Ironically, the fear of crime is more intense in affluent low-crime uptown St Andrew than in downtown Kingston slum communities where bloodletting is perpetual and residents are almost numbed to the spiralling murder rate, police and analysts agree.

“That’s to be expected,” says Jamaican-born Dr Marlyn Jones, assistant professor of Criminal Justice at California State University, Sacramento.

“Crime and the fear of crime don’t necessarily correlate,” adds Jones, citing a 2005 Planning Institute of Jamaica report which states that despite Jamaica’s staggering murder rate of 64 PER 100,000 persons, only 12 per cent of Jamaicans had actually been victims of crime.

“There are instances where the actual incidence of crime may be quite low, but the fear of crime is quite high,” the criminologist told the Sunday Observer in a telephone interview. “Also, the people who are more likely to be fearful of crime are not necessarily those at great risk of victimisation.”

Deputy Commissioner of Police for crime Mark Shields agrees. “This notion that crime is out of control, I actually don’t think is true, but what is true is that the high-profile murders – the Vilma Mais murder, the St Thomas Six, the abductions and murders of Jamie Lue and Steve Harvey and the brutal slaying of Ambassador Peter King – we’ve seen recently have done a lot to raise the fear of crime, despite the fact that we’re beginning to make inroads into the volume of murders we see in Jamaica.”

Shields emphasised that for the first three months of 2006, murders actually fell about 30 per cent when compared to the same period in 2005.

All that is little consolation for one upper St Andrew resident who did not want her name to be published. She has decided she’s had enough of Jamaica.

It’s mostly the fear of being held-up, raped or car-jacked that has caused her to change her mind about living here. She only returned to the country three years ago in anticipation of enjoying the last of her working years in retirement at home. But now, because of crime, she said, she’s not comfortable with Jamaica being her home any longer.

“Crime has a lot to do with why I’m leaving, it is just too high,” said the 58-year-old, who owns a townhouse in a gated community in the largely affluent Kingston 8 area of the capital. “You hear all these stories and you just know that it’s just a matter of time before it happens to you.”

She went on to recount a list of unfortunate incidents with criminals, including one she experienced personally, when she was robbed at gunpoint late one night while leaving a party in a posh Jack’s Hill, St Andrew neighbourhood.

“It’s so bad, I tell you. I’m migrating, and I won’t even put an ad in the paper to say I’m selling my personal things, because I understand that when you do that the gunmen target you, stake out your house and then just pull up in a trailer and clean you out,” she insisted.

Just as worrying to her as getting robbed is the fear that one day she may be killed in cold blood, like Vilma Mais, the church volunteer who was stabbed to death last month in the Pastoral Centre of the Stella Maris Church, located in an upper St Andrew neighbourhood.

“Really, it’s no longer in the ghetto, these days the crime is very much in the uptown residential areas,” she added, her voice tinged with worry.

That’s the sentiment coming from a woman who lives in the police division that has consistently recorded the lowest murder figures and some of the lowest overall crime figures in the Kingston metropolitan area.

And, she is not alone.

Thirty-two year-old Damian, for instance, who lives in an apartment complex in New Kingston said he’s not afraid, per se, but that his expectation of one day being robbed, car-jacked or shot has certainly redefined how he goes about his day to day life.

“Especially of late, I don’t move about like I used to, I stick to small private gatherings rather than large events in public places, and when I do go to public places, I’m very selective of which events and where I attend,” he explained. “Nowadays, I feel like I have to watch my back, you know, constantly be on the lookout for who might be coming after what they think I have.”

Although nothing has ever happened to him personally, he recounted stories of friends being held up, and has resigned himself to the fact that one day, he too might be the victim of some crime.

“I just hope they don’t kill me,” the IT technician sighed.

Like Damian and the upper St Andrew woman, Jamaicans generally are gripped by the fear of becoming victims of crime and another statistic on the nightly news. In the capital city, where the majority of the nation’s crime’s are committed, crime dominates the thinking, conversations and behaviour of most people, determining what, where and when they go about their day-to-day business.

Last November, ahead of 2005 copping the dubious distinction of being the bloodiest year ever in Jamaican history, an Observer/Stone Poll revealed that 87 per cent of Jamaicans felt that crime and violence was the most pressing problem facing the country.

A series of especially vicious and highly-publicised murders last month only worsened that fear of crime which is not restricted to, but is more prevalent uptown than it is in inner-city communities.

The fear of crime, explained Dr Jones, has more to do with the presentation of information rather than the information itself, and how much the public is reminded about crime by the news media and other information sources.

“It’s almost as if you were to tell a person to be fearful, then they are more likely to be fearful, regardless of their risk of victimisation. The more frequently they hear about incidents it gives them the perception that they, too, are at risk, so it is the potential for victimisation that people are reacting to, rather than the victimisation itself.”

And recently, the stories, each seeming more brutal and closer to home than the one before, keep coming in, from all angles and these days in more tech-savvy ways.

Karen, who lives with her young daughter in a shared house in Meadowbrook, said she, too, is scared and that her fear of being raped, car-jacked, kidnapped or killed is only heightened when she finds well-meaning ‘warning e-mails’ in her inbox. She described the most recent ‘forwards’ she’s received, one warning about how criminals target women drivers in parking lots in New Kingston, another about two insurance agents lured to a house where they were tied up and robbed, and yet another about a rapist stalking women in Cherry Gardens.

These, she said, impact even more than the front-page stories and nightly newscasts, because they seem to be more real, and coming from someone she knows (who knows someone who’s a friend of the person who was actually affected) who probably lives near to her and moves in the same social circles, these stories are just too close for comfort.

