- Norman Grindley/Staff Photographer
Custos R. James de Roux, MP Mike Henry and other members of the Clarendon leadership discuss the real issues at the forum.
Last week the Gleaner's Editors travelled out to May Pen, Clarendon, to meet with community leaders in a special forum. Here are excerpts from the discussion
ON CRIME AND SECURITY
Inspector Calvin Webb
MY CONCERN as it relates to security issues is the condition of the road network ... those that go throughout the communities. Because of the condition of those roads even if the police want to save anyone they would have to go on foot because they couldn't do it with their car and if they do it by foot many of them would end up at the hospital because they would break a leg or twist an ankle.
So the inner roads in the intersection all of them need to be fixed. Another problem that I see is lands that are not bushed and deforested and robbers and criminals can always hide in them. There are also abandoned buildings, some of them are burnt-out buildings, no roof, no door, but the walls are still there and those are incubators for robbers.
In some areas since 1986 we got a certain number of street lights and after that we have been promised more street lights and these have not been installed.
The town has been growing and developing, more houses are going up, more businesses are going up. We need at least 2,000 more street lights in the town centre to really light up the area.
Just the other day, there was a lady coming from church and she was raped in the Denbigh area and those sort of things should be things of the past. So, response now to criminality is not as speedy because of the condition of the roads and because the place is dark.
Police are human beings too and I will not tell them to go out there and put their lives on the line at a disadvantage. They want proper vehicles, they want proper roads, they want to be able to see around them when they are going out to apprehend criminals.
Superintendent Warren Clarke:
We have seen a reduction in most categories of crime. However, murder and shooting are of a concern. As of Sunday we have recorded eight more murders than we did this time last year. Four of these murders were due to mob or community killings. These people were accused of committing crimes or attempting to commit crimes and they were lynched by the community. The other category was the largest category, that is the gang-related or reprisal killings.
There is a strong drug culture in the south as you may be aware and especially when narcotics is short, flour or baking soda is often traded as cocaine. When this happens it makes the traders very mad when they are swindled and they usually return with lethal force.
Early in January we dug up three bodies and our investigations are telling us that this was one such situation. We have been tracking three gangs in particular in Clarendon, they come in from the more urban centres of our country and with the convenience of the bypass they come and go efficiently.
They lodge themselves in some remote areas and use those areas as a launch to commit criminal activities.
The assurance though is that of the 16 murders so far this year, when we looked at the motives we saw that the lifestyles of some of the victims in some way attributed to the killings. In other words normal or average decent upright persons we find were not victims. The victims were more or less gang members, persons of reputed circumstances.
There are of course two of the 16 that were due to robbery and jealousy.
But one of our difficulties though is to deal with the convenience of the highway and the increased mobility of the criminals, we find that our strategy has to be matched with the equal mobility and that is an area we are specially challenged in.
The police facilities too are poor and we are encouraged that we have recently acquired a building in May Pen and that is considered now for refurbishing and we are hopeful that very soon we are hoping that by June especially the police in May Pen will be better housed and in a better position to deliver quality service to May Pen.
On the vending in May Pen we have started a field exercise since last May.
In the past two weeks we have intensified this activity and we have structures in place aimed at removing vendors from the streets, from the sidewalks and really looking carefully at illegal or robot taxis. We have really redoubled our efforts in the last two weeks and we intend to proceed with this momentum until the streets especially in the town of May Pen are completely cleared.
MP Mike Henry:
One of the concerns that I have as one of the political representatives in this parish is the drug trade. One of the concerns I always had and I have raised it with the police is whenever these persons have alleged to be trading using flour or baking soda the persons who are punished are the ones who find the flour or the baking soda. The purchasers are always coming to the police to report that they were buying goats or buying cows and guys held them up and took away their money, which is not true. And I would love the police to look at the matter and to see how best they can deal with the total problem.
I would encourage the police to have a second look at a programme where you get into the schools and speak to the children and I believe that you can establish a relationship from that tender age because I believe once you establish that relationship with children and adults I think we will be on the way to effective crime detection and prevention.
