The crime treadmill has again been plugged in and Jamaica is once more walking a road that all decent and law-abiding citizens fear will lead to more bloodshed and a derailment of the country’s efforts to attain meaningful economic growth.

So brazen are the mindless killers that even as Prime Minister Andrew Holness, accompanied by National Security Minister Robert Montague, Police Commissioner Dr Carl Williams, Chief of Defence Staff Major General Antony Anderson, and other officials toured sections of St James plagued by an upsurge in violence, on Sunday, two people were shot in Farm Heights.

Later, news emerged from the parish that gunmen attacked players while a football match was in progress.

It seems as if there is no clear end in sight for this disregard for law and order and total lack of respect for life.

On Sunday, after his tour, the prime minister said that the Government will establish a Coast Guard post in Montego Bay, essentially to give more support to the country’s efforts to combat the guns-for-drugs trade. Mr Holness also announced that more police personnel will be assigned to that city and its outlying communities, while the Government will move to fast-track legislation designed to help the security forces deal more effectively with this scourge.

Prime Minister Holness correctly pointed out that these strategies will not reap success overnight. What will be important, though, is that the Government acts on them with dispatch. At the same time, the Administration, we believe, needs to place greater effort in equipping the country’s law enforcement agencies with more advanced technology that can give them better results through intelligence-led policing.

No one can deny the argument put forward by Mr Garry Sinclair, of telecommunications company FLOW, that the use of a wider range of connectivity solutions to support real-time intelligence gathering will help in the reduction of crime and, ultimately, the maintenance of social order.

Indeed, Mr Sinclair, in an address to an ‘Intelligence-Led Policing’ Conference staged by the constabulary at the Jamaica Pegasus hotel sometime ago, suggested that a good start in this venture would be to get all police stations and departments connected to a central intelligence database using a range of telecoms services.

It is a suggestion that, if not yet implemented, even in part, should be given serious attention by the State, for there is no challenging the effectiveness of that approach to crime-fighting. Indeed, such a system, we expect, would incorporate the advantages of closed-circuit television (CCTV) which, we hope, will be utilised on a wider scale here, having already been introduced in May Pen, Mandeville and Montego Bay.

We are encouraged by the fact that the Government, like its predecessor, has committed to mounting more CCTV systems across the island. That cannot happen too soon, especially given the actions of criminals in recent weeks.

The fear of being caught and prosecuted is, we believe, one of the best deterrents to crime. If the police, with the help of CCTV footage, are able to collect evidence to aid in prosecution, they will, no doubt, hold an advantage in combating this unrelenting crime problem in a more serious way.