AS the St Catherine North police division continues to grapple with an upsurge in violent crimes in the Spanish Town area, members of the force’s high command will meet, this week, to formulate a strategic crime plan for the area.

The emergency meeting, to be held at Police Commissioner Francis Forbes’ Kingston office, comes against the background of a crime wave that has left 37 shot and killed by gunmen and over 18 suffering from gunshot wounds in the division since the beginning of the year.

Thirty-two of those murders, almost 90 per cent, were committed in the Spanish Town area.

“We are still grappling for strategies to contain crime and violence in Spanish Town,” head of the St Catherine North police division, Superintendent Clifford Blake, told businessmen at last week’s monthly meeting of the St Catherine Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

“Next week I will be going back to Kingston to meet the high command because they want to develop a specific plan to deal with what is happening in Spanish Town,” he added.

For the first quarter of the year, Blake said, there were 17 more murders than the 20 committed over the same period last year.

The lawman did not have any comforting words for area businessmen.

“All is not well in Spanish Town as it continues to pose problems in crime and violence for us,” he warned.

The level of criminal activity in Spanish Town had forced the police to revisit, review and reconstruct crime fighting strategies, he said. They were now working to swiftly get on top of the situation and return some semblance of calm to areas such as Tawes Pen, March Pen Road, Windsor Road, McCooks Pen and central Spanish Town communities.

Blake told the Chamber that although Senior Superintendent Renato Adams and his Crime Management Unit had been operating in the area for the past seven weeks and had “somewhat placed a lid on criminal activities”, there was still a problem.

“We are having difficulty in containing and reducing incidents of crime in Spanish Town,” the lawman said.

While rapes and robberies are down, he said, there were abnormal levels of killings and shootings in the area. Based on intelligence reports, Blake said, gunmen from outside the parish have migrated to the area, committing serious crimes. This worrying trend, he said, would have to be taken into consideration in the formulation of new crime-fighting strategies for the area.

Police say the latest crime surge in Spanish Town is largely gang related; however, investigators say they are also pursuing leads which indicate that extortion rackets, reprisal killings, robberies and domestic violence are also fueling the unrest.

Since January, there have been at least three main outbreaks of violent confrontations in Spanish Town, which have claimed the lives of several well-known persons. Among those slain was businessman, Rennie Chin, whom a group of gunmen shot dead at his business place at Wellington Street and Cumberland Road. One of Chin’s assistants was also shot and killed in the attack.

Police statistics revealed that 352 criminal suspects have been held and interrogated over the last three months of the present crime surge. Of this number, some 45 have been arrested and charged with various crimes including murder, shooting with intent, robbery and housebreaking.

The situation in the neighboring St Catherine South Division (Portmore), Blake told the Chamber, was better.

“They are doing much better; last year this time, they had 25 murders. Now they have 12 which is a reduction of 13,” he said. “Their trouble areas are Central Village, which accounts for 50 per cent of their crimes and which has been calm and quiet for some time now. So St Catherine South is doing fairly well in regards to keeping down crime.”