(JAMAICA GLEANER) Government Senator Kerensia Morrison has urged Jamaicans overseas to help stem the murder rate in their homeland by stopping the shipping of guns into the country.
“Send us opportunities. Send us the school fees. Send the lunch money. Send the money to give youths a start. Do not send them murder in a barrel,” Morrison pleaded yesterday during the debate on the extension of the state of public emergency in sections of the Corporate Area.
The appeal follows the seizure of 26 guns, 640 assorted rounds of ammunition, and 42 magazines at the wharf in Kingston over a 24-hour period.
On Wednesday, the Contraband Enforcement Team and the Jamaica Constabulary Force’s Counter-Terrorism and Organised Crime Branch found a Uzi submachine gun, nine pistols, 640 bullets, and 26 magazines inside a barrel that also contained food items. Investigators say that the barrel had been shipped from the state of Georgia in the United States and was addressed to a man in Mona, St Andrew.
GUN FIND
The following day, the police, through its communications unit, revealed that 16 nine-millimetre pistols and 16 magazines were found at another section of the wharf. Investigators believe that both incidents are related.
“Who are sending these guns? We hear some Jamaicans who live abroad say, ‘Oh, we are afraid of coming back; Oh, there is too much killing’. Help us to fight crime. We do not want any guns in any food barrel,” Morrison insisted during her address to the Upper House.
She suggested that there has to be a partnership between local stakeholders and Jamaicans in the diaspora to help tackle criminality and the transshipment of guns and ammunition.
“We can’t do it alone,” she emphasised.
On September 23, Prime Minister Andrew Holness announced that a state of public emergency had been imposed in several communities across the Kingston West, Kingston Central, and the St Andrew Central police divisions.
The anti-crime measure was scheduled to end today but has been extended until January 7, following yesterday’s vote in the Senate. The extension was approved by the House of Representatives on Tuesday.
KINGSTON 16TH OF 50 MOST VIOLENT CITIES
Leader of Government Business Kamina Johnson-Smith, in her contribution to the debate, revealed that a recent report listed Kingston at number 16 on a list of the 50 most violent cities last year.
She did not name the report.
“Sixteen! This cannot be a statistic that we accept,” Johnson-Smith said.
She also pushed back at criticism from the Opposition that the Government was normalising the use of states of emergency as a crime-fighting tool.
One of those critics, Opposition Senator Donna Scott-Mottley, pointed out that the Holness administration had declared three states of emergency this year alone, compared with three over the last five decades.
According to Scott-Mottley, this erodes the shock-and-awe effect the measure was intended to have.
But Johnson-Smith said that her concern was “the very opposite”.
“My concern is that persons have so normalised the excessive state of violence that we have in this country that they do not recognise that the level and nature of criminal activity is so extensive that it endangers public safety,” she said.