MONTEGO BAY, St James — As the parish continues to bleed, divisional commander for the St James police, Senior Superintendent Eron Samuels, remains confident that his team can keep the number of murders below the 58 recorded last year.

“We are putting more activities in place and we definitely will see the numbers trending back in the right direction,” Samuels assured Thursday’s regular monthly meeting of the St James Municipal Corporation.

Last year’s 58 murders was an impressive decline from the 124 murders the parish recorded in 2024 and Samuels set an internal target of 50 or fewer for this year, a goal he shared during January’s meeting of the local authority.

Midway through the year, murders are already at 34, compared to 23 for the comparable period last year – a 47.8 per cent increase.

Samuels said domestic issues continue to be a problem for the division even as the cops work to combat other challenges that also lead to homicides.

“In our breakdown we are continuing to see an increase in our interpersonal murders which now stand at 12, 11 [are] gang related, nine criminal, and two not yet determined,” he revealed.

Samuels told the meeting the police are putting strategies in place to stem the bloodletting, in particular those related to domestic conflict.

“We are trying to push as much community policing [as possible] within the space, trying to see how best we can have the members of the public who come to us with disputes [recommended] to the Disputes Resolution Foundation and to see how best we can ensure that they find ways to rectify these disputes that they’re having,” Samuels said.

As it relates to an overall crime strategy, he said there is an increased focus on several problematic areas across the parish.

“We have some hotspots that we are indeed spending a lot of time in. The Orange space is one, the Barrett Town space, we still have some surveillance activities in the Flanker community, we are very potent in the town centre, and we are doing some restructuring of our operations in the space,” he explained.

The St James police head pointed to the community of Retirement which has recently been in the news.

“We had some flare-ups in that space; we had two murders coming out of a conflict in that space over scrap metal,” Samuels said.

On Wednesday, four men were fatally shot during an alleged confrontation with members of the security forces said to be carrying out targeted operations in the area. On Thursday, Samuels called for greater support as he and his team work to rein in crime within the parish.

“This requires the support of all members in this room — all the councillors, all the stakeholders — as a lot of the issues are not just policing issues, they are directly related to on-the-ground issues within the communities,” he said.

Once burdened with the well-earned moniker of the bloodiest policing division, St James shed that reputation last year after three other divisions had more murders on record than it did. However, so far this year, St James is back as the bloodiest division, followed by the St Andrew South where 22 murders have been recorded so far.