Fixing Clarendon is every resident’s problem
IF SENIOR Superintendent Vendolyn Cameron-Powell has her way, Clarendon will soon be the ideal place to live and raise a family.
At a special Gleaner Editors’ Forum on Thursday at the Versalles Hotel in the parish, Powell stressed her determination to bring the crime figures down.
Last year, the parish had the third-highest murder rate in the country and Powell is now asking ‘her Clarendon citizens’ to stop accepting crime and violence as the norm.
“What I want my citizens of Clarendon to do for 2017, is to stop accepting crime and violence as the norm. Any day our citizens stop accepting crime and violence as the norm in society, we will have somewhere going,” she told the panel of reporters and other stakeholders from the parish.
She also urged citizens to speak out, call and write about it.
Cameron-Powell chided some on the callous and uncaring attitude being exhibited towards crime in the parish. “I am seeing where with some of my citizens in Clarendon, the body drop last night, and you want to party on that spot next morning. And it is accepting of crime, like you don’t care. We want to change that, the whole mindset, the whole culture and that is the way the police are going at,” are the ominous words coming from the commander of the Clarendon division. Youth for Change and Peace In May Pen founder, Dei Rasi Freckleton wants to see a more collaborative effort employed in bringing down the crime figures in the parish. For him, too many entities are planning social interventions and doing them in isolation. “I am doing something and I keep it to myself, and you are doing something and I don’t support you, and the criminals are ganging up on the system,” he said. There will be no real change or result, he said, until the various entities in the parish pool their resources and strength. Anything else, he said, will be a losing battle.
MAYOR OF May Pen Winston Maragh believes that the many unstructured communities in Clarendon make it difficult for the police to track down criminals, adding that stakeholders will need to come together and decide to clean up the parish. He shared these thoughts at a special Gleaner Editors’ Forum on Thursday at the Versalles Hotel in the parish. Describing the level of disorder that exists in unstructured communities, commanding officer for Clarendon, Senior Superintendent Vendolyn Cameron-Powell, fingered Rocky Point as one such community that needs serious and ongoing intervention. “Rocky needs a lot of intervention from [government] agencies, because there are a lot of children in there who have never been to school and are not even registered, so it needs some other agencies to go in and fix the community. Some of the parents themselves have never been to school, nor are they registered – they are what you’d call unregistered citizens inside our country. So because they are not registered and have no birth certificate, they just grow up on the seacoast and their children are just the same. So there are several other factors apart from policing [that is] needed to fix the situation in Rocky,” she reasoned.
ILLEGAL DRUG ACTIVITIES
Cameron-Powell added that Rocky Point wasn’t on the police’s radar for shootings and murders, but for illegal drug activities that have taken deep root in the seaside community. As a recommendation, she said the intervention programmes that began in the community last year needed to be strengthened and maintained.
As a first step to structuring the unstructured communities in the parish, Mayor Maragh shared that a team from the Planning Institute of Jamaica has started a community renewal programme beginning in Rocky Point, with several more communities to come on stream.
“I’m planning to have a meeting with the police, custos and other stakeholders within another two weeks, and we will be bringing in funding agencies to do some interventions in these communities. This community renewal programme will be implemented in phases over a period of three to four years and is intended to reduce crime and make life easier for everybody,” he concluded.