JAMAICA | Murder trend reversed. The number of murders in Jamaica this year up to 24 August rose to 775, up 20.5% on the same period of 2014, according to figures ‘obtained’ by the newspaper The Gleaner. This is equivalent to 77% of the total for the whole of last year. The rise come after a fall of 16% recorded by the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF) between 2013 and 2014. The newspaper says that with 12 of the 19 police divisions reporting a rising number of murders, two parishes appear as accounting jointly for more than a quarter of all…

The government of President Juan Orlando Hernández has been celebrating a further decline in the number of homicides this year, which Hernández attributes to the improvement in the professionalisation of the police forces, where as recently as 2008 most officers had only three months of training. He is now spreading the reach of his new creation, the Policía Militar del Orden Público (PMOP) to all of the country’s 18 departments. The security ministry reported on 26 September that in the first eight months of the year there had been 3,436 homicides, almost 15% fewer than in the same period of…

The Salvadorean street gangs have responded to the government’s decision to start trying them as terrorists [SSR-15-08] with a sharp increase in homicides, to which the national police (PNC) responded with an escalation of confrontations with the maras. The government has interpreted this as another attempt by the gangs to force the authorities to reverse their policy of confining their leaders to maximum security prisons. One feature in the new wave of violence was a string of attacks with explosives that have been attributed to the maras. PNC director Mauricio Ramírez Landaverde reported on 1 September that there had been…