A member of the Crime Monitoring and Oversight Committee (CMOC) on Friday argued that violence-prone communities have become so segregated over many years that efforts to improve them are extremely difficult.

Additionally, Milton Tomlinson, CMOC’s community representative, accused politicians, who have major influence in these communities, of doing very little to unite them.

Tomlinson made the comments during a CMOC town hall meeting at which the committee’s Chairman Lloyd Distant gave a stinging assessment of social, community, and cultural programmes, saying that a number of them have not been fruitful.

“What we used to know as communities are not communities any more” but streets and lanes operating in silos, Tomlinson argued at the town hall meeting held at the offices of the Jamaica Chamber of Commerce on Half-Way-Tree Road in St Andrew.

“One street in a community is now seen as a group. Let us say that you have community X; you also have Y street, J lane and G avenue — and each one of them takes on the identity of a community within a community,” Tomlinson said.

“We need to get back that sense of a whole community. When you go into these places and talk to residents of one avenue and you tell them you want to go around further in the community, they tell you ‘No’, and that this is their side of the community and over there is different. It is important that you work together to make things happen for the entire space, but they don’t see it that way,” he said.

“Everyone is positioning themselves for spoils, and the people that can help best are our politicians. At one point Denham Town was in four or five different pieces; August Town was also in different pieces. These communities need to have people working together. Politicians are the ones who can move 100 people at any time. They are the ones who come in with the spoils. They are the ones who can say, ‘Let us get everybody from the community to the centre,’ ” Tomlinson said.

Distant, in his comments, said it was crucial for the National Commission on Violence Prevention to ensure that implemented programmes actually have impact. He pointed to $380 billion being spent on social, community, and cultural programmes and said there is no data and monitoring evaluation framework of the heavy spending that goes towards these programmes that don’t work.

“Let us spend the money on programmes that work. It is very clear to us there was just not enough empirical evidence to measure the programmes that were being implemented, and as you go through, how do you say here is a framework for a programme that works; and once the programme works, we actually now want to take that working programme and replicate it elsewhere,” he said.

“A Caribbean Policy Research Institute study identified that there are a few that work. While we can’t validate the veracity of some of the data, it does appear, from all intents and information, that there are some useful impact,” Distant said.

He argued that the Citizen Security Plan Secretariat needs a body that can coordinate how all the ministries, departments and agencies work when they go in a community.

“There might be one large community but within that larger community there is a fragmentation, so our approach has got to be a collective approach that brings everybody into the fold,” said Distant.

The panellists acknowledged that while the violence prevention commission, which did not have a representative at the town hall meeting, needs to assess and clearly state what community programmes are working, the agencies that are doing the implementation have a good enough feel of what has worked and what has provided some amount of impact. They also suggested that the agencies continue the work until the rest of the framework gets into place.