ByLeonardo Blair, Staff Reporter SENIOR POLICE officials have blamed Government ministries and state agencies for the failures in the crime-fighting initiative while insisting that they played their part.
The senior officials have outlined a story of operating under stress and strain and of getting little or no support from the ministries slated to assist through the major social intervention component of the plan.
Rather than being allowed to concentrate on the crime-fighting aspects of the plan, police say they were forced to organise social intervention efforts of their own after it was clear that the other agencies were no-shows.
"It (crime plan) was supposed to be a multi-agency approach and the police were a part of it!" lamented Acting Assistant Commissioner Clarence Taylor in an interview with The Sunday Gleaner last week.
"We didn't see the presence of the other social agencies that were expected....the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Social Security, Ministry of Housing. They were a part of the strategy," said Senior Superintendent Kipling Simpson of the Community Relations division of the JCF.
"If we had waited on them we would have never gotten anything done and it is those same people who are giving us the flak," added the impassioned superintendent.
The officers explained that when they entered several Corporate Area communities such as Hannah Town, Denham Town and Kintyre they were involved in a lot of unexpected activities such as removing garbage, renovating basic schools, counselling, assisting at homework centres, organising health fairs, sponsoring sporting activities and whole host of other programmes which were to be sustained through the "unsupportive" Ministries.
"We cleaned up the areas, we cleaned the streets, having done that, we would have hoped that the other social agencies would come in now and continued where we initiated the process like continuing to collect the garbage and so on and do road repairs and maintenance and those things, but they didn't," explained Superintendent Simpson.
The social intervention programmes were to have been part of the nation's anti-crime initiative announced by Prime Minister P. J. Patterson in last December.
However, Commissioner of Police Francis Forbes admitted last Monday that aspects of the initiative had failed as they had failed to reduce homicide by 20 per cent as they had targeted under the plan.
Unloading themselves of any of the blame for the social aspect as well, Superintendent Simpson said, "It is not our job to be doing these things. Our core function is security because while all the other social agencies are falling down we are being forced to take up the slack.
"We have been out there on a limb on our own trying to get all these things done," he added.
In support of the observations of his colleague Acting Assistant Commissioner Taylor said: "Everything was left just to the police and the military and these are just some of the problems that the police had been experiencing.
"We are not blaming any one person but just like how the police got a part of the work to be done, the other agencies got theirs and should have carried out their part of the bargain."
Just recently, explains Superintendent Simpson, the police requested some trained assistance for one of the programmes they were implementing in one of the communities and the request is yet to be acknowledged.
"We had some funds and we asked a particular agency to help us with a problem that we met upon in a community...we asked one of the social agencies to help us because they had the expertise and we haven't seen anything being done with any urgency. We have had to shift this course," he said.
The officers pointed out that they wanted to make it clear that they did When asked if he felt the plan had been too ambitious, Assistant Commissioner Taylor said: "I wouldn't say the plan was too ambitious because nothing is impossible but as is customary the police are always left to do the work of other agencies and that is nothing unusual to Jamaica."
A meeting has been set for tomorrow between Minister of National Security Dr. Peter Phillips, members of the Police High Command and the Chief of Staff of the Jamaica Defence Force to review the Anti-Crime Initiative implemented by the Government in December 2002.
Prime Minister Patterson issued the directive for the meeting of the National Security Council on Friday and said the plan must be the subject of adjustments and fine tuning.
He also instructed that a registry be compiled of all projects being undertaken by agencies involved in the governments social intervention programme outlining specific projects, targeted communities the number of persons to be assisted and a time frame for intervention.
