Crime not limited to unstructured communities – police
LAST YEAR, Clarendon was ranked the fourthhighest of the 19 police divisions with crime. With 132 murders for the period, a greater percentage of the felonies were recorded in structured communities and in the capital, rather than in the unstructured communities (inner cities) as was the case in previous years.
Speaking at a special Gleaner Editors’ Forum on Thursday at the Versalles Hotel in the parish, the commanding officer for Clarendon, Senior Superintendent Vendolyn Cameron-Powell, explained that in 2016, approximately 57 per cent of major crimes were committed in and around May Pen and not necessarily from the unstructured communities. “Communities like Farm, Bucknor and Havana Heights did not give us a whole lot, but those are actually classified as our hot zones or hotspots and we police them a particular way. So we found out that in 2016, a lot of crimes did not come from those unstructured places,” she stated.
Instead, she noted that most crimes occurred in what she termed “very structured communities”.
MAPPED TROUBLE AREAS
“Most of our crimes are in May Pen, on the roadways and areas such as Palmers Cross, Sandy Bay, Hayes and the southern part of the parish, which also gave us quite a bit. As a result, we have strategically plotted and mapped the parish and looked at where the bodies fell, and we are treating those particular zones a different way,” said Cameron-Powell.
However, the commanding officer was keen to note that it is very difficult for the police to operate in the unstructured communities.
“It’s hard to patrol and hard for us to even execute a warrant, because they don’t have an address, they just have a space and maybe that is why we have so many warrants on hand (969 in total for various offences) not executed, because people just live in a space. There’s no address, it’s just a space, so these issues really needs to be fixed.”