KINGSTON, Jamaica. The usual assumption is that people buy walls because crime is rising. Jamaica has just tested that idea, and the result is awkward. In 2025 the island recorded 673 murders by the Ministry of National Security’s year end count, a fall of about 41 per cent in a single year and the lowest total in roughly three decades. In the same year the number of people registered to work in private security rose to 30,013, up from 28,124, according to the Planning Institute of Jamaica’s Economic and Social Survey. The guards kept multiplying while the killings fell.
That gap between risk and spending is the real subject of this investigation. Across the world, the wall, the barrier arm and the uniformed guard have become ordinary features of how middle class people buy a home. Jamaica now has more than two registered private security workers for every member of its police force. In South Africa the ratio is about four to one. In Latin America as a whole, private guards outnumber police by close to half again.
For a property market that sells “gated” as a feature in almost every new listing, the question is not only whether walls work. It is who pays for them, who governs them, and what happens to a buyer who stops paying.
The Guard Outnumbers the Constable
The most careful global count is still the one made by the Small Arms Survey in Geneva in 2011. Reviewing 70 countries, it estimated that the formal private security sector employed between 19.5 and 25.5 million people, and that in many countries private staff outnumbered police. It also estimated that private security companies held between 1.7 and 3.7 million firearms, an extrapolation that excludes illegal and undeclared weapons, and found that outside conflict zones Latin American firms held about ten times as many guns per employee as firms in Western Europe.
Two years later the United Nations Development Programme put a hard number on Latin America. Its 2013 to 2014 regional Human Development Report, Citizen Security with a Human Face, counted 3,811,302 private guards against 2,616,753 police officers in the 18 countries it studied, and reported that the private workforce was growing at about 10 per cent a year. Security, in much of the hemisphere, had quietly become something households and businesses buy rather than something the state provides.
The United States shows that this is not only a story about poorer or more violent countries. The Bureau of Labor Statistics counted 1,304,000 jobs for security guards and gambling surveillance officers in 2025, against 824,200 jobs for police and detectives. Britain’s Security Industry Authority had 455,001 licence holders on its register at the end of March 2026; England and Wales had 147,822 police officers by headcount on the same date.
A League Table of Private Protection
Comparing countries is harder than the headline ratios suggest, because each counts something slightly different. South Africa’s regulator, the Private Security Industry Regulatory Authority, counts “active” registered officers. Jamaica’s Private Security Regulation Authority counts registered individuals, including private investigators and trainers. American figures are jobs, not people. The table below sets out each figure with its basis, so that readers can see what is being compared.
| # | Country | Private security | Police | Ratio | Basis of figures |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | India | about 7 million (est.) | 1.4 million | 5.0 | Guardian research, reported 2017 |
| 2 | South Africa | 577,444 | 145,256 | 4.0 | PSiRA active officers and SAPS frontline, 2023 |
| 3 | Jamaica | 30,013 | about 14,000 | 2.1 | PSRA registrations 2025; JCF establishment reported filled, May 2024 |
| 4 | China | about 5 million (est.) | 2.7 million | 1.9 | Guardian research, reported 2017 |
| 5 | United States | 1,304,000 | 824,200 | 1.6 | BLS jobs, 2025 |
| 6 | Latin America (18) | 3,811,302 | 2,616,753 | 1.5 | UNDP regional report, 2013 |
| 7 | Brazil | 530,194 | not compared | n/a | Guards at federally authorised firms, first half 2024 |
| 8 | United Kingdom | 455,001 | 147,822 (E&W only) | n/a | SIA licence holders and Home Office headcount, March 2026 |
Two warnings belong with the table. The Indian and Chinese figures are rough estimates, not registers. And the British comparison is lopsided, because the licences cover the whole United Kingdom while the police count covers only England and Wales, so no ratio is shown. What the table does establish is the direction of travel: wherever the numbers can be checked, private protection is at least as large as public policing, and usually larger.
Fortress America and the Price of a Gate
The United States turned the gated subdivision into a mass product. The 2001 American Housing Survey found about 7 million households, 5.9 per cent of the total, living in communities secured by walls or fences, according to the planners Thomas Sanchez and Robert Lang. The anthropologist Setha Low, whose book Behind the Gates remains the standard study, estimated that the number of Americans in gated communities doubled from about 4 million to about 8 million between 1995 and 1997 alone.
