Deputy Commissioner of Police (DCP) Fitz Bailey has expressed concerned about what he described as an increase in organised crime activities in St Elizabeth.

According to DCP Bailey, who heads the crime portfolio in the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF), “It is something we are actually paying attention to and we cannot overemphasise the influx of persons engaged in lottery scamming and other organised crime activities that we are seeing in the parish”.

DCP Bailey was addressing the monthly police press briefing held by Police Commissioner Major General Antony Anderson on Tuesday.

The commissioner also expressed concern about the increasing trend of murders, shooting and robberies in the parish which usually has less of those activities year-on-year.

Commissioner Anderson said he is working to address the matter, but called on the public to understand that there are hot spot areas, particularly in Kingston and St Andrew, St James and St Catherine, that require serious attention and manpower.

From January 1 to June 26 this year, St Elizabeth has recorded 20 murders, seven more than the corresponding period in 2021. Last year, the parish recorded five shootings over the same period but this has increased to 14 this year. Robberies also jumped from 12 last year to 34 over the corresponding period this year.

“What we have found is that as we have deployed resources into some of our traditional hot spot areas to bring those down, particularly in the Kingston Metropolitan Area and also in St James where we are starting to see the impact of it. We are going to have to do a similar sort of thing for Manchester and St Elizabeth. They generally enjoy low numbers of these things and all of a sudden we are seeing an increase.

“Obviously we can’t move assets from where they are, especially in these traditional hot spots because they are likely to flare up, we had to do some shifting around to deal with St Catherine north andsouth as we got gang flare-ups there. We had the emergency powers legislation there and with a few extra resources we were able to get that under control,” Anderson said in reference to a state of public emergency that was declared on June 17 and which came to an end July 1.

Anderson said there are some recruits who will be graduating soon and declared his intention to utilise them in shoring up divisions such as St Elizabeth and Manchester that are seeing and upsurge in crime.

“A lot of the planning is already taking place and it is really resourcing those plans that will allow us to start to see those areas coming back under control. We are halfway through the year and I suspect that by year end it should be back to being low crime divisions.

“Their previous success is reflected now as large increases but as I said, we are moving to address that. It is important that it is appreciated that where our hot spots are, if we leave them, we can see a very rapid increase in violence in these spaces. We will continue to work with the team in St Elizabeth. We just recently deployed some additional quick response persons in different divisions and we should see over the next few months, us bringing that back in line with expected trends,” the commissioner said.