Large portion of Westmoreland murders occur in area known for gang violence
Published:Monday | May 13, 2024 | 12:09 AMAlbert Ferguson/Gleaner Writer
WESTERN BUREAU
Sergeant Kenroy Easy, the sub officer at the Morgan Bridge Police Station, says 43 per cent of the 35 murders reported in Westmoreland since the start of this year were committed in Zone Two, an area known widely for gang violence.
Fifteen of those murders were committed within that jurisdiction of the Westmoreland Police Division, an operational space covering all the communities within the remit of the Morgan Bridge Police Station in Grange Hill and the Frome police station.
“The [Westmoreland Police] Division has recorded 35 murders since the start of this year [and] that is nothing to feel proud of,” Easy told stakeholders in Grange Hill Saturday night during a peace march against gang violence.
“The Zone Two area, that is Grange Hill and Frome, has recorded 15 of those murders and that is actually 43 per cent of the total number of murders within Westmoreland. This speaks volumes that we are not doing well at all,” the police sergeant argued.
The peace march, which followed several shooting deaths in the Grange Hill community, was led by Pastor Jahvayne Billings of the Grange Hill District of Seventh-day Adventist Churches under the theme, ‘A Fi Wi Community: Let’s take it back’.
The marchers entered the Grange Hill Square from different directions - namely Top Lincoln, Causeway and Sterling - piloted by the police in their service vehicles before converging inside the Marcus Whyte Transportation Centre next door the Morgan Bridge Police Station where representatives from the police, Child Protection and Family Services Agency, Centre for Investigation of Sexual Offences and Child Abuse (CISOCA), Restorative Justice and the HEART/NSTA, provided critical information to help transform the youths and their community.
Pastor Courtney Rose, executive of the West Jamaica Conference of Seventh-day Adventists was the keynote speaker.
Turf war
In March, Deputy Superintendent Shaunjay Mitchell, the commander for Zone Four in the division, which covers the areas of Negril and Little London, reported that a turf war was unfolding between the resurgent King’s Valley Gang and the emerging Ants Posse Gang.
Since then, the Grange Hill community has been a hotbed of gang violence, including death threats being issued against students in their communities.
In April, 16-year-old Grange Hill High School student Carson Barrett was killed and a female student shot and injured during a deadly attack by gangsters on Belle Isle Road in Grange Hill as they made their way home from sports day.
That incident has forced National Security Minister Dr Horace Chang to counter that threat with a caution to gangsters operating in the parish to lay down their arms and refrain from carrying out threats to kill several students from the Crowder community in Grange Hill.
“There are people in Crowder who are threatening to kill students from that area,” Chang said during a high-level security and education team visit to the Grange Hill High School and tour of the wider Morgan Bridge police area recently.
“I want to tell them, every single one who might be having such thoughts, we will find them, wherever they go (and) anyone that is a perpetrator in Grange Hill we are going to look for them, hunt them down and prosecute them,” the national security minister warned at the time.