MONTEGO BAY, St James — Councillor Michael Troupe (People’s National Party, Granville Division) has thrown his “full support” behind a suggestion by minister of state in the Office of the Prime Minister Homer Davis for a sit-down between police and gangsters to curtail crime in St James.

According to Troupe, compromising may be the answer to the parish’s spiralling crime rate.

“I am in support of what Homer Davis is saying because sometimes you have to compromise certain things to get certain things. One of the things we are not doing in the parish of St James and maybe even the wider Jamaica, is that we are not using some people who can have much greater influence than the police themselves,” Troupe argued at Thursday’s regular monthly meeting of the St James Municipal Corporation after being questioned on his reason for supporting Davis’ suggestion.

“I am just saying that the police need to bring all stakeholders and sit around the table, including the dons,” Troupe told the Jamaica Observer after the meeting.

Davis, a Jamaica Labour Party politician who is also Member of Parliament for St James Southern, made the proposal at a function in Montego Bay last Saturday against the background of police statistics showing that between January 1 and June 6 this year, a total of 104 people were murdered in St James, 26 more than the corresponding period in 2021.

“I am really agonising over how we intercede with the gangs that are really creating havoc in our space. I have a thought process… I think if we can get the combatants, the leaders of these groups, gangs together and put them in a space and say, ‘Listen, tell me now where are you fighting for. Tell me what do you want, what do you need? What can we do to appease you?’” Davis said.

On Thursday Troupe said the St James police should look into Davis’ suggestion as not all dons are involved in criminal activities.

“There are some people who are dons and are not necessarily gunmen, but they have some amount of respect in particular communities. Every councillor is a don because they control a particular division and every MP is a don because they control the constituency, so you have people you can talk to who have the influence in the particular spaces,” Troupe told the Observer.

“I am in charge of Granville, so I am influential in Granville. Every community has somebody who is highly influential…so we need to have a summit with community leaders,” added the Opposition councillor.

Troupe said that he had been begging for this strategy to be implemented by the police in St James for over six months.

“About six months ago I called on the mayor to arrange a summit with all the stakeholders, so we can meet like this. Even to meet with the gang leaders, I am prepared to do that because what is happening in St James [we] cannot allow it to continue. Even the baby fraid. Something want to shake up. I don’t know what, but it cannot continue like this,” Troupe said.

However, Councillor Dwight Crawford (Jamaica Labour Party, Spring Garden Division) believes that a strategy involving the educational system should be implemented.

“I do not have any desire of meeting with any gang leaders, what I am interested in seeing…is we stop the barrel when it is on the top of the hill. We are trying to stop it when it is halfway down the hill, so we are faced with a really difficult task. If we had started at the beginning, it would have been easier to control the problems,” Crawford said.

“I’d like to see representatives from the Ministry of Education and the schools coming into this room and telling us what their challenges are. Getting us as the representatives involved in dealing with the problems before they graduate to the level that they have graduated to now,” the councillor added.

“The problems we are dealing with never started this morning. We have been [seeing] on social media where children are carrying knives to schools and all kinds of things happening,” he said.