Dear Editor,

Community policing initially involved residents who grouped together to guard and patrol the society. In recent times, community policing has embraced proactive, community-sensitive, and focused law enforcement. It tries to change the existing status quo and ideologies to be more responsive to the community.

The more rigid, traditional type of policing is changing to become more community-friendly by involving ordinary citizens, which is important to transforming both the formal and social organisation of law enforcement.

The discussion on community policing illustrates that it is an effective way of maintaining law and order. As a concerned Jamaican in the Diaspora, who has been visiting Jamaica with the idea of returning, my question to the minister of security and the prime minister is: What is preventing them from swiftly implementing community policing across the country and reducing the opportunities for crimes to be committed?

Community policing involves specific principles in its operations. One of them is controlling the people accessing the neighbourhoods, buildings, and businesses as well as carrying out surveillance on specific places to reduce any likelihood of crime.

The Government needs to tell us what makes it so incapable of establishing community policing that will create a more safe Jamaica for us all.

Elly Deedo

eleazarelliston@googlemail.com