THE Montego Bay Chamber of Commerce and Industry is urging the security ministry to provide additional vehicles and manpower to the St James police division, which, they contend, has been doing a good job with very limited resources.

“I think in Montego Bay the police are doing a tremendous job and the violence has really gone down significantly,” chamber president Mark Kerr-Jarrett told the Observer this week. “And here again we make the appeal for more officers, we are about 100 officers short.”

Kerr-Jarrett said that the police’s motor pool is in a state of total collapse and the chamber was insisting that the Ministry of National Security dispatch at least 25 of the 100 new vehicles to St James without delay.

When contacted, Superintendent in charge of the parish, Owen Ellington, painted an even grimmer picture. He said that the parish needed at least 50 cars and was more than 100 men short.

“We are doing badly (in terms of vehicles) but we are expecting some relief by the end of August because the commissioner is aware of the problem,” Ellington said.

But he added that it was unlikely that the parish would get 50 new vehicles, as there was also a shortage in Kingston.

“We need about 50 good vehicles for this parish. That’s very ambitious, I don’t expect we’ll get anything like that anytime soon, but we expect to get a few from (the new batch),” he explained. “They are all earmarked for Kingston, so if we are going to get any it is after Kingston is fully satisfied and I know it is going to take a lot to fully satisfy Kingston so I don’t know how many we will get.”

On the topic of manpower, Superintendent Ellington said that since last year’s shortfall of 100 cops, they had lost 26 more to a combination of transfers, retirements, deaths and resignations.

“We are 26 short of what we were when we recognised the need for 100 last year, so we are in a worse position,” he said. “But we are still trying to do well with the small numbers because even with that deficit last year, we managed to cut the crime by 20 per cent and with the further decline this year we are still going down a further eight per cent of major crimes. We’re holding our own.”