Cabbie deaths worry St James cops
WESTERN BUREAU — A spate of recent murders of taxi drivers in Montego Bay has St James’ top cop, Superintendent Newton Amos, worried.
“We’ve been having too many taxi men being murdered,” he said. ” It’s a different phenomenon than what we had last year. We were having people being murdered in the street, on the roads and in their homes. Now we have seen a difference in where people have been murdered… mostly taxi men. It is of great concern to us.”
On Monday, Alvin “Thousand Head” Bent, was killed and his body hurled from his white Toyota Corolla motor vehicle along Fish lane in the city. He had a gunshot wound to the back of the head and was taken to the Cornwall Regional Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
According to Amos, the new modus operandi of those who prey on taxi drivers is to take the cabs by force and then take the drivers to a remote location where they are murdered. He added that drug-related crimes and gang feuds — often the major contributors to crime — were down, but the murder of taxi drivers had replaced those crimes in prominence.
“I know that right across the board, generally speaking, crime is down in the parish,” he said. “But if you check the amount of taxi murders, it has placed us in a precarious position based on what we are looking for in bringing down the murder rate.”
When Amos was transferred to the parish last year, Police Commissioner Francis Forbes set a target of between 20 to 25 per cent reduction in the murder rate.
With this in mind, the police are developing new strategies to deal with the recent upsurge in the number of murdered taxi operators.
While remaining tight-lipped about the specifics, Amos told the Observer that they were examining the option of having taxi drivers take suspicious passengers directly to any police station if they felt threatened in any way.
“We have to be using all kinds of methods; unconventional ones as well,” he said.
Since the start of the year, five taxi men have been murdered in the parish including Clarence Robb, Leslie Kelvin and Bent, who was killed on Monday.