R.J. Henry (former head of the Clarendon Chamber of Commerce):
The traffic lights and road signs, we certainly have some concerns with the traffic lights in the centre of the town and that is anywhere between the police station and the clock tower. We also need a traffic light at Fern Lane main street, we need a traffic light at Guineap Tree, we need a traffic light at Glenmuir and Anderson Drive. All these are important traffic considerations. Even though we are bashing the taxis and the operators we need to erect a modern high rise car park for May Pen and this must be a paid facility and opportunity for the parish council to earn some revenue to increase their collection that they get to run this parish when we become an autonomous body.
ON PARENTING AND EDUCATION
Beryl Clarke (Glenmuir High School):
Children are children everywhere. We get the same type of children that go to all the high schools in Jamaica and as the saying is children live what they learn and learn what they live and I think that we need to be working on improving parental responsibility for children not just in Clarendon but since I teach in Clarendon and I have done so for years. I have discovered that I know many teachers have also discovered that living in a society in which many of the parents are young, sometimes the necessary support which should be there is not there.
I am not talking about financial support, I am talking about the emotional support, the necessary counselling, the example that should be there for the children is sometimes lacking and what it means for the school is that you have to spend perhaps more time than you would normally do in the class to teach children the correct behaviour and attitude.
Nowadays when a child has a disagreement with another child the almost automatic response is to say something that is harsh and cutting if not to do something physical and there is no PALS in the high schools and you find that teachers have to try to teach the children that it is not necessary to react physically to something that somebody says or does and that you can talk about it and get somebody else involved. At our school we have a whole set of persons to whom students can talk to get advice and to get assistance in settling their disputes.
Stanhope Porteous (Principal, Clarendon College):
The absence of so many parents for whatever reasons is of great concern. There are too many cases where the children are left in the care of an older sibling or an older relative who really can't manage all the emotional strains and they can't deal with it. So many of them have absented themselves from school.
We need to know how many people really live here:
Mike Henry (M.P.) :
Eighty per cent of our children are born to single parents. I have been advocating now for 15 years about addressing the zoning of schools because if you look at children travelling great distances to get to school and if don't begin to zone schools they are going to travel further. If you allow children to gravitate to schools merely on the record that the school is achieving then you will not be able to deal with some of the problems. So for instance take May Pen Primary it was at one stage 7,000 children going to one school in a cramped area. It is now down because we have made efforts to develop the other schools surrounding it, it is now down to just about 5,000. That is the largest in the Caribbean.
Let me relate these statistics which the Government gave me last week that the recent census shows that there are 58,000 people in May Pen.
That relates to the fact that if you are going to build a highway then there will be motor cars in large quantities. There is going to be more mobility. More mobility means that there is no new village that doesn't have a taxi. Let us relate that to the fact that your criminals are going to move more quickly. That relates to the lack of education, if you are building a toll road then the toll is now going to be $50 from whenever it begins at Old Harbour and ends at the other end. Have you educated the people that when they get in a taxi they are to add $50 to their fare? That relates to all the others things which must flow from whether you understand your planning from the right statistics and the vision that flows.
I have been talking about the population of Jamaica being incorrectly accounted for in our census and nobody is following it up. We still say we are 2.6 million which it was when I was a little grasshopper. In fact I am doing something for the Urban Transport Corporation, a little town like May Pen, how can you have a town with a growing population and you don't have a planned system to get the people around. You haven't upgraded it.
May Pen can now decide to ask to be a municipality if the new law comes in.
Because if you are 50,000 the new law laid in Parliament says that if you are 50,000 persons and seven per cent sign up to be a municipality then you can have your own municipality and own mayor. I don't know if this is some form of chaos on top of chaos. But I just raise the fact that if you don't have the right statistics and the vision to plan then how can the police really deal with crime when a man can pick up a cellular mobile on the corner and speak to someone in Russia as easily as he can speak to someone in Kingston? How can you deal with it unless you are also equipped with the right statistics?
