We sense a degree of frustration in National Security Minister Dr Horace Chang’s announcement that the Government will be cutting funding for social intervention programmes because they are not working.

Readers will recall that Dr Chang voiced his disappointment with the programmes in September this year in an address to a violence prevention and peace-building symposium at Montego Bay Community College.

At the time, he said: “Every single social intervention measure that can be thought of has been done in St James; every single one has been active [yet the] homicide rate has moved from 12 per 100,000 to 182 per 100,000. Where is the success? I would like someone to show me.”

He also said that through different political administrations, “There has been no significant variation of social programmes [yet] there has been a constant rise in crime – and in 2017 we got to 182 per 100,000.”

Minister Chang said, too, that murders in St James escalated between 1997 and 2017, and the introduction of a state of emergency in 2018 was the only measure that curbed the trend when first introduced last year.

“There is nothing else that you can point to that has had any dramatic effect on the saving of lives in Montego Bay [and the wider St James] than the state of emergency. If anybody here can name me one other measure I will be very happy to hear,” he said.

A prescription advanced by Dr Chang to curtail crime in St James is to pump funding into two critical areas — schools and public health.

In that address, though, Dr Chang made what we thought was an interesting suggestion which, in the current heated debate, has not been addressed by the administrators of social intervention programmes.

“You need to change direction,” he said.

A month after that presentation, Dr Chang elaborated that thought in a column published in this newspaper.

“We can no longer rely on project-based interventions that are not inbuilt with the requisite parameters for continuity,” he argued. “We must, however, embark on an all-of-government approach in which the key ministries, departments and agencies work collaboratively within the identified communities. In this way, both the budgetary and human capital requirements will be duly accounted for, in advance, and within the framework of the national budget.”

Dr Chang, we believe, would have made a better case for his argument had he gathered data on the effectiveness of social intervention programmes, not just from St James alone, but from other sections of the island. However, it is difficult to dispute his position as, to our knowledge, the programmes don’t seem to have a sustainability element.

Surely, the administrators of the programmes must have thought to themselves that there was not an endless supply of the funding they receive. And, even if they were so assured, proper planning would have required them to have contingencies in place for any eventuality that would jeopardise that comfort.

Dr Chang has said that his reason for initiating this debate was not to negate the value and importance of social interventions. Rather, it was meant to create the context for objectively examining how we have gone about conducting these interventions over the years, and to rethink how to optimise the impact of interventions going forward.

He has a point. Our hope is that the debate will be frank, analytical, and lead to a solution that will redound to the benefit of the country.