As of mid-2026, roughly a thousand Axon Body 3 cameras were deployed across the Jamaica Constabulary Force, with a second thousand in procurement for the following financial year. In the St James division, Senior Superintendent Eron Samuels reported 89 percent camera usage during deployed operations by June, with a target of 100 percent, and pointed to a $41.5 million cash seizure that body-camera footage documented from first contact through to handover.
Holness has described the wider plan as an integrated system: broadband connectivity to move footage off the cameras, secure data storage to hold it, an evidentiary management framework to track chain of custody, closed-circuit television folded into command and control, an expanded JamaicaEye surveillance network, and a new C5-type command centre to watch it all in something closer to real time. In-car cameras for patrol vehicles are planned but limited so far.
What is absent from every public description of the programme is any mention of how the footage gets reviewed once it is stored. Two thousand cameras, most running for full shifts, generate more video than any team of human investigators can watch end to end. INDECOM already says its investigations into fatal shootings run for years before they close, and the Gleaner letter published the same day as Holness's remarks argued that dedicated investigative staff, not another public statement about independent institutions, is what would actually clear the backlog. A camera that records a shooting and then sits in storage for two years before anyone reviews it in full has recorded the truth without producing accountability from it.
Four ways AI could turn the camera investment into faster, more credible investigations
None of what follows requires the government and Chang to first resolve the fight over cameras at gun raids. Each of these applies to footage the JCF is already collecting, right now, from checkpoints, market patrols and the growing share of planned operations that do carry a camera.
Automatically flag the footage that matters most
A multiple-fatality shooting, by definition, produces the most consequential and contested footage the JCF holds. Axon Evidence, the cloud evidence-management platform built by the same manufacturer that sold the JCF its Body 3 cameras, already includes AI search tools designed to locate footage by content rather than making an investigator scrub through hours of video by hand. Pointed at multiple-fatality incidents specifically, that kind of search could route the footage to the front of INDECOM's queue instead of leaving it to sit behind routine traffic stops in the same storage system. Given that INDECOM's own count shows 26 multiple-fatality incidents in eight and a half months, prioritizing even that subset would touch a small share of total footage while covering the cases the public and Parliament care most about.
Redact footage fast enough to release it
Publishing body-camera footage builds trust only if it can be published without exposing bystanders, informants or minors, and manual redaction of hours of video is slow and expensive. Axon's own Redaction Assistant, built for the same Body 3 cameras the JCF uses, automates the masking of faces, licence plates and in-vehicle screens and claims to cut redaction time by up to 70 percent. That speed is the difference between INDECOM publishing footage from a contested shooting within weeks and publishing it, if at all, after public attention has moved on.
Watch for the pattern before the sixth or seventh incident
Two of the 26 multiple-fatality incidents this year killed four people each, and three of the triple-fatality incidents involved a woman among the dead. Early-intervention systems, the kind Chicago and New Orleans built into their police departments under federal consent decrees, track use-of-force incidents by officer, unit and location over time and flag a pattern statistically before it produces a sixth or seventh casualty. Jamaica's command centre infrastructure, built for JamaicaEye and CCTV integration, already has the technical foundation to host this kind of dashboard. It has not, on the public record, been asked to.
Score the risk of a planned operation before it happens, not the camera
Chang's objection was to filming a raid against an armed suspect, not to knowing in advance that the raid was likely to be dangerous. A model built on the JCF's own operational history, including weapon type, location, time of day and prior incidents at the address, can score a planned operation's risk level before officers deploy. The highest-risk operations could then be routed to additional oversight, a second commanding officer's sign-off, or a specific after-action review, independent of whether a camera is running. That would let Chang keep his position on gun raids while still building a record of which operations carried elevated risk and how they were handled.
What the rest of the Caribbean should watch
Trinidad and Tobago ended its own state of emergency on 17 September 2026, after thirteen months under emergency powers the government credited with cutting murders. Jamaica's challenge runs in a different direction. Its murder rate is already falling without emergency powers, and the accountability question is not about detention or curfews but about what happens after a shooting the state itself carried out. Any Caribbean government building a national camera network, and several are, should note that Jamaica bought the cameras roughly a year before anyone in government described a plan for reviewing what they record.
The weakest part of this argument is that none of these tools stops a shooting that happens in three seconds of contact. Better footage review, redaction and pattern detection make it possible to reconstruct and judge a shooting after the fact. They do nothing to change what an officer decides in the moment, and if commanders do not act on what an early-warning system shows them, faster analysis produces better-documented inaction rather than fewer deaths.
What to do before the next multiple-fatality shooting
- INDECOM: publish, alongside the incident counts it already releases monthly, the median time from a fatal shooting to a completed investigation, so the backlog the Gleaner letter describes is measured rather than assumed.
- The Ministry of National Security: commission a written risk-scoring policy for planned operations, covering the roughly half of 2025's fatal shootings that came from operations the police themselves scheduled, independent of the camera-at-gun-raids dispute.
- The Jamaica Constabulary Force: report the actual review turnaround time for body-camera footage from multiple-fatality incidents, not only the deployment and usage rates it currently publishes.
- Parliament's national security committee: require a public account of how the new C5 command centre and JamaicaEye integration will be used for use-of-force analysis, not only for general surveillance and crime response.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many people has Jamaica's security forces fatally shot in 2026?
According to INDECOM, 215 people had been fatally shot by police and soldiers as of mid-September 2026, rising to 223 by September 24, against 217 over the same period of 2025. Twenty-six of those incidents killed more than one person, together accounting for 67 deaths, already above the 62 people killed in multiple-fatality incidents during all of 2025.
Why did Minister Chang say police will not wear body cameras during gun raids?
Dr Horace Chang argued in April 2026 that officers confronting an armed suspect need both hands free to take cover and cannot also manage recording equipment, calling the requirement a crazy idea. INDECOM and former deputy police commissioner Mark Shields disputed this, pointing to specialist units in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago that already use body cameras on high-risk armed operations, and to a stealth mode on the JCF's own Axon Body 3 cameras that disables lights and sound while recording continues.
How many body cameras does the Jamaica Constabulary Force have?
Around a thousand Axon Body 3 cameras were deployed by mid-2026, with a second thousand in procurement for the following financial year, as part of a phased national rollout that also includes broadband connectivity, secure data storage and an evidentiary management framework.
How can I report a complaint about police conduct in Jamaica?
INDECOM can be reached at 876-968-1932 or 876-968-8875, or by WhatsApp at 876-553-0000. Complaints about specific incidents can also be made in writing or in person at any INDECOM office, and the commission's findings are separate from any internal Jamaica Constabulary Force disciplinary process.
Does a falling murder rate mean policing in Jamaica is getting safer overall?
Not by itself. Jamaica's murder count fell by about a fifth in the first eight months of 2026 compared with the same period in 2025, which reflects harm from criminal violence. Fatal shootings by the security forces are a separate count, and it rose to a 2025 total of 311, the highest since 2010, before holding roughly level again in 2026. A full picture of public safety needs both figures, not one.