SANTA CRUz, St Elizabeth — Two house break-ins, a hold-up at a bar, a robbery, and a shooting that left a man with abdominal wounds may seem far less than catastrophic for many in Jamaica’s high-crime environment.

But for those served by the Malvern Police Station in dozens of districts across the Santa Cruz Mountains, the incidents earlier this month represented a crime wave of seismic proportions.

Also, for residents at a well-attended community meeting with police in Malvern last Wednesday night, the mid-January crimes were even more worrying when viewed against the backdrop of armed robbers killing two locals in the early hours of April 13 last year.

Back then the hoodlums committed murder while fleeing traditionally peaceful Malvern, after a pre-dawn crime spree including the theft of poker boxes and the sexual assault of a bartender.

They ended up shooting and killing a man who was among a group of enraged citizens chasing them; as well as another man, a farmer, who was on his way to his field and merely happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Educator Janice Simpson, a long-time resident of Malvern, told the Jamaica Observer she used to feel free to stay at work at nearby Hampton School until after dark. Now, she leaves the school by 5:00 pm “… because you never know what might happen”.

She added: “Malvern is usually very quiet but with all that has been happening, it [crime] jumps out at you.”

Councillor for the Malvern Division, Donald Simpson (Jamaica Labour Party) observed that while “the numbers [crimes] are not astronomical, the community is not accustomed to this sort of thing”.

For chief of police in St Elizabeth, Superintendent Kenneth Chin the recent meeting in Malvern presented an opportunity to emphasise community policing as a strategy of choice.

“The community is the police… you are the police,” Chin told his audience in the church hall of Malvern New Testament Church of God, recently.

In fact, he said, under Jamaican law “citizens can make an arrest” by restraining a wrongdoer while awaiting the arrival of the police, without resorting to unnecessary violence or disorderly conduct.

An upbeat Sergeant Debra Smikle, sub-officer in charge of the Malvern Police Station, told the Observer that she intended to build on the gains from the meeting.

Efforts, she said, would be redoubled to rebuild neighbourhood watch groups and to work with “stakeholders to resurrect police youth clubs”, which had gone dormant due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We have to be determined and show that we need to break ground for a positive way forward. We want residents to put out their ideas, and we [police] must give feedback,” she said.

That message urging police and community to join hands is one Chin has been trumpeting since his arrival in St Elizabeth in mid-2022.

At the monthly municipal corporation meeting earlier this month he credited what appeared to be a trending down of major crimes parish wide — in late 2022 and early January, and in sharp contrast to Malvern — to the support of the St Elizabeth public.

“The good citizens of this parish deserve credit for some of these reductions,” he said then.

Taken as a whole, 2022 was very testing for crime fighters in St Elizabeth with 39 murders, up by 12 from 2021. Also, a number of high-profile armed robberies highlighted a 35 per cent increase in major crimes.

Yet, the Malvern area and a few other communities apart, 2023 appears to have started well for the St Elizabeth police with just one murder .

A major feather in the cap was the arrest for murder of the parish’s most wanted, Dwayne Morris, also known as Sharkie, in early January. Chin said Morris had been tracked for some time by the police “and after we deployed our resources [he] surrendered himself within half an hour of that operation”.

According to Chin, active gangs which had largely spurred the murder surge had been brought to heel by the end of 2022.

“For the first part of the year there were groups [gangs] operating between Spring Park, Vineyard, and Speculation [south-western St Elizabeth],” he told journalists at a briefing in Black River recently.

“They gave us a lot of murders last year. We were able to take some decisive police action [and] those groups have been dismantled…,” Chin claimed.

But the police will not relax because, according to Chin, “notwithstanding the main players are no longer a factor … we know [the possibility] for others to come up is real”.

Again, he said, the police will be relying on community outreach programmes “… to get into the minds of the youth … and we also want to engage [residents] to develop a culture … [involving] the neighbourhood watch groups, the community groups, the business watch, the farm watch, and other activities that we can use to dissuade people from committing crimes”.

Based on crime figures in 2022, St Elizabeth’s main commercial centres of Junction, Santa Cruz and Black River would be getting special attention in 2023, said Chin.

He identified farm theft (praedial larceny) as a matter of growing concern given the need to encourage agriculture to ensure Jamaica’s food security.

It would help if farmers used a receipt system introduced years ago to facilitate legitimate transactions between farmers and buyers, he said.

Chin noted that illiteracy may be a reason some people are not writing receipts.

“However,” he said, “the fact is that the use of the receipt book is a legal provision. Farmers will have to find a way to ensure that they comply with the law because while we attempt to be very sympathetic, the fact is that you cannot be overly sympathetic if people are breaking the law. The only way we can [easily and readily] distinguish between legitimately bought goods and stolen goods is the receipt system,” said Superintendent Chin.

He pledged to increase efforts to determine the true extent of farm theft in St Elizabeth — given suggestions there is significant underreporting — and to improve police relations with farmers.

Chin, meanwhile, voiced satisfaction at efforts by the police to reduce domestic violence and tensions.

“We are seeing a 34 per cent decrease in aggravated assaults for 2022 and we are convinced that this is based on the interventions we have undertaken and continue to undertake to allow people to resolve their differences in an amicable manner,” he told journalists.

A continuing headache, however, is a shortage of police personnel across the parish. It’s an issue about which the police chief has spoken frankly in recent months.

As it is, the St Elizabeth police had set itself a target of a 10 per cent reduction in major crimes for 2023, Chin said.

“Ideally we would want to bring the figures down 30 per cent to get back to 2021 figures but without additional human resources it is just wishful thinking”, he said.

On the plus side, Chin said “we have engaged the JDF [Jamaica Defence Force] to improve military support” for police in St Elizabeth “within short order…”