Nelson’s answer to crime

Poster from Freestylee

If I had the job of solving Jamaica’s crime problem, I would not be spending money that Jamaica does not have, to buy cars for the (largely corrupt) police.

But that is what the new National Security minister, Dwight Nelson is doing.

He’s been in the job for three weeks and has listed his priorities for dealing with a crazy crime rate, see JA’s murder figures in this blog post. And here’s another post I wrote about the jump in robberies.

To be fair to the man, he also says he is going to talk to ordinary Jamaicans and ask them what to do – a good starting point, but rather than go into the communities where they live and seeing the reality first hand, he’s meeting people in a new “civic centre” in MoBay.

More police are required yes, (a 1 to 300 ratio is not great), but training them and rooting out corruption and getting a justice system that works is key – rather than investing in some state of the art forensics lab – most people know who did the shooting Nelson – it’s just they don’t want to tell the police.

Jamaica’s murder rate rises inexhorably

The figures show a 22 per cent rise on this time last year. The numbers show a tally at 1105 up to the end of August compared to 968 recorded last year. Not only murders, but a ten per cent increase in rape. Just when you think it cannot get any worse than this and it goes up and up. Here’s the detail

Pictures posted from the funeral of Spragga Benz’s son here show the human face of grief and sorrow behind these figures. From Yardflex.

Spragga at his son's funeral with his 6 year old daughter