Crime-fighting initiatives announced by government Wednesday are not novel, but represent a more focused approach to policing measures already in place, says Deputy Commissioner of Police Mark Shields.

Shields who was responding to Sunday Observer requests for comment on the dual announcements mid-week of a more concentrated attack on crime, said the pronouncements were about strengthening the existing system to better take on the crime problem.

“The word new is misleading. It’s about enhancing the work that is already being done,” Shields said Friday.

Essentially, Prime Minister P J Patterson and his national security chief, Dr Peter Phillips announced that there would be more intense police presence in the troubled and murderous centres of the island – mainly found in sections of the Corporate Area and St Catherine.

The announcements were made as British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw visited the island.

Phillips last week suggested, as he outlined his new plan, that the successes of Operation Kingfish might have sparked the new wave of violence.

But in a swift reaction Thursday night, Opposition Leader Bruce Golding said the new plan – the sixth in as many years – was destined, like the others, to fail.

“It is merely tinkering at the edges,” Golding scoffed in an address to the West Kingston fundraising dinner at the Jamaica Pegasus Hotel in New Kingston.

“The Prime Minister announced the appointment of a new intelligence chief without providing the intelligence machinery that the new intelligence chief is to be intelligent about,” said the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) leader.

As announced, the hot spot initiative – a policing concept implemented by Shields when he took up the job of crime chief in March – was a fairly simple concept that he said involved intensifying police work in certain areas, and bringing their presence into sharper focus.

Shield’s strategy involves daily briefings and debriefings with team leaders, and devising tactical responses to emerging trouble centres.

“While we have been effective in certain areas (of crime fighting) we believe that we can be even more effective,” said Shields, a near 30-year veteran of the London Metropolitan Police Service and the first of five foreign cops being recruited to help transform police operations here.

The appointment of Charles Scarlett as DCP Intelligence was fundamental to the renewed approach, Shields said Friday.

Prior to Scarlett’s new posting, he shared the crime portfolio with Shields.

Police commissioner Lucius Thomas had attempted to downplay the issue of two DCPs of crime, but it was apparent that one of those jobs was superfluous, though Scarlett was identified as being in charge of special squads, and some thought he was understudying his British counterpart.

“We looked into the structure of our intelligence framework, and we saw where the parts could be better coordinated to make it much slicker,” Shields said of Scarlett’s new role.

Attempts at securing an interview with Scarlett were unsuccessful.

Speaking at a function with Straw, Phillips said Kingfish, established in cooperation with the UK government, had not led to the hoped for containment of violence.

As the organised crime networks disintegrate, the national security minister said, a ‘second tier’ level of criminals has emerged who have sought to compensate for lack of income from drugs by expanding into extortion and robbery.

Kingfish operatives have so far recovered 121 firearms and 2,303 rounds of ammunition, and made 235 arrests for murder, firearms, ammunition and drugs.

Its inroads into narco-trafficking has seen seizures of 12 tonnes of cocaine, 4,300 pounds of ganja, 53 boats, and the unit has disabled three illegal airstrips.

“In the process, Kingfish has dismantled some of the major criminal networks involved in the drug trade in this country, arrested some of the biggest players and has also taken on the big ‘dons’ of violence,” the minister said.

“These successes have not yet brought the overall reduction in crime and violence which we intend to accomplish.”

But, central to the problem, Phillips acknowledged, was the lack of jobs and economic alternatives for young people.

The national security minister cited a recent study showing that within the 15-29 age group, there were 123,000 young people who were unemployed, and that nearly three-quarters of this group have no educational certification of any kind.

The same group accounts for 75 per cent of the perpetrators or victims of violent crime.

“Whereas improved intelligence, effective policing, efficient judiciaries and severe sentencing systems were effective against the kingfish of the drug trade, much more is needed to deal with the present wave of extortion and violence, which is primarily based on the increasing reservoir of unemployed youth,” Phillips said, as he rolled out his two-pronged crime plan.

To limit the available recruits for crime, the state sponsored Lift up Jamaica and Community Security Initiatives programmes are to target them for one-off jobs.

Patterson said in his national broadcast that the police would be flooding the trouble spots immediately.

The concept, as logical as it appears, is not always practised by the police. In the midst of gang conflict and deadly reprisal attacks at Maxfield Avenue, for example, the police were no where in the area when Sasha-Kaye Brown, 10, was burnt to death by fire as gunmen stopped neighbours from going to her aid.

Golding suggested that the attack on Sasha-Kaye meant that the criminals were not just vicious toward their victims, “but are contemptuous of the rule of law and the institutions of state that enforce and regulate it.”

He countered that the police force – the first line of defence against the criminals – was “under-manned, underpaid, under-equipped and badly structured”, adding that allocations to the force had remained the same as eight years ago, although the murder rate had increased by more than 50 per cent.

The police continue to keep the weekly murder statistics hidden, but a rough count to date indicates that the killings now top 1,300 victims.

To help solve the mounting cases, the JCF is also to contract the services of retired detectives to boost the force’s investigative capabilities.

Reported by Sunday Observer writers Luke Douglas and Balford Henry