ALL divisional police headquarters will, by March 2023, be equipped with electronic station diaries as the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF) continues its programme to rid police stations of physical cumbersome “big books” normally used to record reports, complaints, and administrative entries.

This was announced by Prime Minister Andrew Holness, who gave an update on the implementation of the JCF’s Station Records Management System which started in April with the Harbour View Police Station in the Kingston Eastern Division. He was speaking at Wednesday’s Passing Out Parade and Awards Ceremony at the National Police College in St Catherine

Holness said the system “is a very powerful change to the JCF because it gives the JCF a new tool for immediately making connections, immediately tracking and immediately analysing crime data”, noting that the Government started rolling out the system in three of the 19 divisional headquarters which include Kingston Eastern, St Andrew Central and St Andrew South.

The prime minister said that with introduction of the records management system, “the JCF is transforming before our very eyes,” and is now implementing something that has been talked about for years and which has been developed using the internal skills of the JCF.

“For over a decade, radio commentators, politicians, academics have been speaking out about the lack of integration of technology into the operations of the JCF and what they usually point to is when you go to a station, you go into the reception area and you have to give a statement, the officer on duty takes up a book, it could very well be the book of life and searches through the pages for space and in long hand, oftentimes in excruciating detail, write out a statement and this has been a practice of the JCF…for 150 years of existence,” he said.

Speaking during his contribution to the 2022/23 sectoral debate in Parliament in June, National Security Minister Dr Horace Chang had explained that every station has 19 of the big books to manually input various important data, including records relating to prisoners, assets and vital legal documents.

Later, speaking with the Jamaica Information Service (JIS) after participating in a live demonstration of the new electronic system at the Harbour View Police Station on June 9, Dr Chang said it is part of the upgrade and the digitisation of the JCF to improve efficiency, and admitted that its implementation “should have been done a long time ago”.

“I know it will bring significant improvement to policing in all areas, including tracking down the murderers,” he said then.

— Alecia Smith