THE POPULARITY of cellular telephones across the island has been hampering the success of Crime Stop, says Mike Hirst, Director of the National Crime Prevention Fund (NCPF).
Mr. Hirst, who was speaking at the eighth annual general meeting of the NCPF at the offices of the Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica (PSOJ) yesterday, said that Crime Stop has been receiving fewer calls from potential informants about criminal activity because many Jamaicans believe the cellular telephones now rapidly replacing the traditional call boxes do not offer adequate protection.
"People generally will phone to Crime Stop on an anonymous basis through a public phone ... The problem with the cell phone is that people believe that you can trace the call," explained Mr. Hirst.
Between August 1999 and July 2000, Crime Stop received a total of 1,042 calls but that number nose-dived between August 2000 and July 2001 to 720. The number of arrests made through the programme has also been affected by the dwindling number of informants. Arrests made by the police acting on information from Crime Stop informants fell from 100 between August 1999 and July 2000 to 83 between August 2000 and July 2001.
Mr Hirst explained that if Crime Stop were to get a toll-free number informants would no longer have to worry about the possible revelation of their identity. Acquiring this toll-free number, he noted, has been a task. He said the organisation applied to the Office of Utilities Regulation (OUR) to assist them in getting a toll-free 1-1 number assigned to Crime Stop but the application was rejected on the basis that there were no more available toll-free 1-1 lines.
He said that they have since appealed the rejection citing the importance of such a line to the Crime Stop programme.
Also discussed at the meeting was an education component of the programme geared at urging young people not to get involved in crime.
Pointing to the recent robbery of vendors in the Pearnel Charles Arcade in downtown Kingston, president of the PSOJ, Peter Moses, who indicated that he will not be contesting the presidency of the organisation in the coming year, highlighted the difficulty in curbing the wayward youth.
"It (the news of the robberies) was very disturbing ... there were 12-13-year-olds with handguns that basically went in and took over the market," said Moses. "We have eleven, twelve and thirteen-year-olds already basically holding to ransom people in the business community, it speaks a lot to the problems we're having," he added.
Mr. Moses said that any approach to deal with the growing crime problem among youth will have to involve more than just arresting them and putting them in jail. The action which Crime Stop is about to take will need to involve not just the police but the entire community.
"When 40 young people would seek to commandeer a market and the police basically at some point in time, according to one woman (in a news report) were, backing off because they say they couldn't match the weaponry of these people, it is frightening ... but it is the reality," said Mr. Moses.
