MANCHESTER, Jamaica – With the festive season here, businesspeople in Manchester are being urged to cooperate with the police in maintaining law and order, including the provision of surveillance footage when crimes are committed in Mandeville.

Head of the Manchester police, Deputy Superintendent Carey Duncan, implored businesspeople at a recent Manchester Chamber of Commerce meeting to assist the police.

“When we go on these crime scenes and are doing our own investigations we find it very difficult for persons to assist us where we see clearly where cameras are in the areas and every time you get the excuse that cameras are not working, cameras not recording and all these different excuses,” he said at the Golf View Hotel.

“I am saying in Manchester in [being] serious about the business of fighting crime, this is something that can enhance our own investigative capabilities. So I am asking, I am imploring you when you can, to make your cameras available to us for viewing so that we can identify perpetrators and bring them to justice,” added Duncan.

Official figures from the police show 49 murders in the south central parish up to December 14, an almost 16 per cent increase over the 42 recorded for the same period last year. The parish has also recorded 44 shootings, almost 19 per cent above last year.

Duncan disclosed that over a dozen surveillance cameras on the JamaicaEye network are in need of repair in Mandeville.

“Of our 29 CCTV cameras that are in Mandeville , 15 are up and working, 14 are down,” he said.

“The JamaicaEye system, we are in constant dialogue with them. We know that these cameras will be up for the Christmas Season as a matter of fact there is a drive for an expansion of the CCTV cameras, so we expect to have them also in Spalding, Christiana and to lesser extent Porus in very short order,” he added.

He reiterated his appeal to the business community to support the police with monitoring the town.

“As a chamber, we are asking [for you] to assist us. In our township we have 29 CCTV cameras looking over Mandeville at some critical points. Whilst these cameras assist us tremendously in our crime fighting effort, there comes the time where something might happen in a space where the camera is either not working or we do not have a camera,” he said.

– Kasey Williams