Crime initiatives that the Government should have announced but did not

Frankly the press conference that was held last week to announce crime fighting initiatives was very disappointing to say the least.

These would have been the things I would have announced were I asked to come up with a plan.

Operational Initiatives 

1. Zero tolerance approach to loader men and people extorting us to park downtown.
2. Pushing through DNA legislation and regulations
3. Extraction of DNA sample and bio-metric data from all deportees
4. Dossiers of all criminal deportees to be provided to law enforcement officials in Jamaica before the arrival of each deportee in Jamaica. Should contain bio-metric data as well as criminal offence for which the person was arrested and or convicted.
5.  Issuance of TRN number and national photo ID of all deportees on arrival in Jamaica
6. Phone company be mandated to provide SIM and Tel # of all deportees who purchases a SIM card, to law enforcement officials (you need valid ID to purchase a sim card)
7. Partnership with USA to get bio-metric data of all citizens of Jamaica landing on USA soil. Recall we are fingerprinted and pictures are taken at every USA port of Entry.
8. Extract Photo and fingerprint from all persons who have been arrested
9. Extract bio-metric data as well as DNA from all persons who have been arrested and charged for any criminal offence

 

Strategic & Tactical Initiatives

1. Provide every police station with at least one computer to record all crime reports.
2. Each station will be linked to central server for each parish. The parishes central server will be tied to the its county server.
3. All 3 county servers will now be tied to central server located at a high security location which will be the HQ of a special police unit.
4. Employee 14 university graduates   and assign to one police across Jamaica to complete data analysis of crime pattern across each parish.
5. Data analysis from these analysts will be useful to refine strategies for specific parishes. They would be tasked to look for patterns in crime, to detect trends and possible factors that appear before or after certain crimes. Interesting data could be, when police operations increase in Clarendon, we see lower crime in Clarendon but an increase in say St Catherine. That kind of analysis will allow you to therefore target Clarendon  and  St Catherine  simultaneously  as well as the routes across the borders between the two.
6. Make MOCA a full and independent law enforcement unit. which will house the criminal database for DNA, crime, bio-metric etc.
7. GOJ will employee a cadre of data Analytics specialist( at the database center) to sort and analyse this data at a national level. This data will be used by national security adviser(NSA) to help formulate national crime fighting strategies.
8. Recruit and form at least two Special Weapon and Tactical Team (SWAT) one for Kingston, St Andrew and St Catherine  and one for St James, Westmoreland and Hanover. These teams will be used only for special situation eg where a gang would need to be surgical taken down, a task which should not be assigned to local police officers.

 

The above are not very difficult to put put in place and are steps I believe would go a far way in pushing crime, specially murders down to manageable levels

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