“When you hear about all these things, you just know it’s not safe. It’s so dangerous to live here in Kingston as a single woman. You can’t take any chances these days,” laments the 31-year-old administrator.

While many of these e-mail stories are based in reality, the truth is that they stir up way more fear than is warranted, said Shields, who admitted to being aware of the incidents being broadcast through e-mails and the like.

But it’s incidents like the Vilma Mais killing that pose an especially large problem for the police, because they erode public confidence very quickly, due in part to the combination of who it happened to (the matronly wife of a prominent lawyer), how (attacked and stabbed to death), and where (on the compound of an upper St Andrew church) it took place.

More than causing a headache for police, however, Dr Jones warned that an unchecked fear of crime can lead to more crime, as people begin to act pre-emptively to avoid victimisation.

“I think the fear of crime changes people’s behaviour, they may decide to stay home just because there is the potential for victimisation,” she said. “They don’t go out and party as much. They’re almost not wanting to be vulnerable. They may become more vigilant with their own security. But vigilance may actually precipitate vigilantism, because people act pre-emptively, where the person who thinks that they are likely to be victimised acts first.”

Andrew David is one of those who may just turn out to become a vigilante. The young man, who lives in Stony Hill and recently opened his own business, said crime has gotten so bad he’s thinking about getting a gun.

“I do feel the necessity for a firearm because of the fact that crime is happening and the police can’t stop it,” he told the Sunday Observer.

“I don’t know if it (a gun) would necessarily put me in a better situation, but you have to weigh your options,” he said, adding that he’s particularly afraid for his mother and sister of late, especially since his family worships at the same Stella Maris Church on Shortwood Road.

He’s never personally been the victim of violent crime, but he has had to deal with the police once, to report a stolen car, an experience which, he swears, has totally shattered his confidence in the constabulary to protect him and his possessions.

“I don’t trust the police and I don’t have the confidence that they can protect me,” he said. “Now, if anything happens, without my own protection I don’t know what to do, because it doesn’t even make sense to call the police.”

Not so, said Shields. Although the police do have a lot on their plate – trying to reduce the skyrocketing murder rate, clear the streets of guns and police smaller pervasive crimes simultaneously – the police will be applying their so-far successful intelligence-led murder reduction strategy to other crimes, such as robbery and car-jacking in order to boost public confidence.

But if the police intend to win back the confidence of upper St Andrew, home to the wealthy and business classes that pull the strings of Jamaica’s economy, they need to move quickly to replicate the successes they’ve attained in some of the worst areas of the inner-city, where tangible results have residents feeling reassured – almost to the point of exultant.

“Yeah man, roun’ here quiet, quiet. No gunshot. Nobody nah dead,” said a man who insisted on giving his name only as Blacks, and who the Sunday Observer found sitting on a wall near Judgement Yard in August Town. “Sometimes, to how it so quiet I wonder if is peace accord dem sign,” he chuckled. A friend nearby concurred.

In other war-torn communities where the police have turned the tide of crime, the sense of relief and reassurance is liberating for residents. Lisa, who helps to run the after-school programme at the Jacques Road Community Centre, is thankful to be able to walk – even at night – to the top of the road and see friends and relatives, a far cry from less than a year ago, when the entire community cowered at the mercy of feuding gangs.

“The scars are still here, but at least you can go about and go here and there, no problem,” she said. “Everybody wants the peace to stay, I think, because everybody has lost a friend or family or a neighbour.”

In Dunkirk, the community is still ecstatic that the police ‘removed’ a local terrorist, Delano ‘Delly-Bap’ Waite, who was accused of killing dozens in the community for the slightest or no apparent reason.

“Since Delly-Bap dead everybody join up so,” said a pregnant 18 year-old in the area of the community called ‘110’. “You can all park yah so and left everything open and nobody nah trouble you.”

In Jones Town, where the peace is a bit older, the intersection of Penso and Bryan streets is alive with regular scenes of city life. Schoolchildren are walking home, bars and shops are doing lively business and only if you look hard do you see the police on guard, standing with their automatic weapons.

A group of well-dressed youths make jokes and even offer to pose for photos for the newspaper.

“We nuh fraid a nuttn roun here. The police dem a work.”

The youths even crack jokes about their newfound relationship with the cops.

“Dem can stop gwaan so hard on de youths dem now. War done star,” grinned a dreadlocked teenager sitting in a doorway on 110 Corner.

Uptowners, said Shields, can help the police to get to that state by doing their part, and that means simply co-operating with the cops to fight crime.

“I think it’s worth reporting crime, because if people under-report crime, it means that we cannot analyse the crime that’s going on and we therefore cannot deploy our police officers,” Shields said. “The more people report crime, is the more we can understand crime, the more descriptions we get of suspects, which raises the opportunity to make arrests and subsequently convictions.”

The police, he announced, are in the process of improving the way crimes are recorded, and intend to pilot a new crime recording system on a phased basis in a number of divisions in the Corporate Area.

“Soon, it will be far easier to report a crime and the data will be far easier for us to analyse as well,” added Shields who, before working for the Jamaica Constabulary Force, was head of Scotland Yard’s International Terrorism Unit in London.

“So I don’t think that people should be discouraged. If you’re not getting the service that you deserve, speak to us, and we will do what we can to improve that situation,” he said. “We know that we have a lot of shortcomings around how we deal with victims, and how crime is reported, but that doesn’t mean that you as a citizen should not expect or deserve a service.

“Of course, there is a need to be concerned about crime, but I want to persuade people not to be fearful to go about their lawful business. People have to take some responsibility and be streetwise, and think about what they’re doing before they do it.

But I’m not saying ‘lock up your doors and don’t go out’ because if you do that, the criminals have won. What we have to do is create a balance between people going about their business freely but at the same time being careful.”