JIS – Acting Commissioner of Police (ACP), Novelette Grant, is cautioning persons against protecting criminals during police operations in communities, warning that there are serious consequences for such actions.
Addressing a meeting of business interests and residents of Montego Bay at Sandals Royal Caribbean on March 22, Mrs. Grant said police investigations have been revealing a very disturbing trend where residents have been aiding criminals in evading the police.
“What we have been seeing in our analysis is very frightening,” ACP Grant told her audience. “We are seeing the hand signals, we are seeing the non-verbal communications, and we are seeing where criminals are being tipped off about the comings and goings of the police in a number of communities,” she added.
She warned that it is a crime punishable by jail time to harbour fugitives. She noted further that persons who, wittingly or unwittingly, assist criminals in evading justice are doing their communities and, by extension, the country a great disservice.
“If you are assisting them, then it means you are complicit,” she pointed out. “It means you find it okay that they are out there killing people and getting away with it…You cannot have it both ways,” she argued.
Mrs. Grant said it is time to ostracise criminals, noting that they should not have safe havens anywhere.
“We need all hands on deck. We cannot continue to have persons, who should know better, telegraphing the movement of the police to these shameful, disgraceful and violent criminals who continue to plague our communities. There should be no refuge for criminality,” she declared.
Mrs. Grant also decried incidents of violence against women, saying that this should be harshly condemned.
She noted that too many children are being raised in homes where they experience domestic violence.
“The experience that they are having is not wholesome. It is not nurturing and it continues to fuel the general violence, because when you have our pubescent boys not being raised in a nurturing environment, then they become that fodder for the gangs out there seeking to draw them into violence,” she pointed out.
“What we will find is that this kind of violence transcends generations,” she added.
