What are the true figures in Trench Town?

THE EDITOR, Sir:

I find it difficult to accept what Mark Golding appears to be insinuating when he stated that the prime minister is making "allegations" in relation to the number of murders/shooting incidents that have taken place in Trench Town as he made the case for the extension of the state of public emergency covering that area.

These "allegations", he states, have hurt and offended the residents of Trench Town, who now have to deal with the stigma attached to the community.

If I remember correctly, the prime minister, in his statement to Parliament following the declaration of the Kingston SOE on October 2, 2018, expressed explicitly that it was not his aim to cast any stigma on the communities. His intent was simply to highlight the facts as they are, as a sort of why the SOE must be enforced.

There is a high level of violence in the community. It is not the goal of any leader of any country to single out and publicly shame any one section of its society.

What the residents of Trench Town can do in this instance is to take this information they now have and turn that perceived stigma into impetus to report crime and participate in the Government's crime-fighting agenda by providing information to the security forces when they have it.

A word to Mark Golding is that I refuse to accept that the prime minister deliberately and maliciously presented those statistics. I also fail to understand the disparity between the statistics presented by the prime minister and Mark Golding. I hope the Jamaica Constabulary Force acts very quickly to clarify this information.

T. REDWOOD