No official gun amnesty, says Phillips
There is no official amnesty for people who turn in guns, but police who receive illegal weapons will at times use their discretion in deciding whether to lay charges for breaches of the Firearms Act, National Security Minister Peter Phillips said yesterday.
The issue of a gun amnesty was placed on the agenda on Friday when dancehall deejay, Ninja Man, called Senior Superintendent Reneto Adams while performing at the Sting concert and handed him a loaded Glock semi-automatic pistol and urged others with illegal guns to do the same.
But Ninja Man, whose real name is Desmond Ballentine, suggested that he still had another gun, a Beretta pistol.
Adams later told the Observer that he did not arrest Ballentine because “the mandate guiding us is that anyone who voluntarily hands over an illegal gun to the police will not be charged with a breach of the Firearms Act”.
Neither Police Commissioner Francis Forbes nor other members of the police high command were available for comment yesterday on Adams’ media statement on the issue which fuelled an assumption that a gun amnesty was in place.
However, Phillips made clear that there was no formal immunity from prosecution for persons who hand in guns.
“There is no official amnesty,” said the minister. “People from time to time turn in guns which they have in their possession where the officer on the ground makes a judgement (on whether to forego charges).”
But Phillips said that even in such circumstances the police would undertake “relevant investigations” into the origins of the weapon and whether it may have been used in crimes.
“The police may act on those investigations,” Phillips said.
Adams did say that ballistic and other tests would be done on the gun handed in by Ballentine, but it was not immediately clear if, and when, the police planned further interviews with the deejay.
Ballentine was in 1999 sentenced to a year in jail for the illegal possession of a firearm and only in June of this year was freed at a preliminary inquiry of the shooting death of a taxi driver, Anthony White, of Waltham Park in Kingston. Ballentine, who once flirted with born-again Christianity, has had numerous other brushes with the law.
Up to Friday the police had recovered 460 illegal firearms for this year. They reported seizing another yesterday and charging Nigel Chamberlin of Hampton Street, Allman Town for the weapon.
Police said that Chamberlin was found with a plastic bag with the gun during an operation by the Crime Management Unit in the area. Four other men, whose names were withheld, were detained on suspicion of committing various crimes.
Phillips told the Sunday Observer that while there was no gun amnesty, a reward programme for information leading to the recovery of guns, put in place early this year, was working well. That scheme is operated under Crime Stop, which is run by the police in conjunction with the Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica.
The administrators of the programme were not available yesterday to comment on its performance.
“The public is responding,” said Phillips. “There has definitely been an improvement in sections of the public to the programme.”