The Minister of National Security Dr Horace Chang, we believe, is possessed of the gravitas, backed by overwhelmingly impressive crime statistics, to command the fullest support of the Cabinet for the seven-year-old JamaicaEye surveillance network.

We are, of course, aware that for the political class nothing takes priority over winning an imminent general election. However, the Administration might consider that a stronger JamaicaEye network would help to lock in the spectacular drop in murders and other major crimes — a legacy achievement with which it is inevitably associated.

The minister should not therefore appear to be timid or shy about demanding greater resources for the surveillance programme, which is an absolute companion tool for the yeoman efforts being made by the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF), and in keeping with the expectations of the crime-weary populace.

When the network was launched, with great fanfare, in March 2018 the promise was that Jamaica would have been completely covered by the national closed-circuit television system that incorporates feeds from public cameras and allows registered private citizens to share footage from their cameras with local authorities, free of cost.

The system was aimed at utilising digital imagery to detect and deter criminal activity, as well as help in the detention and arraignment of offenders.

It therefore came as a shock, as late as December 2024, to hear Dr Chang’s confession that the system was merely hobbling along because of a shortage of maintenance personnel to handle failing cameras.

As it was underfunded, so was it understaffed, the minister admitted.

In other words, in six years, no preventative maintenance capability had been developed or acquired. That meant that the millions of taxpayer dollars spent to buy and install cameras went to complete waste.

“The reality is that maintenance is a problem. Since we have gone digital with the telecommunications system nobody in the country has an effective islandwide technology maintenance system,” said Dr Chang at the time.

The shift from analogue to digital technology had presented difficulties because the country lacked trained technicians to manage the new system, and there was no national body with a full maintenance programme, [so] there are a significant number of cameras that are down,” he disclosed.

We note that even though the Government was said to be “far advanced in outsourcing the maintenance service to a local company [in 2024]”, Dr Chang was unable or unwilling to report on any progress in this direction when he announced in April that Cabinet had approved his ministry’s Strategic Master Plan to expand JamaicaEye.

After seven years, the best the minister could tell the nation in his contribution to the 2025/26 Sectoral Debate is that the Master Plan will roll out an additional 2,500 cameras islandwide over a three-year period. Nothing about the critical maintenance service programme. Nothing about how the system, as it is, was performing. Nothing suggesting that we are any farther down the road than we were in 2024.

Dr Chang must use his considerable political capital from the good work of the police under his watch to spur the Cabinet into action, or let the country know what is the obstacle in his way. The tools and personnel necessary to undergird this significant instrument in the crime fight must be fuelled and funded.