The following is an excerpt from an interview, conducted by Observer writer, Earl Moxam, with Police Commissioner Francis Forbes on Saturday. The rest of the interview will be carried tomorrow.

Earl Moxam: Commissioner, My first question is on the National Crime Plan — has it been a failure?

Commissioner of Police: Definitely not! I am a little disappointed that a plan that initially had bi-partisan support, some people are taking political potshots at it now. It is not necessary because it is there for the protection of every one of us.

EM: Have you heard specific partisan persons levelling criticisms at it?

CP: It has been reported to me that people have cricitised it saying that from as far back they had said that it had failed and now I have come out to confirm that. I am looking at a certain newspaper today; I saw where the opposition spokesman (on national security) is reported to have “slammed” me by saying that I’m back-tracking. The truth of the matter is that, right after the launching of the Summer Programme on Monday of this week, a number of journalists surrounded me and they asked several questions, sometimes all at once. During that confusion I tried to answer as best I could and I tried to explain that, regarding my own objectives or targets for homicides, I had failed to achieve that, because, at the moment I was speaking, homicides were up by one percent. Now that seems to have developed into headlines that suggested that I stated that the entire crime plan had failed.

EM: Let us pause to clarify the matter of your own projections. In January you were projecting, what, a 20 per cent decline in murders?

CP: No. That was another media headline and I blame myself because I did nothing to correct it at that stage. What occurred is that I went down to Montego Bay, having changed the command structure in Montego Bay. In my address I spoke to the superintendent, publicly, telling him that a number of things had been done; I was going to increase the number of persons there etc, and so there was nothing to prevent him from achieving a 20 to 25 per cent reduction in homicides this year.

EM: So, you’re saying that it was specific to St James.

CP: Right. But, having said that, and the media having carried it in such a manner that it suggested that this was a national objective, I spoke with the Minister of National Security and I told him that the officer corps ú the people who were in command ú seemed to be taking it as a challenge, and we didn’t have anything to lose if we allowed them to run with that objective.

EM: In hindsight, was that a mistake?

CP: Well, yes and no. I should have corrected it and that would not have prevented me from telling the people to reach for the sky. But I left it there… It was good because it created a serious competition among the commanding officers to see who could achieve that target. And in fact, up to near the end of March this year we several times were fluctuating between a 20 per cent and a 25 per cent decline, so it wasn’t a totally impossible target to achieve.

EM: Let’s go back to the St James-specific targets though… Have you, to this point, disaggregated the figures, and if so what is the current rate in St James vis a vis the targets that you would have set?

CP: St James has experienced a number of homicides that range from those that are robbery-motivated to those that are domestic. And it is one of the six parishes that have caused a general increase in the rate, which is preventing us from achieving the 20 per cent target.

EM: Is the parish below last year or at the same level?

CP: I think they are about three or four (per cent) above.

EM: This brings me back to the national crime plan and the social intervention aspect of that plan… It seems that what you are describing in St James and on the fringes of the tourism areas is one that calls urgently for the kind of intensive social intervention that has been spoken about…

CP: Well, when I was asked to contribute in the design of the National Crime Plan, I looked to what was happening in other countries where there were some success stories. New York perhaps would not have been successful had it not been for the recognition that you can’t deal with the crime problem purely by guns and manpower. There is need for hard enforcement because there are certain categories and crime, which require hard enforcement. But on the other hand there needs to be a total package and this is where the social intervention is critical to the success of any crime plan.

EM: To the extent therefore that there has not been enough of that social intervention… would the critics not have a point when they say that the national crime plan, if it has not failed completely, certainly is not achieving what was set out?

CP: I don’t know if it is fair to assess an entire plan that is less than a year old and say that it has failed because it hasn’t met all its objectives. My contribution to it had seen it in a three-phase design and just about now we would be in the second phase.

That is not to say that the slowness with the application of the social intervention in some areas has not had a negative impact; I don’t think we can bury our heads in the sand and not admit that. But the plan has not failed because of that. In fact there are many social intervention programmes that are on-stream to come about. My dissatisfaction was that it was taking too long to come about, some of those.

EM: The security forces had very high profile direct interventions in areas like Hannah Town, Payne Land etc. How would you assess the progress to date of those interventions?

CP: You can add Kingston Central police division also to that list. I would say that we have seen a tremendous amount of success. In fact, 90 per cent of the work that has been done by the police inside there has been towards the social side. One of the main challenges that the police in Jamaica face is the lack of confidence between themselves and the public. You can’t underestimate the value of the police interacting in a non-traditional way in these communities, which is what we have set out to do.

We have been benefiting by that confidence building in all of those communities that you mentioned. And what we have seen is that the major people who were contributing to crime in those communities… those people have migrated and we have not seen crimes committed in those areas at all. So there is a tremendous success story to be attributed to those communities in which we are present in a very high profile manner now.

EM: What bearing has this success had on the specific crime statistics?

CP: I am not in possession of community-by-community statistics, but I can speak from my own knowledge since I’m intimately involved with the project on a day-to-day basis. There has not been any homicide in Payne Avenue and the general Hannah Town/ Denham Town area since we commenced. There have been two homicides on the fringes, one on the fringe of Payne Avenue and one on the fringe of the Hannah Town area, but there hasn’t been any homicide inside there. Since we started in Kingston Central ú the target area ú we have not had homicides or shootings there. There was an attempt a couple weeks ago at some gang warfare and we were able to move in very quickly and settle that. And so there is a success story there.