NATIONAL SECURITY Minister Peter Phillips told a PSOJ luncheon last week that there has been a slight decline in recorded criminal activity as against the terrible last quarter of 2001. This is in line with his declaration that the war on crime is not a sprint but a marathon.
What could be a useful fillip in the long run came last week also, in the pooling of resources between the police and certain security guard companies.
As stipulated in the memorandum of understanding signed on Thursday between the Jamaica Constabulary Force and the Jamaica Society for Industrial Security, some private security companies are to become part of the crime-fighting network. Individual guards deployed in various locations will report crimes they see or hear to their own headquarters which in turn will inform the police.
The guards will not have police powers, an aspect which had evoked objection by the Opposition JLP, which had also questioned the integrity of some security companies.
If the procedures and monthly assessments outlined are to work effectively, security guards, as a category of uniformed and identifiable workers, will have to be alert to the potential risk that this new role assigned to some of them poses to all of them.
If nothing else, this new initiative is a welcome change from the knee-jerk naming of special squads paraded like military units.
Sprint or marathon, the current indicators remain grim reminders of the status quo. Last week, Senior Superintendent Reneto Adams, commenting on the state of business extortion, said there had been a few arrests "but overall success has been eluding us". This is echoed by merchants themselves who sense that "nothing has changed".
The most frightening score of all is that in the first 59 days of the year police report 154 persons have died violently. Murders mark too many milestones of the marathon.
