Trouble in West Kingston This Time

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Denham Town locked down - Empty streets, classrooms after four killed
published: Thursday | November 9, 2006

Glenroy Sinclair, Senior Crime Reporter


The empty streets, partially blocked roadways and tense atmosphere in the once lively community of Denham Town in west Kingston painted a grim picture of why more than 400 students were prevented from leaving their homes yesterday for classes at the St. Alban's Primary School on Albert Street.

Principal of the west Kingston school, Marjorie Hudson, told The Gleaner that only about 30 of 465 students enrolled showed up, after a night of sporadic gunfire which left a trail of blood across the community and several families mourning the deaths of at least four persons.

"The teachers turned out and found empty classrooms," declared Mrs. Hudson.

Bloody gunfight

Superintendent Delroy Hewitt, head of the West Kingston police division, told The Gleaner that five other persons, including two Jamaica Defence Force (JDF) soldiers, were shot and injured in what he described as a bloody gunfight between two groups of men in the Denham Town community.

The JDF soldiers' injuries were not serious but the other three persons were hospitalised.

"We have put things in place to protect the innocent residents," Supt. Hewitt said.

Two of the injured were charged and last night remained under police guard in hospital.

The St. Alban's Primary principal said students and teachers were traumatised and gripped with emotions Tuesday afternoon after seeing the body of 24-year-old Fabian Brown, who was murdered outside the gates of the school, minutes before classes were dismissed. The deceased was well known to the school community.

"Right now I am crying out for help. I need some counsellors to come in and talk with both the teachers and students. One of my best teachers who joined us in September is already saying that she is leaving," said Mrs. Hudson.

Brown was reportedly killed by another prominent member of the Denham Town community. The police said about 8:30 Tuesday night, a number of heavily-armed men invaded the Wellington Street and Nelson Street areas and began shooting indiscriminately in reprisal for that killing.

When the smoke cleared three bodies were found at separate corners of the community. The bodies of Patrick Davis, alias 'Long Head', and an unidentified man were found lying on Wellington Street. The body of a fourth man, who is also unidentified, was discovered on Race Course Lane in a mask.

Members of the security forces responded to the shootings and, according to police, a member of the JDF came across one of the gunmen wearing army fatigues.

The shooting is reportedly centred around an internal conflict between rival factions which has been on going since last April.

[Sinco01]

Re: Trouble in West Kingston This Time

Terror in Denham Town
Four shot dead, five injured
KERRY MCCATTY, Observer staff reporter
Thursday, November 09, 2006






A policeman stands guard at the spot in Denham Town yesterday morning where one of four men was shot dead Tuesday night. (Photo: Michael Gordon)

FOUR people were brutally cut down by heavily armed gunmen in Denham Town between Tuesday night and yesterday morning, in what the police said was a bitter gang feud in the tough West Kingston community.

Police and soldiers throughout yesterday and into last night had regular patrols in the troubled community as they tried to stem any further outbreak of gun violence in the impoverished inner-city community.

The police identified three of the dead as Fabian Brown of Charles Street, and Patrick Davis, alias Longhead, 43, and Cleveland Kelly, 42, of Dumphrey and Blunt streets in Denham Town. The other victim was not identified.

Brown was cut down on Charles Street, while Davis and Kelly were killed at the intersection of Nelson and Wellington streets, while the body of the fourth victim, the police said, was found on Race Course Lane.

Five others, including two Jamaica Defence Force soldiers who were part of a joint police/military patrol, were shot and injured in the Denham Town shootings. Two of the injured men, the Constabulary Communication Network (CCN) reported, were identified as gang members who fired on the security forces earlier. The men, whose names were not released, were held when they turned up at the University Hospital with gunshot wounds.

The CCN said a Ruger 9mm pistol, bearing serial number 31256916, and which was loaded with 12 rounds was seized by the police after it was dropped by one of the men who fired at the security patrol.

Yesterday, 300 school children from the Corporate Area, who had gathered at the Bethany Gospel Hall for Jamaica Child Evangelism Fellowship's World Day of Prayer, prayed for peace in Denham Town, after they were told that their counterparts from Denham Town could not spend the afternoon with them because of violence in that community.
And so the children prayed.

". Save our children from all this violence. heal our nation so that this crime and violence will stop dear Lord and cover us in your arms."

