Most of the narcotics passing through Jamaica then smuggled into North America for the United States market apparently are distributed by a clandestine network of US drug pushers already in place. But, late in the 1980s, along with the increase of marijuana and cocaine brought from and through Jamaica to the US, a new breed of Jamaican criminal also has entered the United States. Joseph Vince, an agent of the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, who is based in Miami, asserts that the Jamaicans are “the most rapidly growing organized (criminal) group in the United States.” Within a very few years, these Jamaican men and women – whose numbers are estimated in the thousands – have organized a drug-based crime network on US soil that has extended itself well beyond Miami and New York into the American heartland. During 1987, profits from Jamaican-run “crack houses” operated in Dallas alone were estimated at US $400,000 per day. The Jamaican criminal groups, apparently obsessed with brandishing weapons, refer to themselves as “posses.” US drug enforcement authorities attribute the fearless character of members of the newly arrived criminal group as rooted in the impoverishment of their home island, conditions that have given these men and women the attitude that they have, literally, nothing to lose (Cohen 1988).

The stereotypes produced by these Jamaican criminals distress the long-term Jamaican residents of the United States.