LITTLE LONDON, Westmoreland — The Government has been building airtight cases designed to catch the masterminds in the illegal importation of firearms, according to Prime Minister Andrew Holness.

“Too many illegal guns are coming through our legal ports. We know the people who are doing it. Yes, write that statement down; we know. But we are not going to go after one little person; our strategy is to take down networks — so when we act, we are bringing down entire networks,” he warned.

He was speaking during last Thursday’s ground-breaking ceremony for the Little London Police Station in Westmoreland.

“Before, the strategy was to deal on a street level just to get the man selling the gun. No, that is not who we really want. We want to get the customs officer who is facilitating the guns coming through the ports. We want to get the man that works in the bank that is allowing the currency to be transferred either into the country or out of the country,” said the prime minister.

In February this year, the Jamaica Customs Agency (JCA) was formally brought into the ‘Get Every Illegal Gun’ campaign, and in March the agency gave an update on the big bucks it had seized since April 2021, part of its role in the fight against money laundering and cutting the financial lifeline of transnational organised crime.

“We want to get the person who is hiding the guns, keeping them in the areas where they believe the police are not going to go. We want to get the policemen who are tipping people off,” Holness said to applause from those in attendance at the Westmoreland event.

The police began the year with a series of big gun finds, which the prime minister credited with an improvement in the security forces’ intelligence-gathering skills for the progress made so far. It is important, he said, to have solid evidence before moving on the masterminds.

“A lot of them believe that we don’t know. We know because we have improved our intelligence gathering and we are going to get them. But we don’t want to get them and don’t have evidence because, as you would be seeing, we are taking everyone to the courts, to the justice system. We are bringing evidence and these cases have to be airtight, they have to be strong, so, it takes time,” said Holness, who assured that the Government has a comprehensive strategy.

He pointed out that the country’s crime problem did not happen overnight and therefore it will take a while to fix.

The country’s annual murder figures moved from 400 at the beginning of the 1990s to more than 1,000 over the last couple of years.

“We are not going to correct this problem in one year or two years; it is going to take time and a concerted effort. And it is not as if we have all hands on deck or a national consensus; it would be much easier if we have a national consensus but the political divide creates a space in which criminals can flourish and plan their activities. We want to have a consensus and go hard on criminals and use all the tools, including the SOEs (states of public emergency), available so that we can truly bring down the crime problem,” Holness said.