Westmoreland civic group labels SOE ‘a waste of time’

WESTERN BUREAU:

The leader of a civic group in Westmoreland has scoffed at the possibility that the state of emergency (SOE) declared for Westmoreland will be effective in taming the crime beast running wild in the parish.

“Jamaica’s state of emergency to me is just a waste of time because, at the end of the day, everybody is back to normal,” said Lyndon Johnson, president of the Westmoreland Neighbourhood Watch Council.

“I always have a problem with a state of emergency because at the end of it, you don’t reap any success,” he said in response to Prime Minister Andrew Holness on Tuesday declaring SOEs in six parishes, including Westmoreland, to curtail elevated levels of crimes, threats to property and public order being among them.

“Nobody going to jail, no guns are being found,” argued Johnson, whose Neighbourhood Watch Council organised and led a peace march against crime and violence in the parish on October 27, where it encouraged residents to talk out their differences instead of resorting to violence.

Holness said gang activities in the parishes where the SOEs have been declared are “cause for grave concern”.

“The underline threats are such that it will cause an increase in the number of murders and homicides that we see going into the next few weeks, and indeed we have seen an increase in murders over the last six months. What we are seeing with gang activities in these areas is cause for concern,” Holness told journalists at a press conference.

But Johnson argued that if the SOE is to be successful, the police and military personnel operating under its powers should adopt a different approach in removing guns and criminals from the communities under siege.

“I believe that states of emergency should be done community by community, and try to find these guns and the persons who are committing the crimes,” he told The Gleaner.

FRUSTRATED

Bishop Oneil Russell, a former violence interrupter with the Peace Management Initiative (PMI), argued that while he is frustrated with the social intervention arm of the ongoing zone of special operations in the northern end of Savanna-la-Mar, the Government has no choice but to use the SOE to put a lid on murders taking place in the parish.

“We have ZOSO in the parish and it seems like we have nothing because the murders continue with little gang wars here and there with the use of knives and machetes,” Russell noted.

“I personally was asking for an SOE for Westmoreland, even for seven days to really curtail the number of murders in this parish,” said Russell, who is also pastor of the Ark of the Covenant Holy Trinity Church headquartered in Savanna-la-Mar.

“We need something drastically, the parish is out of control in terms of murders. And if it [SOE] is going to help in any way to curtail the murder rate, I am in for it,” the clergyman said.

Businessman Moses Chybar has thrown his support behind the SOE as an interim tool, but stressed that it is not the solution to the escalation of crime and violence in the parish.

With approximately 130 cases of homicides recorded by the police in Westmoreland since January 2022, Chybar said the incidents of crime and violence have been much higher than usual, “so it remained a major concern to all of us”.

“Right now, we will support the state of emergency, the security forces, and the government initiative because all of us want to see crime and violence reduced and if possible down to zero,” Chybar said in support of the SOE.

“What we are hoping is that we can see meaningful strategies being employed to address the underline problems,” he said.