Pastors from Grants Pen in St. Andrew leave for Trinidad today as ambassadors for the 'Grants Pen Model' of crime reduction.

The Greater Grants Pen Ministers' Fraternal will share their experience of cooperation between police and community groups. They will meet with their fellow pastors, policemen, prison officers and community leaders in Trinidad which, like Jamaica, has experienced increasing incidents of violent crime.

Ministers' Fraternal Chairman, Rev. Ian Muirhead, pastor of the Upper Room Community Church, who is leading the trip, said that it was another "benchmark" in cooperation.

"The Grants Pen model has worked and is really a model in which partnerships have been a very important element in sharing resources and identifying problems which we have worked together to solve. We believe that this trip will be of value," Rev. Muirhead told The Gleaner.

Grants Pen, which was once stigmatised by violence, went over a year without recording a murder until last December, following inter-vention by various groups, including United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and Ministers' Fraternal and the construction of a model police station.

The Ministers' Fraternal has also organised regular prayer meetings and is also cooperating with the community policing initiative organised by the USAID-funded Police Executive Research Forum.

The trip will be a role reversal of the pastors trip to Boston in 2004 when they visited the Dorchester region to learn about the Boston 10-point Coalition, where the involvement of churches was credited with helping to reduce crime.