St Elizabeth should take a page from Manchester in crime fighting – Bunting
WHEN THE relatively peaceful parish of St Elizabeth recorded its first four murders for the year, all in less than twenty-four hours in two separate double-murder incidents, Jamaicans were again forced to stop and consider the seriousness of the country’s crime problem.
With that in mind, Minister of National Security Peter Bunting says that the approach that is now being taken to the crime problem is to consider it an epidemic and, therefore, treat it in that way. He was speaking at the funeral of Desrick Williams, one of the two 15-year-old boys who were killed in early January.
“We have a strategy and we have started to use the public health terminology and the framework of treating violence as an epidemic and there are three steps to controlling epidemics.
“First is to interrupt the transmission, and that’s where the police are primarily involved in terms of where you have flareups of violence related to gang activities and reprisals and counter-reprisals. That is largely being [practised] since the beginning of October. Through Operation Resilience, hundreds of anti-gang operations were launched across the island. We have started to see success. Since November, we have started to get some reduction in the rate of murders; December, further so,” the minister said.
The minister continued: “The second step is preventing future transmission, and this is where we are doing a number of things in terms of building the institutional capacity, not just the police, but supporting functions of the forensic lab, the legislation, etc. But long term, the most important step is the third step, which is really changing the [ societal] norms, changing the culture, and ultimately, building group immunity to violence. This is really where the wider community comes into play.”
FRICTION
The minister went on to say that the nature of the crimes committed in St Elizabeth and Manchester showed a similar trend in that they were mostly attributed to acts of domestic violence or friction among community members. He said that so far, since the establishment of a dispute resolution and violence prevention association, Manchester has seen a reduction in crime and St Elizabeth could benefit from such a venture.
“St Elizabeth and Manchester produce a lot of domestic violence and murders attributed to domestic violence. In Manchester, we started a dispute resolution and violence prevention association in 2012 where we trained more than 100 first responders across the parish who could identify domestic disputes with the potential to escalate into violence and facilitate an intervention before.
“And we saw a reduction in murders last year, and so far in Manchester, we haven’t had our first murder,” the minister said.
He went on to add that he had observed that the broader society was now starting to accept that the crime problem was greater than just being a law-enforcement issue.
“I think the awareness of the broader society now is that this is not a law-enforcement problem alone, but this is a societal problem. I think that is the beginning of the change we need to see,” he said.
He further stated that although it was a societal responsibility, true progress could not be made in crime fighting endeavours without a more professional police force.
“A pivotal and important element of [a] long-term reduction in crime and violence is going to be [a] professional police force that is trusted by the average citizen and community.
“The only way we’re going to get this is to have similar cultural change that we’re talking about in the wider society in the police force, and I think it is under way already. I think the police force is becoming more professional – certainly, over the past five or six years since the establishment of the Anti-corruption Branch, which has been weeding out hundreds of bad eggs out of the police force whether through criminal charges or administrative measures.
“There is some way to go and we have supported INDECOM. We have been unequivocal there will be no protection of policemen who have abused citizens who don’t maintain the behaviour consistent with the use-of-force policy of the police, and we believe with strong leadership at the divisional level and High Command, this culture change will permeate the entire force over time,” Bunting relayed.
Bunting said that where the force was unsuccessful in influencing some members towards a change in culture, the force would then have to separate itself from those individuals.