Dear Editor,

The urgency of now dictates that there must be immediate, massive, and clinical social interventions from the State and its partners to stem the level of criminality now enveloping sections of our society.

For a country to be seeing these high levels of murders and other heinous crimes on such a consistent basis is cause for great concern, and an even greater concern as it was only a couple months ago the Government was given a landslide consecutive mandate at the polls.

There is always a direct link between the effectiveness of social interventions and crime levels in developing countries like Jamaica. However, for social interventions to be effective in getting the proverbial monkey of criminality off the back of Jamaica, land we love, our political leaders who wield tremendous power must, first, come to the realisation that only effective social interventions targeting vulnerable communities, demographics and social groups will result in reducing crime.

In this era of the world’s worst pandemic, we are seeing a rise in rural and inner-city poverty, which will ultimately lead to further increase in criminality unless something is done to dramatically reverse the frightening situation.

Our leaders, especially those in Government, must therefore remove the politics from Government’s social programmes, cut out corruption, and use the money saved from reduced corruption to increase funding of the needed social programmes.

All 63 constituencies have very strong pockets of crime and battle its attendant effects. If these constituency leaders make meaningful social interventions to stem crime in those pockets we would have gone a far way in reducing the grasp of the crime monster.

But, as we all know, it is in their best interest to have those pockets in that level of social abyss to maintain their local political power.

The evil that men do live after them, so with crime control out of the hands of those who are empowered to stem it, decades from now another writer will be writing a similar article like this one.

Fernandez Smith

Former Jamaica Labour Party councillor

fgeesmith@yahoo.com