CHURCH AND VALUES, ATTITUDES
Rev. Winston Thomas:
From the churches perspective in Clarendon May Pen in particular we have a number of churches but I am not too sure if this probably reflects on the change in attitudes and values in the Christian perspective. We all feel that the church should be the influence in voicing community and developmental concerns. But my problem is that the churches today rather than going to sea to catch fish some of the church leaders stay on the shore for the fisherman to come in and then steal the fish from them. They are playing grab games. We need to be going out there to evangelise the unconverted and bring to them the gospel. Therefore our efforts should be at focusing on those who are unconverted to come to understand the gospel and to live a lifestyle that relates to the gospel.
Renford Samuels (director Clarendon Assoc. of Street People)
What I am worried really is about the lack of adequate social workers, ...paid social workers in the community. For instance, in the school system there should be some form of social worker, in the hospital, there should be some amount of follow up and study as it relates to where your students go. If a student drops out of school. They don't bother to find out why the child is not in school and what's the situation with the child. What we find is that you see a young lady and you say how comes you are pregnant or how comes you have a baby and they say they are 18.
What that is creating is a biological and economic problem right to the family and spread to the community. You have a problem therefore with teenage pregnancy, you have a problem with something else like sexual transmitted diseases and the spread of AIDS in the parish. When I was working with The National Council on Drug Abuse there were six cases that we could count and we knew where the six cases came from. Right now we have at least 250 cases in the parish, that's our problem and we need to deal with the human sexuality especially in the teens programme.
Spt. Warren Clarke:
It is true that there is a high percentage of rape and carnal abuse being committed not just in Clarendon. It seems to me that there is a high level of tolerance for these crimes. Those persons who are caught seem to be the minority and by and large the jurors never register their contempt for this and I believe that it is in court that we have not been able to make a firmer statement.
Renford Samuels:
Indiscipline in this country has become the order of the day. If a man is in the road and wants to speak with his friend, then he is going to stop. A man just goes out there and shoot. People use foul language in front of anyone and they don't care particularly students in this parish. The whole discipline has become cumbersome. The law must be upheld at any cost, and those of us who are here that have the responsibility for a large number of people, the people must be told to respect the law, the law must be upheld.
When I walked the streets of May Pen last Friday, it was like Christmas or Boxing Day it was clean as a whistle. We need to have that maintained.
ON GARBAGE COLLECTION:
Inspector Alvin Webb: I would like to address the problem of garbage collection. I think this is one of the towns that need a lot as it relates to the collection of garbage. Quite often, sometimes a week would pass and you don't see the garbage truck. My information is that on many occasions after collecting garbage, the truck has to go to Kingston to dispose of the garbage. If this is going to be done then naturally the parts will go quickly so I am wondering if there couldn't be some disposal in the parish close by to save that long journey.
Mike Henry M.P.:
I think it is good to clean up the town in terms of garbage but then you look at the town at 11 o'clock when it is cleaned and it is really clean and the moment you have 8 o'clock and you look at it, you can't believe its the same town that was cleaned.So I believe that we really need to do something about how we are disposing of our garbage. You look at the cars, the cars are driving and they throw the garbage on the road.
Mr. Charles Learmond M.P., Former Mayor
The matter of garbage collection is being looked at and the Ministry of Local Government is trying to centralise landfills. At the moment Clarendon's garbage goes to Riverton City which is a good distance. The matter of garbage collection is an expensive exercise and I think what the government is planning to do really is to put a cost to it.
The tax that all persons will have to pay to the parish council will go towards the whole matter of the collection and disposal of garbage. Until that comes on stream we will have to try our best to see how we can work with what presently exists. I know it has always been a problem, when I was mayor of May Pen, we got experts to come down and look at various sites. I remember JAMALCO asked us to look at a landfill site in the Woodside area and when we carried out the necessary tests we realised that we couldn't have it there because the water level was pretty high and we had to abandon that idea. We went down to McGilcrest Pen, thought we would have gotten there to establish a landfill again the community was against it because nobody wants to live next to a dump/landfill. But we have to work as hard as possible to really address the matter of collection and disposal of garbage but I must tell you that it is going to be at a cost.
Continues tomorrow in Monday's Gleaner
