Opposition commends the Commissioner for 1st Quarter decline in murders, bemoans years of failed SOE experiments costing lives

Kingston, Jamaica. March 31, 2025: The Opposition is publicly commending Commissioner of Police Kevin Blake, and the entire Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF), on the significant 35% reduction in reported murders for the first quarter of 2025.  Opposition Spokesman on Citizen Security remarked, “This performance demonstrates what the police can achieve with professional, targeted, and data-driven policing methods.  Relying primarily on the powers given to them under the JCF Act, the police are now substantially more effective in containing murders than when the wasteful and unproductive States of Emergency were being used as a serial and routine tool of policing.”

The PNP’s principled stance in not supporting the 90-day extensions, together with the various court challenges by us and others, have curtailed the use of SOEs since 2023.  The few declarations since have been short-lived and merely performative.

We bemoan the unnecessary loss of life that occurred during the years when the JLP administration stubbornly refused to abandon the SOE policy.  This resulted in 2,300 more murders occurring (a 25% increase) than if they had even just maintained the average annual number of murders that the JLP administration inherited from the previous PNP administration. Consequently, Prime Minister Andrew Holness now holds the dubious distinction that more Jamaicans have been murdered under his leadership than in two terms under any previous Prime Minister.

Finally, the PNP notes with skepticism media reports that Minister “Chang now a big supporter of social intervention programmes”.  This JLP administration discontinued or defunded all the flagship social intervention programmes which they inherited in 2016 – the Unite for Change initiative, the Citizen Security and Justice Programme (CSJP), and the Peace Management Initiative.  These actions were accompanied by repeated statements around the ineffectiveness of such programmes by Dr. Chang.  Now that elections are imminent, Dr. Chang and the Prime Minister have suddenly ceased seeking to imitate authoritarian leaders and are now shamelessly copying the PNP’s approach of balancing crime control with crime prevention through social investments.