Amid Crime Surge, Caymans Call in U.K. Police - DealBook Blog - NYTimes.com.
The Cayman Islands has brought in British police to tackle a rise in gang-related crime that business leaders fear could hurt the territory’s image as a safe finance and tourism destination, Reuters reported.
Fourteen British officers arrived ilate on Wednesday after they were requested by the Cayman police commissioner, David Baines. The murder rate in the small British territory, with a population of 55,000, remains low compared with Caribbean states like Jamaica. But the 390-strong local police force has been stretched since the start of the year by five homicides, a kidnapping, armed robberies and shootings. Victims included a 4-year-old boy killed in crossfire.
Cayman authorities and local leaders in tourism, financial services and real estate are worried the spike in crime could damage the islands’ reputation for safety and security, which has underpinned its emergence as a legal domain for many of the world’s hedge funds.
I've long argued that secrecy jurisdictions seek to undermine other states.
I have also long argued that their own business model is not viable becasue it is internationally unacceptable.
Only occasionally, but persistently none the less, have I argued that their business models are also deeply and fundamentally dangerous to the people who live in the small island secrecy jurisdiction.
There are two reasons why I have argued this. First of all, is is obvious in the case of the Crown Dependencies, Cayman and others, the model is incapable of funding the necessary functions of government.
Second, as in Turks & Caicos and Antigua, corruption has destroyed the state already.
This social unrest is spreading. You cannot build a state on the corrupt premise that is inherent in the abusive structures promoted by secrecy jurisdictions - structures that were always and solely designed to facilitate crime and, I will candidly suggest, for no other purpose - without crime spreading, including in your home jurisidiction.
Cayman is the latest jurisdiction where this is being seen. It is suffering enormous tension in an island of just 55,000 people, an outbreak of violence and murders and has an inability to now police itself - showing how absurd is its claim to be an independent territory.
Cayman is collapsing fiancially.
Cayman is collapsing as a society.
The financial edifice that records its transactions there might topple with it.
Of course that edifice is based on deceit - not least the deceit that Cayman is the place where it undertakes its activity. But we kbnow decit is utterly corrorive - including when it is exposed.
If Cayman does collapse - and it will take little for it to dso so - have no doubt it could be the next Lehman.
That's why action is needed now.
Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:
You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.
And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:
Suggest people look at the history of Hong Kong and the establishment of the Independent Commission Against Corruption.
Richard
I worked there in the mid-1980s when the population was around 25,000 and when two-thirds of Grand Cayman’s land mass was swampland. I have been back several times since then, but not since 1993, and I have been staggered to hear that the population is now 55,000 and that most of the swampland has now been built on. The growth has been exponential and its very clear that the infrastructure has been unable to cope. Its arguably still not overcrowded because of the large area of swampland which had never been built on back in the 80s, so that in itself hasn’t been a problem.
Back in those days, most of the crime was committed by Jamaican and Honduran immigrants, who were involved in drugs in a big way. Lots of the “serious crime” was drugs-related but at that time Caymanians were very rarely involved. When I read Cayman news articles now, despite a 30,000 population increase of mainly finance-related expatriates and low-wage immigrants, it does seem that the indigenous Caymanians are now extensively involved in the murders, armed robberies etc.
I don’t know how directly correlated it is to the growth of the finance industry, as it could just be due to poor quality and under-resourced policing, but something somewhere has gone horribly wrong there.
If the serious crime statistics for Cayman were compared in relative terms with Guernsey, Jersey or the Isle of Man, the figures for Cayman are probably 10-20 times worse, so its very clear that its a serious problem which Cayman has to address. Its historically been a very nice place to live and work (if you like that lifestyle), but its soon going to become just like the Bahamas was in the late 1970s/early 1980s (which ironically was one of the factors which fuelled Cayman’s dramatic growth in the 1980s).
I don’t think you can really compare Cayman’s crime situation with Antigua (whose finance industry is miniscule and was dominated by the corrupt Stanford), or with Turks & Caicos (where corruption at government level is far more of an issue than “street level crime”). Bermuda and the Bahamas would be more relevant comparisons, I think.
But it sure doesn’t look good in Cayman and for anyone who’s ever spent time there in the past, its extremely sad to hear how bad the problem is.