KINGSTON, Jamaica — A University of the West Indies (UWI) professor is calling for increased use of technology by developing countries, including Jamaica, to assist in the fight against crime.

Professor Evan Duggan, who is Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences, said there have been “amazing advancements” in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), over the past six decades, which offer great potential for improving security strategies.

The academic, who was addressing a recent National Security Policy Seminar at UWI’s Regional Headquarters, located on the Mona campus, pointed to Kenya as a developing country that has employed the use of inexpensive technology in its crime fighting initiatives.

“Potential applications and innovations have been implemented through the use of powerful but not very expensive technologies that have allowed law enforcers to make enormous leaps in criminal intelligence, crime analysis, emergency response and policing,” he said.

He pointed to the use of a variety of mobile apps for crime prevention and reporting, web facilities, and citizen portals for the reporting of criminal activity.

Professor Duggan said that in order for Jamaica to realise the full benefit of technology in crime fighting, national security stakeholders need to engage local application developers.

“I would enjoin our stakeholders to engage the extremely creative Jamaican application developers, who now produce high quality apps for a variety of mobile and other platforms. I recommend interventions to assist in helping these groups to cohere into a unified force that is more than capable of supplying the application we need,” he urged.