WESTERN BUREAU – Montego Bay’s business and political leaders have hammered out a two-pronged approach to tackling the troubling crime problem in the inner city, following a special meeting held in the city this week.

“We have established two things that we would like to begin working with,” Dr Horace Chang, the Member of Parliament for North West St James who spearheaded the meeting, told the Observer.

The plan, Dr Chang said, is to initiate community counselling, training in conflict resolution and parenting across several inner-city communities, in addition to setting up educational training facilities inside Glendevon and Canterbury.

“The Canterbury community centre was targeted and that’s where we will be setting up the training and education centre – where adult training programmes will be held,” the MP said.

He noted that the project in Glendevon would involve the establishment of a training centre on the compound of the Anglican Church where construction, information technology and hotel services would be taught.

Dr Chang has committed $400,000 from his SESP fund to the effort.

“Those are tangible projects that we want to start with, but there are many more things that we want to do, but we believe that we can use these to lay the foundation,” he said.

Glendevon and Canterbury are among several areas in St James that have, over the past few years, experienced a high level of criminal activity, particularly homicides.

At Wednesday’s meeting, which was attended by a wide cross-section of business leaders and social workers, it was the general consensus that unemployment and a lack of education were the two main factors driving the high incidence of criminal activities in the parish.

Christopher Graham, a social development officer who works in inner city communities in the parish, called on the business community to provide resources to tackle the problem of chronic unemployment.

“In the inner city communities where I am working, a lot of people are there with nothing to do, and are badly in need of jobs,” Graham told the meeting.

He added that he was confident that if the high level of unemployment was addressed, there would be a reduction in crime in the parish.

Last year, there were 105 murders in St James, 25 per cent more than the 84 recorded in 2002. Since the start of this year, 10 people have been killed within the parish.