CMOC’s stakeholders upbeat on plans to update the 2020 Consensus

The two-year-old Crime Consensus Monitoring and Oversight Committee (CMOC) agreements are to be updated and refreshed, and are expected to incorporate a wider cross section of stakeholders. This was prompted and initiated following a series of meetings in recent months with the Minister of National Security Dr Horace Chang.

This was announced by Lloyd Distant Jr, chairman of CMOC, at its recent press briefing.

The proposed changes to the 2020 Consensus received strong verbal support from representatives of private sector stakeholders, those from the Jamaica Council of Churches and the Jamaica Umbrella Group of Churches, as well as some of the signatory NGOs at the press briefing. Representatives of several of Jamaica’s international donor partners such as the European Union and others from Canada and the United Kingdom were also in attendance at the press briefing.

At the event, CMOC’s executive director Col Oral Khan advised that the relevance of the Consensus to all Jamaicans had been bolstered with several other groups indicating a desire to join the monitoring organisation as stakeholder partners.

In a message read at the press briefing, Opposition Spokesman on National Security, Senator Peter Bunting, affirmed that the Opposition participated in a preliminary review of the proposed updates to the Consensus and had a high-level of comfort with most of the items identified in the updated document. He also reiterated the Peoples’ National Party’s ongoing commitment to the principles of the Consensus.

The CMOC chairman noted that, since the initial meetings with the Minister of National Security, CMOC has had engagements with all its signatory stakeholders and has received overwhelming support from those who have reviewed the more extensive proposed updates for refreshing the Consensus.

Distant pointed out that in the early sessions with Dr Chang, the national security minister suggested that CMOC should consider including key priorities identified by the Government of Jamaica as a main focus.

The CMOC chairman said one of the drivers of changes to the 2020 Consensus was that the document now included a focus on short-term measures for the reduction of violent crime, instead of only medium- to long-term initiatives that would deliver a sustainable reduction in crime, violence and corruption. Therefore, the updated document was expected to include a focus on programmes to expedite reduction in violent crimes.

In addition, the updated Consensus is to include: brought forward outstanding and unachieved items from the initial agreement, such as the fact that to date, 11 of the 31 targets due to have been completed by the end of December 2022 have been satisfactorily achieved. Four have had their timelines reset; 10 are in red because their timelines have been missed without satisfactory justification; four are recorded in amber as they are lagging and likely to miss the agreed timelines, while two are in green because they are on track to meet their deadlines.

The updated Consensus is also to increase its focus on monitoring impact or outcome-related metrics, such as reporting on improved efficiencies in the Jamaica Constabulary Force, as a result of the investments in the transformation of that organisation.

Another transition will be to move from the milestone-related metrics used for several of the Consensus deliverables to a more performance-oriented metric. An example being the Public Bodies and Management Act regulations, where the focus should now be on implementation, and measuring the transition of government boards to being in compliance with the new regulations.

“This review is timely and should have been expected. Times change, conditions change, the environment within which we live and operate change – so its only natural that we must revisit the Consensus to ensure it remains relevant for Jamaica”, said Rev Newton Dixon, secretary general of the Jamaica Umbrella Group of Churches.