Col. Trevor MacMillan, the retired army officer and former police chief who is now an Opposition senator, has a fair bit of currency with the Jamaican people.

Col. MacMillan was hailed for his efforts to re-professionalise the police force and his willingness, during his three-year stint in the mid-1990s, to stare down the dishonest cops and those who felt that law enforcement was about paramilitary behaviour. But, more importantly, he is deemed to be a man of integrity, with a fair mind, uncorrupted by narrow, partisan interests.

Col. MacMillan will therefore not be surprised if some people were taken aback by his reported comments during his maiden speech in the Senate last Friday, and if there are calls for some explanation of what he meant. Of course, Col. MacMillan may not have been as precise with his language as he intended.

Indeed, all well-thinking Jamaicans would be deeply concerned about the level of crime in the country, particularly the high rate of murders, especially in the face of the more than 1,600 homicides in the country last year.

With a murder rate of over 60 per 100,000 population and the knowledge that perhaps most crimes in Jamaica are under-reported, it is understandable that the fear of crime is high, and the constabulary has been under pressure to reverse the trend.

Like most Jamaicans, we welcome the reported 25 per cent decrease in murders and other crimes during the first eight months of this year, even as we understand that we have yet a far way to go and that it would be premature to rejoice. The cold, hard fact is that despite the drop in the number of homicides so far this year, most of the guns which are used in the killings are still in the hands of the criminals. At the opportune moment they can be brought out again.

Nonetheless, there is no denying the efforts of the constabulary to contain the level of crime and the fact that, tenuous as it may be, they have had a measure of success.

In that regard, we are more than a little bit surprised by what might, in some quarters, be determined as an effort by Col. MacMillan to diminish and belittle the efforts of the constabulary with his advice that we should not take the police statistics "on the face of it".

To be fair, he did admit that it might be possible to accept the decline in murder figures "because there are bodies" to be counted. But then he reminded us to be "very, very wary" and to take no consolation in the dip in murders. We agree, as we are sure everyone would, that the level of homicides, as Col. MacMillan said, "is still too high".

Rather than belittle the gains, though, what we should do is to press the police to follow up on the initiatives to sustain the performance and continue to chip away at the killings.

Further, under-reporting of crime is a common phenomenon in all jurisdictions. Understanding this is important in crime prevention. But unless there is evidence of a drastic surge in under-reporting in Jamaica recently, it would seem disingenuous to use this to impeach the data.

That, we do not believe, would be the intent of Col. MacMillan.