Head of the St Andrew South Police Division, Superintendent Damion Manderson is predicting that new commanding officer for the St Elizabeth police, Deputy Superintendent Coleridge Minto, will be a success in his new assignment.

The transfer of senior members of the St Elizabeth Police was announced last Friday, following a jail break at the Black River Police Station five days before. It emerged that Superintendent Kenneth Chin, who was in charge of the south-western Jamaica parish, would be transferred to St Andrew, while Minto, who had been assigned to St Andrew South, would replace him within days.

While Minto declined to comment on the transfer, Manderson expressed a bittersweet feeling, in that he was saddened to lose Minto as a member of his team in St Andrew South but happy that an opportunity had opened up for him in one of Jamaica’s most productive parishes.

“Sir Minto is the epitome of every police officer,” Manderson told the Jamaica Observer in an interview late Friday. “He is what you want in every police officer – committed to the cause and embarking on nothing unless he is giving his 100 per cent.

“I wish him all the best. I know this is upward and onward movement, and I dare say that I regret it, because I will miss him working on the team with us. But I know wherever he is planted, he will grow, and him being a few parishes away from us will not stop the relationship and the camaraderie.

“We will continue to support him. He is a young commanding officer and he will get the full support of not just myself but of the entire JCF [Jamaica Constabulary Force] apparatus to ensure that he succeeds wherever he goes,” Manderson said.

Being central to an initiative that saw the St Andrew South Police going into volatile communities and using gospel music as a tonic to try and quell crime and violence and bring about greater cooperation between the police and citizens, Minto’s absence would be enough to ask questions about continuity and efficiency.

Manderson was asked if he would encourage his departing colleague to examine the scene in St Elizabeth, with a view to introducing something similar there.

“I don’t have to tell him that, to be honest,” was Manderson’s swift response. “Mr Minto would have been in the Community Safety and Security Branch for years. He would have been working in the Safe Schools system for years, he knows exactly how to bring the communities together… how to work with the communities to foster peace. A parish like St Elizabeth is a community parish, where better to?

“I know that the fruit basket… will grow, he will bear fruit there,” Manderson said of his colleague.

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