BASSETERRE, St. Kitts —When Dudley Williams was a police commander in the mid-1980s, law enforcement in St. Kitts and Nevis was a leisurely occupation. Violent crime was rare on the sleepy specks of land in the eastern Caribbean.

“If fellows got into a heated dispute at a rum bar, things were settled with fists, a piece of stick, a knife at the worst,” said Williams, now 79. “You’d get a shooting once every five years.”

Times have changed here and for many islands across the Caribbean, where an escalating arms race among criminal gangs has turned once-peaceful neighborhoods into battle zones.

St. Kitts and Nevis, a two-island federation of nearly 50,000, has tallied 31 homicides so far in 2011, already making it the bloodiest year on record. Police blame gangs with names like Killer Mafia Soldiers and Tek Life for the escalating violence.

Usually far from the view of sunbathing tourists, tit-for-tat shootings by trigger-happy gangsters have become common in the Caribbean, according to a new report on global homicides by the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime.

Public pressure

Alarmed citizens are putting pressure on politicians throughout the region to attack the problem. In Trinidad and Tobago, which is off  Venezuela’s coast along a prime drug shipment route, the government has declared a state of emergency, imposing nightly curfews and giving police and soldiers broad powers to conduct searches and seizures.

Little of the violence so far has affected tourists to the Caribbean, where about six million Americans visit each year. Many stick to all-inclusive resorts and those who don’t rarely stray into the gritty slums where the violence flares up.

Still, there are isolated cases. A vacationing U.S. Army sergeant was killed during a robbery in Trinidad last year. A Welsh couple was butchered in an Antigua vacation cottage on the last day of their two-week honeymoon in 2008. In St. Kitts, bandits held up a small bus of tourists last year, prompting two cruise lines to briefly suspend stops there. Two British women were raped on a remote beach in St. Lucia earlier this year.

Guns and drugs

Drug traffickers have helped drive up the crime rates by introducing firearms and narcotics with a street value exceeding the size of the Caribbean’s legal economy.

Although the islands remain near-perfect conduits for drug shipments, with their numerous un-policed islets and barely monitored coasts, the U.N. crime office says Caribbean drug seizures actually diminished 71 percent between 1997 and 2009 as more contraband shifted to Central American routes.

According to the agency, the increase in the Caribbean’s lethal violence can partly be traced to frenzied competition among underworld groups fighting for turf in a diminished drug smuggling market.

Caribbean experts worry a culture of violence has become entrenched on the islands, where nearly 70 percent of homicides are committed by firearms.

“Until fairly recently, we had an innocence about ourselves in the Caribbean but that’s been lost. This thing is a Pandora’s Box and I’m not sure you can ever close it again,” said Marcus Day, director of the Caribbean Drug & Alcohol Research Institute in St. Lucia.

Soaring murder rates

Comparisons with other parts of the world can be stark. Jamaica, an island of roughly three million people that has been hit hard by drug and extortion gangs for years, chalked up 1,428 killings in 2010. Chicago, a city of nearly three million, reported 435 homicides last year.

Statistics from the U.N. crime office show homicide rates nearly doubling in a number of Caribbean countries since 1995. In St. Kitts and Nevis, slayings have increased six-fold since 2002, when there were just five killings.

Ivelaw Griffith, an expert on Caribbean security at City University of New York, said outmaneuvered and outgunned law enforcement agencies on the islands have a limited ability to cope with the problem on their own.

He said the spread of cable television and popular music has raised expectations among youths by depicting the easy life even as the rough global economy is making pockets of poverty grow deeper and wider. It’s “really creating a very unholy and unhealthy recipe for these small societies,” Griffith said.

Touch new laws

To counter the gang culture, the Bahamas is toughening crime and bail laws, building more courts, trying to round up unlicensed guns and funding programs to steer at-risk youth away from crime.

The archipelago off Florida’s east coast has seen 104 people killed so far this year, easily topping the previous full-year record of 94 set just last year.

Prime Minister Hubert Ingraham is urging Bahamians to join neighborhood watch programs and help police identify criminals.

“Community engagement and service will be more effective in combating crime than iron bars and gated communities,” Ingraham said during a recent televised address.

Trinidad and Tobago’s emergency decree, imposed in August and expected to extend through December, angered some young people but others applauded the move.

“We don’t mind living under curfew conditions if it makes the country safer,” said Zana Ramdial, a 40-something mother of three in the capital of Port-of-Spain.

Many Caribbean islands have been known for feeble local enforcement. In St. Lucia, drug smugglers know immediately when the maritime police are on patrol, making evasion nearly effortless, said Day, the crime researcher in St. Lucia.

“We don’t really have enough fuel to pay for the police boats so we can only run them at certain times. And the criminals know when they go out,” Day said.

Police patrols

Some of the poor, developing islands have reached out to Scotland Yard and the FBI for help or brought in foreign police and security consultants.

St. Kitts recruited a new police commissioner, Celvin G. Walwyn, who is a native islander with long experience as police officer in Texas and Florida. He has warned street gangs he plans to eradicate them and has special teams of police and soldiers to patrol crime hotspots together. A tough new law can put people away for 20 years if they are convicted of recruiting for the gangs.

“Rumors on the street are that the gangs have an arsenal. But if push comes to shove, we can wipe them out,” Walwyn told The Associated Press.

He said employment and other services will be available for young people who wish to leave gangs.

Dale Watley, a 31-year-old who served three years in an overcrowded St. Lucia prison for a shooting, says youths can be lured away. He turned his back on the underworld life he had known since childhood and now runs his own barber shop.

“The young guys, they want a movie kind of life, like Scarface,” he said. “But once they get a chance to survive in the real world with respect, they don’t want to shoot anyone anymore. They want to live.”

Associated Press writer Megan Reynolds in Nassau, Bahamas, contributed to this story.

BY THE NUMBERS
Jamaica: 1,428 killings in 2010.

St. Kitts and Nevis: 31 murders so far this year, already the bloodiest year on record, a six-fold increase since 2002.

The Bahamas: 104 murders so far this year, topping the total of 94 for all of last year.

THE RESPONSE
Trinidad and Tobago: Government declared state of emergency, imposed nightly curfews and gave police and soldiers broad powers to conduct searches and seizures.

The Bahamas: Toughening crime and bail laws, building more courts, trying to round up unlicensed guns and funding programs to steer at-risk youth away from crime.

St. Kitts and Nevis: Hired new police commissioner, Celvin G. Walwyn, former police officer in Florida. Special teams of police and soldiers patrol crime hotspots together. Tough new law can put people away for 20 years if they are convicted of recruiting for the gangs.

Photo: Hubert Ingraham