Lock ’em up!

Looking at the country’s current murder rate, National Security Minister Dr Horace Chang has admitted that in hindsight, he would have cautioned Prime Minister Andrew Holness against promising Jamaicans that they would be able to sleep with their windows and doors open under a Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) administration.

Holness had made the pledge as opposition leader while on the campaign trail in the run-up to the February 2016 general election.

At the end of that year, 1,354 murders were recorded. An additional 7,864 people were listed as victims of murder between January 2017 and July 16, 2022, with the country seeing an average of more than 1,400 murders annually since the controversial statement.

And for the second consecutive year, Insight Crime ranked Jamaica as having the highest murder rate in Latin America and the Caribbean in 2021, with 1,463 homicides translating to 49.4 per 100,000 people – an increase from the 46.5 per 100,000 for 2020, when 1,301 homicides were recorded.

Chang, who has held the national security portfolio since 2018, told The Sunday Gleaner last week that he would not now encourage Jamaicans to go to bed without locking up their homes, adding that the crime problem keeps him up at nights.

“If I knew what I know now and was advising the prime minister in 2016, I would tell him to hold that statement, but rather indicate that we will make public safety and good order a priority and invest in our security forces,” said Chang, who is also deputy prime minister.

“One of the things is that a lot of the murders in Jamaica are still geographically based and this is why we have been able to survive in the society and grow the economy and still do things in a positive way because [many] of the murders come between gangs and gangs.”

According to Chang, the Holness administration is strongly focused on the fight against crime.

“I think we have gotten the attention on it and sometimes it puts a lot of pressure on myself as minister, a representative of the Government, but we are not objecting to it because we have to get on top of this criminal activity and this is why we are so focused on the fact that we need hard policing to reduce the numbers. It will require legislative changes and then we pursue in the medium term the other social investments required to really get at this propensity for violence in our society,” Chang outlined.

SLEEPLESS NIGHTS

Chang is of the view, however, that the JLP has not failed in its mandate to secure Jamaica.

“We have not brought down our [murder] numbers, but we have not failed at security. I think we have made it a priority and we have made progress, actually having a more professional police force and interrupting more gangs than any other time in our history. We have taken out more scammers, drug dealers, gangsters than any other time in our history – big, big players,” said Chang.

“We understand it is still going to take time to get crime down, and I think we will get further movement, but we have to completely build out the police force.”

Asked if the murder rate keeps him up at nights, the national security minister responded in the affirmative.

“Yes, it does. It still does. I used to like reading at nights, but I would get to rest off by midnight, and if I do that, I get up fresh for the day, but pretty much every night, it keeps me up,” he said.

“I’ve tried to break that cycle because I get sleepy sometimes in the days, but I stay up to get my last report, which comes in between 12 and 12:30 [a.m.] to see what the numbers were like that were currently reported and then I seek to analyse it, which keeps me up sometimes.”

The national security minister also had a bold projection of his own about the country’s high murder rate.

“I think we can hold it fairly level this year within that five per cent band [when compared to last year] with the number of things we are planning to get in. And I think by 2023, we’ll see significant or what you call sustainable decline, once we complete our investment in this. We are expanding the police force and putting in the tools and equipment, and I think the legislation we are bringing forward will help,” said Chang.

He added: “Our police commissioner would tell me all the time, ‘You know Nicaragua picked up 19,000 people to cut their murder rate? We not going there?’ We are not even thinking of going there, but if I could isolate 500 Jamaicans who I know are violence producers, I could reduce the rate rapidly.”

He added: “We have a tough, complex problem, but this Government is committed to investments in all aspects of the problem to bring it under control, and we are near there but we are not there yet.”

tyrone.reid@gleanerjm.com

MURDERS RECORDED IN JAMAICA

• In 2017 – 1,647 with a per capita murder rate of 60 per 100,000

• In 2018 – 1,287 with a per capita murder rate of 47 per 100,000

• In 2019 – 1,339 with a per capita murder rate of 49 per 100,000

• In 2020 – 1323 with a per capita murder rate of 48 per 100,000

• In 2021 – 1,463 with a per capita murder rate of 53 per 100,000

• And, up to July 25 this year – 850 murders have been recorded