Jamaica's anticrime drive is deemed a failure
SECURITY UPDATE is part of the Latinnews Daily service. Published every Thursday, Security Update provides pointers on key security issues in the region.
`Aspects' of the anticrime drive launched eight months ago by Prime Minister PJ Patterson have failed, according to Police Commissioner Francis Forbes. `I think,' he says, `we have to go back to the drawing board.' The initial objective of reducing reported crime by 20% is, according to Forbes, `out the window'. Indeed, he acknowledges that the police have not yet been able to achieve 15% of the target, which was what had been expected after this time lapse.
While overall crime has been reduced somewhat, murders so far this year have increased overall by 1%. This is a misleading figure, because rates have varied significantly from one area to the next. In St Catherine North, for instance, shootings are up by almost 100% since last year, and murders by close to 50%. In St Catherine South police statistics show shootings up by 13%. St James is another area where major crime is higher than last year. These `spikes' in the figures are attributed mainly to turf wars between gangs.
Police officers in the field have been suggesting that one of the features of the anticrime strategy, the imposition of curfews, has only really succeeded in driving the gunmen to other areas. It has also been suggested that enforcing the curfews has drawn resources away from other crime-fighting activities - a view Deputy Commissioner Lucius Thomas refutes, noting that the Constabulary's Mobile Reserves have been used to balance the allocation of manpower.
Another area where the December drive failed to meet expectations is that of gathering adequate intelligence on the gangs being targeted. The new Organised Crime Investigation Division (OCID) is now saying that a number of the `old' gangs have merged into bigger and better organised units, rendering much of the previous intelligence obsolete. This process of mergers is related to the turf wars behind upsurges of violence in some areas of Kingston. The OCID was set up two months ago, after commissioner Forbes disbanded the Crime Management Unit (CMU) led by Reneto Adams.
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