POLICE Commissioner Major General Antony Anderson delivered a morale-boosting address to members of the constabulary on Tuesday morning, praising them for “outstanding work” last year and charging them to raise the bar on that performance in 2024.

“The sort of work I saw our officers put out made me proud to be in charge of you for the time that I am. And putting out that kind of effort bodes well for the future of the force, and for 2024 all we need to do is keep it going — [we] can’t stop now,” General Anderson said at his annual devotion held inside the conference room at the police commissioner’s office in St Andrew.

“The year had many big pieces that came together over 2023. There were challenges, but every single challenge is an opportunity, and I think we leveraged those opportunities collectively [so] that in the end we moved the force ahead in a significant way,” Anderson said.

The devotion, held under the theme ‘Celebrating 156 Years of Advancements in People, Quality and Technology’, was streamed on the JCF’s YouTube channel.

General Anderson said he wants members of the JCF to feel revved up about what was accomplished last year, adding that for 2024, “there’s nothing stopping us; we’ve been laying the foundation. We have a good, solid foundation on which to jump off of to get great things done”.

“We’re going to continue doing what we do. We’re going to continue building out our capacity… for ultimately, it boils down to what each individual contributes to the whole. When everybody is contributing and know that they are contributing their best, there’s no stopping us, there’s absolutely no stopping us; it’s only if some people decide not to do that that we start getting challenges,” he said.

The commissioner said he is also pleased that the JCF is finally getting to a position where citizens are starting to ask the police to support them in ways that they never did before.

“Some of those ways are not even really core business of policing. We’re becoming that go-to organisation when you have a challenge; when you have a problem or you want knowledge, you want information, go to the JCF — that is significant,” he said.

He noted that one activity which endeared the JCF to the public during 2023 was its inaugural expo which, for the first time, “exposed our public, in a massive way, to what the JCF is”.

“Of course, what that did for us is set up a bar of expectation from our public that what they saw there is what they expect. The people they interacted with and how they interacted, that’s what they expect going forward, and rightly so, and I believe that that expectation is well-founded and we can deliver that,” he said.

“That was not just a show that we put together to talk about the potential of the JCF, what we did was put together a show of the existing JCF. Nothing there that we had is not in use. Everything is in progress but, most importantly, we got the chance to show off our members, some of our young members — bright people who have decided to make policing a career,” Anderson said.

He said that as members seek to build and grow the force from strength to strength, they should fly the flag of the JCF high and provide the best-quality service to the public.

“You determine how we are all seen. It’s how do we make the people we serve feel? Do they feel safe? Do they feel secure? Do they feel better for seeing us? When they’re having that bad day and they see the JCF or some symbol of the JCF — some vehicle, some person, some uniform — do they feel better for that? That’s what we need to aim for, and the way we do that is that when we see a problem, when we see somebody in need, we step out and step up,” he said.

“So my charge in 2024 is for each of us to step outside of ourselves and see how we can do our best in our role as police officers and members of the JCF. And if we do that, then we must have a better force and, by extension, a better Jamaica,” the top cop said.