MANDEVILLE, Manchester — The Government is exploring the possibility of overseas help as it presses ahead with plans for the setting up of a national identification system as part of the effort to fight crime, according to National Security Minister Dwight Nelson.

“We are presently in discussions with a number of entities (and) foreign embassies in whose countries the (National ID) system already exists,” Nelson told a crime forum at the Golf View Hotel in Mandeville two Thursdays ago. “A number of them have indicated that they would like to assist us in creating this system,” he said.

Nelson said the Government was “working towards ensuring that every man, woman and child in this country have a unique national identification number which will state his own biographical and biometric details so that everybody in this country can be recognised and dealt with in whatever way they need to be dealt with…”

The development of a sophisticated National ID system was one of the pledges made by the Bruce Golding-led Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) prior to its narrow victory in the 2007 parliamentary elections.

Nelson told a packed auditorium that police were often hindered by the inability to identify and track down suspects because of weaknesses in current national registration and data recording systems.

“One of the tendencies we have in this country and it affects crime and violence, is that there are too many persons who don’t exist,” said Nelson. “They don’t have no birth certificates because they weren’t registered, they don’t have no church record because they weren’t baptised, they don’t even have proper name, they don’t live anywhere…” he added.

He noted that the problem often extended to people who were deported to Jamaica from Britain and North America. In some cases, he said, it could not be determined if the deportees were actually born in Jamaica.

“We have people who are deported from Canada, US and UK and when they come here we don’t know if they are Jamaicans. In England a lot of nationalities like to pretend they are Jamaicans. Our archives don’t show any records for them. In a number of instances we have had to ask the UK to take them back,” he said.

Vivian Brown, a technologies expert in the Ministry of National Security, said the proposed National ID system would embrace a “unique ID number”, facilitating access to databases. “The benefits will be huge for the country: for the State and private sector,” he said. Such a system would assist the Constabulary Force’s information system, new criminal records systems, new record management systems, and traffic ticketing systems. “It is going to lead to huge changes,” Brown said.

During a recent visit to Mandeville, Assistant Commissioner of Police Les Green praised the plans for a National ID System, but warned that it would have to be “robust” and thoroughly conceived and implemented to avoid being corrupted by criminals.