Buyers pay for the gate. In a study of St Louis, the economists Michael LaCour-Little and Stephen Malpezzi found that homes on streets where gates were erected between 1979 and 1998 carried a price premium of about 26 per cent, against about 9 per cent for private streets with no gate, as summarised by the geographers Renaud Le Goix and Elena Vesselinov. A later study of Shelby County, Tennessee, by Evgeny Radetskiy, Ronald Spahr and Mark Sunderman, found significant premiums for gated homes, largest in medium sized communities, but reported that the premium in higher priced gated communities vanished after the 2008 financial crisis.
That last finding matters for Jamaica. A gate is valued when buyers believe it protects them and when the community behind it is well run. When either belief weakens, the premium can disappear faster than the service charge does.
South Africa and Brazil: Where the Wall Became the City
In South Africa, private security is now a parallel police force. Registered security businesses rose from 8,144 in 2014 to 15,113 in 2023, while frontline police numbers fell from 152,977 to 145,256 over the same years, according to figures from PSiRA’s annual reports compiled by BusinessTech. In Johannesburg, residents’ associations have for years closed public roads with booms and palisade gates; in May 2026 the city’s transport department publicly warned one Dunkeld association that it was installing gates at locations its approval did not allow.
Brazil gave the world its most famous gated suburb. Alphaville, outside São Paulo, was conceived in the 1970s by the developer Albuquerque & Takaoka and launched its first residential project in 1975; the original site now holds 33 separate gated areas and more than 20,000 homes. Brazil’s private guard force reached 530,194 in the first half of 2024, up 9.3 per cent in a year, according to the Anuário Brasileiro de Segurança Pública.
The Country That Tried to Tear Down Its Gates
One government has tried to reverse the trend. In February 2016 China’s State Council issued urban planning guidance saying that new residential compounds should in principle no longer be gated, and that the private roads inside existing compounds should gradually be opened to public traffic, to ease congestion and use land better. The reaction was immediate. Legal scholars argued that the roads were private property, paid for in the purchase price of every flat, and the plan made little visible progress. The episode is a useful lesson: once a wall is priced into a home, removing it becomes a question of property rights, not just planning.
The Caribbean Bill for Feeling Safe
In the Caribbean, the state itself is one of the biggest customers. In May 2025 Trinidad and Tobago’s Prime Minister, Kamla Persad-Bissessar, said ministries and state agencies were spending about TT$500 million a year on contracted private security, roughly US$74 million, with the Ministry of Education alone accounting for about TT$200 million. She called the bill too high.
Jamaica’s industry is smaller but growing steadily. The PIOJ figures show 331 registered security organisations in 2025, up from 311, with 30 new registrations in the year. Of the 30,013 registered individuals, 25,802 were unarmed and 4,211 armed. Women made up 11,727 registrants, about 39 per cent, a far higher share than in most police forces. Measured against the 1,413,200 Jamaicans in work in October 2025, registered security personnel are equivalent to about one in every 47 employed people, although not every registrant works full time.
Jamaica’s Two Kinds of Wall
Jamaica has two very different gated landscapes. The first is the familiar one: townhouse and apartment schemes in Upper St Andrew, Portmore, Spanish Town, St Ann and the north coast, with guard huts, access cards and visitor logs. Julian Robinson, Member of Parliament for St Andrew South Eastern, has said his constituency has a large number of gated developments.
The second is older and rarely appears in property listings. Residents of inner city Kingston began blocking roads in the late 1970s, during the political violence of that period, to stop drive by shootings. The Jamaica Observer has documented how these barriers evolved from debris to concrete slabs and, on Price Lane near Torrington Bridge, a steel door secured with heavy padlocks. In Parade Gardens some barriers were installed by the security forces as part of a zone of special operations in 2022, and Hannah Town has concrete barriers and a military checkpoint under a similar operation. Residents told the newspaper the barriers had cut crime. Both landscapes rest on the same idea: that controlling who passes is the first line of safety.
Myth Check: Safe Behind the Gate
The selling line is that a gate makes a home safe. The evidence is more qualified. The most cited American study, by the criminologists Lynn Addington and Callie Marie Rennison in Justice Quarterly in 2013, did find that gated communities lower the odds of residential burglary, after controlling for income, tenure and location. But the authors warned that walls may push crime into neighbouring streets and may raise the risk of offences committed by people already inside, from vandalism to domestic violence.
Jamaica has its own reminders. In December 2024 a 77 year old woman was killed in her home in Caymanas Country Club Estate, a community with barcodes, PINs and visitor checks; police said the intruder had climbed a wall. Senior Superintendent Christopher Phillips, then the divisional commander, said publicly that gated communities are not necessarily safe, and in May 2024 the police complained that some residents in gated schemes were obstructing officers. The verdict: a gate reduces some risks, displaces others, and creates new problems of access. It is a feature, not a guarantee.
