CRIME TOPS the agenda for the New Year. With some 1,650 persons murdered last year, making Jamaica the murder capital of the world, poll after poll has indicated that crime is the number one concern of Jamaicans.
The New Year's messages from the Governor-General, the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition, while filled with hope and politically correct, have all acknowledged the huge, negative impact that crime is having on the nation's prospects. In what is his final New Year's message, after being at the helm of Government for close to 14 years and in public life for 40, Prime Minister P.J. Patterson frankly admitted that crime is the country's most pressing problem.
History will, in due course, assess Mr. Patterson's successes and failures. What is certain is that the country's crime situation, measured in murders, has deteriorated on his watch as it has under every Prime Minister since Independence. All of those who seek to replace him, including the Minister of National Security in his own Cabinet, are promising to decisively tackle the crime monster as a top priority.
On his part, the Leader of the Opposition, Bruce Golding, has used the occasion of his first New Year's message to name the other members, except one, of the six-member Task Force on crime which he announced at the Jamaica Labour Party annual conference last December, with former Police Commissioner Col. Trevor MacMillan named as head then. There have been many such committees including the one headed, in 1993, by Justice Lensley Wolfe, who is now Chief Justice, early in Mr. Patterson's long stint as Prime Minister.
Mr. Patterson, in an unusually long New Year's message, reviewed several crime-fighting initiatives which have been taken. Among them Operation Kingfish which has netted several major suspected criminal operatives but in so doing has left vacuums in criminal leadership now being filled, as the Security Minister admits, by an upsurge of street level violence.
There have been many calls for overseas assistance for dealing with crime. The recruitment and deployment from the U.K. of Mark Shields at the very senior level of DCP has been a widely popular response to that call but is yet to deliver the kind of decisive results anticipated.
Towards the close of his first year as top officer, Commissioner Lucius Thomas, as we reported on Sunday, has the confidence of the men and women under his command, of both Government and Opposition, and of the public. Commissioner Thomas has been an on-the-ground, hands-on, people-person leader. The strong support with which he enters the New Year and the second year of his command is enormous capital to be used wisely in the fight against crime.
The appropriate deployment of key crime fighters in an expanded police force, the provision of adequate resources, anti-crime social interventions, and a greater role for the army, both in tackling crime and keeping the peace, have to be high on the crime-fighting agenda this year.
THE OPINIONS ON THIS PAGE, EXCEPT FOR THE ABOVE, DO NOT NECESSARILY REFLECT THE VIEWS OF THE GLEANER.
