Garfield Green, President of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce, says he has confidence in the police’s plans to see a decrease in crime in the parish.

Speaking during the monthly Manchester Chamber of Commerce’s (MCOC) meeting in March, Mr. Green announced phase two of a partnership called Crime Tip between the police and the Manchester community to combat crime.  

This system is to be modelled after Crime Stop and will serve the parish of Manchester. The Manchester Crime Tip will be officially launched on April 5.

“There’s an initiative between the community in general and the police and that is to create more community involvement in what the police is doing. So there is this official initiative dubbed the Manchester Police and Community Partnership: The Platform for a Safer Community and through that we’re looking at capacity building in the police force. We’re looking at increasing community involvement in crime fighting and equipping the police with some of the necessary resources that they might need,” Green explained.

Head of the Manchester Police, Superintendent Wayne Cameron, says kidnapping is a concern in the parish. Speaking during the monthly Manchester Chamber of Commerce’s (MCOC) meeting in March, Superintendent Cameron said a case of kidnapping occurred in February.

“A man met another man online and he was invited to a particular community and when he got there, he was met by a female who took him to a particular house where there were nine men waiting, including the one who invited him online. The long and the short of it is that he was held for ransom and the money was paid over. We have done significant work on this particular case because so far, we have arrested six of the ten individuals involved, including a female,” he said.

According to Superintendent Cameron, Manchester recorded one incident of kidnapping in 2015 and another last year. He says the Manchester police was “fortunate enough to make significant breakthroughs” in all the cases.

Cameron announced that the Manchester police intend to keep murders in the parish below 36 for all of 2018.

“We ended the year 2017 with 44 murders; a little too high in respect to the projections that we made at the start of the year. We really intended not to go over 38. (A) number of things happened during the course of that year, ended up with 44 murders, but I will quickly add that we were very good at getting to the root of those situations and so we were able to clear overall 73 % of the murders that we had in that particular year one of the highest clear-up rate in Jamaica as it is right now,” Cameron said.

Since the start of the year, Manchester has recorded three murders; a double murder in Porus and the discovery of a body in the Spur Tree vicinity. Superintendent Cameron says no murder was recorded for the month of February, a feat he says that not many parishes can boast.

According to statistics from 2017, the lion’s share of murders were committed in the Mandeville Police Area, followed by Christiana and Alligator Pond. Superintendent Cameron says data of this nature is used to analyse crime and ascertain how best to deploy resources. He also outlined a number of steps the police will be taking to tackle crime in the parish.

“To realize our murder reduction, we have to improve on our border protection. Seven, or 16% of the murders were committed by migrant criminals and by that I mean men coming into the parish of Manchester, committing murders and then leaving. And if that is the case, then we know that we have to improve on our borders and this would of course sometimes inconvenient [sic] the movements of you because it means that we [sic] gonna have to increase our presence on the roadways.

“So there’ll be increased vehicle checkpoints, increased stop and search, increased spot checks and so on. These are some of the things that we have projected to do this year to ensure that we cut off people coming into this parish or passing through the parish transporting drugs, guns and other forms of contraband,” he said.