The Jamaican Opposition is expressing alarm at a spike in murders over the past three weeks, during which 113 people have been killed at a rate of 5.4 per day.

In a statement Monday night (June 28), the People’s National Party (PNP) stated that murders have increased by 5.5 per cent year-to-date, when compared with 2020, with a number of police divisions having increases in the order of 50 per cent.

Senator Peter Bunting, opposition spokesman on national security, said: “What is particularly disappointing is that only a few weeks ago I acknowledged in the Senate that the JCF (Jamaica Constabulary Force ) was seeing better results in violent crime this year relative to last year, and without the states of emergency.”

He added: “At the time, murders were down two per cent year to date. Has someone dropped the ball to have such a
sharp and sudden deterioration?”

Demanding that Minister of National Security Dr Horace Chang explain what has precipitated the spike and “outline the measures being taken to mitigate the spike”, Bunting stressed that the zone of special operations established in Norwood, St James, last week could not be the mitigating measure as St James accounts for only five of the recent 113 murders.

According to the PNP, the Opposition “is concerned that critical data necessary for stakeholders to assess the crime situation continues to be withheld by the JCF. For example, the breakout of the victims of murder among males, females, and children is no longer provided”.

The party added: “Similarly, there is no data on sexual offences against children. These figures were previously provided on a weekly basis by the JCF for over a decade. The Opposition finds this perplexing as violence against women and girls has been a recent topic of national discourse and media reports of these incidents suggest they are on the increase.

“Similarly, all categories of arrests are now reported as one figure instead of separating: Arrests with evidence under the Firearms Act; Arrests with evidence under the Dangerous Drugs Act; or arrests under the DRMA.”

The PNP argued that stakeholders deserve to know whether the reported increase in arrests corresponds to more violent criminals being taken off the streets for gun offences, or whether it is delinquent party goers arrested
for breaking curfew.

Said Bunting: “We have been calling for greater transparency from the Ministry of Security and the JCF, and in particular, to return to the well-established practice of issuing detailed crime data to the key stakeholders. Suppressing statistics on how many women and children are affected by violent crime, and on the categories of arrests, represents a deliberate and clumsy attempt to obfuscate the data.”

He said Chang and Police Commissioner Major General Antony Anderson must understand that suppressing crime statistics will not lessen public fear and that public confidence would only be restored by fixing crime through a professional and transparent JCF.