Why There Is No Honest Count
No Jamaican agency publishes the number of gated communities, the number of homes inside them, or the price difference between a gated home and an equivalent one outside. Strata schemes are registered with the Commission of Strata Corporations, but many gated subdivisions of freehold houses fall outside strata law altogether. Access itself is a barrier to measurement: the Director General of the Statistical Institute of Jamaica, Carol Coy, described entry to gated communities as “a significant problem” for the 2022 census, and the Chief Justice, Bryan Sykes, has said that the “proliferation of gated communities” makes it harder to serve jury summonses.
This investigation therefore does not offer a Jamaican gated price premium. Any figure circulating without a named study behind it should be treated with caution. The honest position is that the American evidence suggests a premium exists when communities are well run, and that Jamaica has not measured its own.
What a Gate Costs a Jamaican Homeowner
The cost of a wall does not end at purchase. Monthly maintenance fees in Jamaican gated schemes range widely: J$5,000 in one Coral Spring, Trelawny community described by its association president this year, and J$20,000 or more a month in some schemes, a level Roger Allen, second vice president of the Realtors Association of Jamaica, describes as a significant burden. At J$20,000 a month, a household pays J$240,000 a year, about US$1,500, before any special levy. Over a 25 year mortgage that is J$6 million in today’s money, and fees rarely stay flat.
The weak point is collection. In some communities up to 30 per cent of residents do not pay routine fees, The Gleaner reported after the Caymanas killing, and security is the first service to suffer. Associations have responded by deactivating access cards and sending non paying owners through the visitors’ queue. Under strata law, a corporation can already apply to the Commission of Strata Corporations for a certificate of power of sale over a unit in arrears.
The Bill That Would Give Gates a Constitution
For freehold gated subdivisions, that power has not existed. The Registration (Shared Community) Bill, 2026, tabled in the House of Representatives on 27 January by Robert Montague on behalf of the Prime Minister, Andrew Holness, would change that. It has 60 sections and three schedules. It would require shared communities to register with the Real Estate Board, turn every lot owner into a member of a community corporation, make contributions legally enforceable with interest, and allow a corporation to sell a lot for unpaid fees once the board issues a certificate. Where fees are 60 days overdue and the owner cannot be found, a corporation could seek a court order to rent the home. Courts could impose penalties of up to J$1 million for bylaw breaches, and owners living abroad would have to appoint an agent in Jamaica.
The arguments on each side are serious. Supporters, including the Realtors Association president Gabrielle Gilpin-Hudson, who also sits on the Real Estate Board, say owners who benefit from shared roads and guards should not be able to opt out of paying, that disputes will move from an expensive Supreme Court to the Real Estate Board, and that properly run common areas protect property values. Critics, including the Citizens Rights to the City group, whose spokesperson is Diana McCaulay, say new accounting and insurance requirements will raise fees for retirees on fixed incomes, and that older schemes need time and a tiered approach. The Opposition’s Julian Robinson asked for wide scrutiny, and the bill is now before a joint select committee chaired by Mr Montague, which agreed this month, partly at Mr Robinson’s urging, to invite public submissions, hold a town hall in person and online, and visit a community.
What This Means for Jamaica
For buyers, the practical lessons are concrete. Ask for the community’s audited accounts, its arrears rate and its security contract before signing, because a gate is only as strong as the share of neighbours who pay for it. Ask whether the scheme is strata, a registered association, or neither, because that decides what happens if fees go unpaid, and the shared community law, if passed, will add new obligations and new risks. Diaspora buyers, who the Realtors Association estimates make up about 70 per cent of purchasers in many of the largest developments, should note the proposed requirement to name a local agent.
For policy, the fall in murders raises a harder question. If the state succeeds in making streets safer, Jamaica will be left with a large private security workforce and thousands of homes whose value is partly built on the idea of a wall. The country that tried to remove its gates, China, discovered how hard that is once the gate has been bought and paid for.
The Wall and the Street
A wall is a promise made by neighbours to one another: we will pay, we will check who comes in, we will keep the road and the light working. When that promise holds, it can add value and calm. When it breaks, a gated scheme becomes a private town with no tax base, no court and no one in charge. Jamaica is now writing the rules for those private towns at the very moment the public streets outside them are becoming safer.
A gate can keep a stranger out. Only a well governed community, and a safer country, can keep the value in.
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