ROSE HALL, St James — Police Commissioner Dr Kevin Blake says he has been given a list of about eight concrete ways in which the Jamaica Constabulary Force and the Diaspora can work together. One is the building of community centres.

“We, the police, are competing with the gangsters for the hearts and minds of these children. We need them to be in places where they are secure,” he said, adding that some working parents are unable to provide adequate supervision.

“We’re looking at community centres, building facilities within the community where we get people to help people with children with homework. Get them occupied, remove that space that criminals may have to recruit children into these things,” the police commissioner added on Monday at a fireside chat during the 10th Biennial Jamaica Diaspora Conference being held in Montego Bay.

Blake did not list any of the other initiatives but said the list would be made available so that it can be shared with members of the Diaspora.

This may likely come at a meeting to which he has been invited in Florida. He did not give the date and time.

“I really hope that you can be there where we can explore a lot more of these [initiatives] and where we’re going,” he stated.

“I must warn you, it’s a two-and-a-half-hour presentation and so you’d have to be able to tolerate that — but it’s going to be a good opportunity. I look forward to speaking to members of the Diaspora on a more intimate basis in the different areas. There we can emerge with some strategies that we can develop together,” added the commissioner.

In his view, the best way to help the police is to help the communities they police.

“If the community infrastructure that should be there is there, then it makes our job that much easier. That’s why we deliver so many services, because there’s some void that we have to fill as police officers,” stated Blake.

To make his point he highlighted the work being done by the Social Transformation And Renewal Project (STAR) that was created by Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica (PSOJ) and the JCF. He said that in determining how the private sector could assist the JCF it was collectively decided that the best way to assist the police is to help communities.

He stressed that the JCF does not impose solutions.

“What we do is a session where we engage with communities to identify their problems, create a facilitating environment so that the solutions for those problems are derived from the communities, and then we help them to build community programmes. They develop their community plans and we help them in executing those plans,” Blake explained.

The commissioner noted that there is one element in the STAR project that JCF consistently insists on, and that is the need to leave tangible benefits from the social intervention within that community.

“Too often we have had social intervention where most of the funds and resources go to administrative costs, training some people, and leave. We insist that there must be economic viability — it doesn’t have to be finding jobs for people, but also creating entrepreneurial opportunities. There’s an entire arm of STAR that looks at economic development, job creation and stuff like that, and we insist on that,” argued Blake.

“It has been working wonders,” he said as he urged members of the Diaspora to get involved.

In addition to investing in tangible projects such as community centres, he also told those gathered for the first full day of the three-day event that they can assist the constabulary’s crime-fighting efforts by dispelling negative narratives about the country.

The conference, which is being held at Montego Bay Convention Centre in St James, has attracted 1,100 participants.