ASSISTANT Commissioner of Police Les Green often points to the extreme difficulty in implementing normal “policing” in the slums or so-called ‘innercities’ that pockmark the Jamaican landscape.

Those from planned, ordered areas who have never visited the gully bank settlements, the squatter communities perched on dizzyingly steep hillsides or the tenement yards crammed with people will struggle to understand what the ACP is talking about.

They will struggle to visualise the mystifyingly intricate web of claustrophobic zinc-fenced lanes that get narrower and narrower with every advancing step, rendering motorised police patrols impossible.

Many Jamaicans have no real concept of the extreme poverty and deprivation, the ignorance and illiteracy, the absence of basic amenities that are taken for granted by the rest of us, the hopelessness in such communities. All of these have engendered among far too many in those areas, the strong belief that the whole world is the enemy.

Down the years the chronically under-resourced, under-manned police force largely backed out of ‘normal’ visits to such difficult areas — often turning up only in response to murder and mayhem or for special operations that often end in cries of police brutality.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and in the absence of the State, the gun-toting criminal networks and gangs took hold — aided significantly by the vicious tribalism spawned of the political party divide.

So now what’s to be done? The human rights and welfare activists are largely correct. Crime will only be dealt with in a sustainable way when the weight of social and economic intervention by the State and civil society can be felt in our most depressed communities. Also, of course, there must be basic community organisation involving the setting up of structures that will allow residents to partner with the agents of law and order.

The trouble is that such efforts are futile while the gangs and criminals remain in charge. Those evil networks must be destroyed if a window is to be opened for social and economic interventions and the effective formation of citizens’ groups.

The only way to match the gangs on the ground in the short term is to massively increase the presence of the security forces. That’s why we fully endorse the recent moves to increase police presence in some of our most crime-infested areas.

Trouble is, there aren’t enough police personnel to go around. It’s one of the more illogical aspects of our peculiar society that despite having by far the biggest crime problem, Jamaica has one of the lowest police-to-population ratios in the Caribbean.

Hopefully that problem will be resolved over time. Since we are realists we know it won’t happen overnight. That’s why we believe that the army has to take a more active role in combating criminals — not just by their presence on the streets but in terms of the power to independently act, search and detain in specified circumstances and areas.

This newspaper believes the nation must now accept that criminals have declared war and that we must respond in any way we can. It cannot be business as usual.

A major difficulty is that the Government, which is mandated to lead, is rapidly losing credibility. It is sending flawed and confused messages. This newspaper fears that by its peculiar stance in the current extradition disagreement with the United States, Mr Bruce Golding’s Government is in fact empowering the crime syndicates and undermining the work of the security forces as well as the trust that is needed for international anti-crime partnerships.

The Government needs to backtrack and do the right thing regardless of the consequences.