Middle-Class Security: Market Heights

Abstract

This chapter explores Market Heights—a middle-class comparator for Tivoli Gardens. I demonstrate how threats to middle-class security and the construction of these threats have reproduced and, in some cases, produced new trajectories of insularity, intensified hegemonic individualism and amplified demands for more stringent laws to protect the middle class from what is sometimes regarded as pathological cultures of criminality. I examine how differences around space, place, and class define security experiences, the relationship between the state and community and its place in the social and political order in Jamaica. Various narratives are explored in a bid to understand the security landscape of the community, practices pursued to address the fear of crime and the ways in which people occupying different strata in Kingston position themselves vis-à-vis the state. As a response to fear and the inability of the state to gurantee security, neighbourhood watches and private security have become pervasive among the middle class. Neighborhood watches are ready to ‘take back their community’ and private security has emerged as part of a self-governance approach to security among the middle class.