"Lord tell the gunmen to just put down the guns and realise they can't put breath into people. we just ask you to tellthem that killing is not a good thing," was the prayer of Vaz Preparatory's Tahaliea Thomas.

Head of the Kingston West police Superintendent Delroy Hewitt said the bloody feud might have started as far back as April this year when a man tried to break away from the main cell of a gang in the adjoining community of Tivoli Gardens area and tried to start an offshoot gang in the "Shooter's Hill" area of Denham Town.

"We still have a commitment to protect innocent people," Hewitt said yesterday.

The police theorise that the murder of Brown, who was believed to be a member of the offshoot gang, called Cowboy, could have led to the other shootings.

Yesterday morning, partially sun-dried blood marked the sidewalks at the intersection of Wellington and Nelson Streets where two of the men were shot dead. Only a few brave residents were seen milling around, a sharp contrast to the dozens of residents who are normally seen in these areas. Schools were, however, in session as the police did their usual patrols.

Residents said they hoped there would be no further violent outbreaks, but would not be surprised if any were to occur in the coming days.

A woman who said she was Davis' sister and gave her name as Paulette, said her brother was easy-going.

Another woman, who described herself as a close friend of Davis, said the deceased man was sitting on the corner among other people, playing with her daughter when a group of gunmen approached and opened fire.

"Mi nuh know a weh dem come from, 'bout 300 gunman wid black mask over dem face," the woman claimed. She said she grabbed her children, as she and others who were outside ran for cover.

Another resident, who said he had grown up seeing Davis and Kelly, said it was hard to tell whether those men were targeted as some of the gunmen suggested they should 'take' some women too. But others in the gang protested.

At the Jamaica Child Evangelism Fellowship's gathering, chairman of the board of directors Barrington 'Barry' Wignall said the children had a real concern about the violence in the society.

"That's a real concern and we are concerned about how our children are affected by the violence; some can't go out to school, Sunday school or Sabbath school, because they can't cross certain borders, it's horrible what's happening to our children," Wignall told the Observer.

- Additional reporting by
Alicia Dunkley

[Sinco01]

Re: Trouble in West Kingston This Time

Stop pussyfooting with crime

Henley Morgan
Thursday, November 09, 2006



Henley Morgan
I have a simple two-pronged strategy for dealing with the type of crime (localised civil war) that is currently raging in the corridor leading from the Norman Washington Manley airport to the capital city, and which with disturbing regularity rears its ugly head in Spanish Town and other garrison communities mostly across the Corporate Area. 1) Make crime cost , and 2) make peace pay.

Making crime cost the perpetrator is a deterrent strategy. It says to the would-be criminal the following: "To the extent that your actions are premeditated and are therefore a matter of personal choice, before you act, count what it is going to surely cost you in terms of the loss of your ill-gotten gains, your freedom and possibly your life."

There is a recommendation in the Report of the National Committee on Crime and Violence (June 11, 2002) that communicates this strategy in harder policing terms than any I have seen elsewhere. It deserves repeating.

"The JCF must complement the use of curfews with a standard procedure for cordoning and searching a community once violence has, in the judgement of the competent authority, escalated to crisis proportion. The procedure must involve bringing in the manpower, sniffer dogs, metal detectors, helicopters and whatever other technology is available to seal off an area and search it from top to bottom, to use a common expression. We are further suggesting that these special situations do provide another legitimate opportunity for introducing overseas-based personnel on a limited and controlled basis. Personnel from the Caribbean Search Centre as well as observers from human rights groups could be involved in these exercises."

I want readers to picture vividly what the deployment of such an operation would look like. Within 48 hours of uncontrolled violence in, say, Rockfort, combined security forces numbering up to 500 commandos launch an Entebbe-type raid. In a flash, a cordon is thrown up around the area, leaving no escape route. Like a tourniquet applied to a bleeding arterial wound, the cordon is tightened each day as a methodical search is conducted. Every house and shack is emptied of its contents; every square inch of sod is turned.
Entry and exit is controlled military style. Adults are taken to work and children to school in government-provided transportation. Food, water and other life-sustaining supplies are delivered to the area under strict supervision. The operation continues night and day until the community belches; spewing out the criminals and yielding the cache of weapons that hitherto could only be found in miniscule quantities.

