Aid in Action

Jamaican Police and Residents Join Forces to Fight Crime

St. Catherine, Jamaica | Tuesday, September 30, 2008

A crime surge this year has many Jamaicans caught between fear and outrage. The island nation has experienced more than 700 murders, 200 of which occurred in May alone.

Persistent crime is Jamaica’s greatest development challenge. It dissuades investment and weakens social interventions designed to improve quality of life. And high security costs undermine the competitiveness of many Jamaican businesses in an economy where manufacturing and tourism contribute the largest share of the gross domestic product. 

On June 20, the Jamaican government formally launched community policing as a national policy. The strategy focuses on building stronger relationships between residents and the police force to prevent and tackle crime. “Community policing is not soft policing,” said Rear Admiral Hardley Lewin, commissioner of police. “It is a style of policing where the police respect the people and the people respect the police, where there is trust and communications.”

Lewin said the time had come to develop a professional policy force, free of corruption. “Not until now has there been a widespread development and deployment of community police officers on the ground throughout Jamaica,” he said.

Marilyn Nash, head of the Flanker Peace and Justice Center in St. James, said residents have started to trust police officers because they interact with them during their 24-hour patrols. “Young people now seek out the police,” she said. “And this is a phenomenon in this community.”

“When we helped residents resolve domestic disputes early, we helped reduce murder because domestic disputes cause most of the murders in the community,” said Constable Marvin Franklyn of the Community Safety and Security Branch in Spanish Town, St. Catherine.

USAID’s Community Empowerment and Transformation (COMET) project provides training and technical assistance to the Jamaican Constabulary Force (JCF) and helped develop a manual for community policing that is now being used by police officers and community development workers. The project helps communities address crime and disorder through partnerships between citizens, police, and other state and non-state actors that play a role in safety. 

“Policing, though it is the responsibility of the police, cannot be done by the police alone,” said John McLean, assistant police commissioner police responsible for the Community Policing/Community Safety Branch.

A team of representatives from law enforcement, the private sector, the Social Development Commission, and international donor agencies is charged with country-wide coordination of community policing activities. 

 “Whereas past community policing programs were largely donor-driven and, as a result, quite limited in their impact, the current program puts the JCF squarely in the lead on policy development,” USAID’s Mission Director Karen Hilliard said.

“The fact that the entire donor community has signed up to support the JCF’s agenda in a way that is consistent with Paris Declaration principles signals a  sea change in development programming in Jamaica that we hope to replicate in other sectors,” she added.

Community policing is being implemented in 39 communities across 19 divisions in the first phase of the program, with an expected increase of at least 38 communities per year, officials said.

Published in FrontLines August 2008