I guarantee you if such an operation were surgically and skilfully executed, it would be a decade or more before another community erupted into an orgy of murders, evictions, bombings and open challenge to civil order. Communities, like individuals, do learn. But learning that crime costs is by itself not enough.

A preventive strategy is also necessary. The sociological, economic and even historical reasons underlying crime and violence, particularly in garrison communities cannot be summarily dismissed. Communities learn that peace pays dividends when these issues are effectively addressed and the social and material well-being of citizens improves. It is scandalous that after going one year without a single homicide in the Grants Pen Road area of the Corporate Area, there is still more talk than action concerning the need for greater youth employment and social empowerment.

Government and the private sector had better rid themselves of any notion that by pursuing a purely policing strategy, peace can be had on the cheap. Communities previously at war must be rewarded with the fruits of peace. Herein lies a challenge for Jamaica. In a weak economy such as ours, economic buoyancy does not naturally return to an area on the heels of protracted peace. It has to be engineered through a creative and cooperative partnership between private interests and all levels of government. Failing that, the peace will be tenuous. In one of his many quotable quotes, the late President John F Kennedy hit the nail on the head: "If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich."

At the risk of offending those who believe that being positive means losing one's sense of reality, let me issue a warning. If we continue pussyfooting with crime, one morning we are going to wake up to a Rwanda experience. Often referred to as "the land of a thousand hills" and a paradise on earth (sounds like Jamaica), in 1994 Rwanda became known for something else: the genocide that killed 800,000 of its people in just three months. Think it impossible? The weapon of choice in Rwanda was the machete. In Jamaica it is the M-16 and AK-47 .

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Re: Trouble in West Kingston This Time

I'll call to find out whataclockastrike.

[Sinco01]

Re: Trouble in West Kingston This Time

Replicating the Grants Pen experience in Matthews Lane


Tuesday, November 14, 2006



The Government is to be commended for moving swiftly to try and replicate the success of its Grants Pen experiment in Matthews Lane and neighbouring communities, which are known more for their volatility than for the many bright and ambitious people who, we are sure, live there.

We are encouraged by the fact that this social intervention programme appears to have been embraced fully by the communities. For without the residents themselves wanting change, such programmes are wont to fail, regardless of how comprehensive they may be.

The Grants Pen initiative worked mostly because the people who live there were eager for transformation, and the private and government agencies that helped to foster that change had faith in the residents' aspiration.

It was not insignificant, therefore, that last month the people of Grants Pen, accompanied by officials of the support agencies, celebrated a full year of peace in that community - a year without a single murder in a community where people once lived in fear and through which others feared to travel.

It didn't happen overnight. And we don't expect that Matthews Lane and the neighbouring communities of West Street, Chancery Lane, Charles Street, Love Lane, Beeston Street, Orange Street, Luke Lane, Mark Lane and Church Street will experience a quick transformation. However, we have no reason to doubt the commitment of people like Ms Patricia Balls, the director of the Community Security Initiative within the National Security Ministry.

Ms Balls, who is also co-ordinator of the Social Intervention Unit in the Cabinet Office, has told us that the programme in these downtown communities will run for three years. That's just about enough time for a project such as this to start having meaningful effect.

But humans, we all know, have a tendency to grow impatient for social change, particularly people who, for most of their lives, have been exposed to repeated episodes of crime and violence, who are unemployed and who lack proper housing and basic social amenities.

Therefore, the Social Intervention Unit, we suggest, could explore the possibility of inviting persons from Grants Pen to share their experiences with the residents of Matthews Lane and the other communities in an effort to assure them that the benefits are worth the investment in time.

Which brings us to Dr Horace Chang's misguided dismissal of a plan by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to build a community police station in the volatile Flankers community in his North West St James constituency.

In many ways, Flankers is a reflection of what Grants Pen was before the Government, the Kingston Restoration Company, the American Chamber of Commerce in Jamaica (AmCham) and other agencies decided to invest their time and effort in resolving the difficulties there.

The concept of the model police station is central to the achievement in Grants Pen as it helps to break down the barriers of mistrust between the residents and the police and gives the residents a sense of security.

While we agree with Dr Chang that Montego Bay's inner-city communities are desperately in need of improved infrastructure and training opportunities for young people, we believe that he is missing the significance of USAID's gesture, which is to further strengthen the social intervention process already being implemented in Flankers by private sector firms.

It is an initiative that Dr Chang should embrace rather than belittle.