Crime Stats 2014, Are the Numbers Up This Year?

George Lovell

The crime statistics for 2014 are out – well, not exactly because 2014 isn’t done yet and all those figures are subject to change. But at the request of the media, there is an interim stat sheet. We won’t look in-depth at all the figures until the end of the year, but we did take a look at murders. In 2012 there were one hundred and forty-five murders, a new but certainly not welcome record. In 2013, that went down to ninety-nine, a record low in the past five years. This year, at least up to Monday, official figures are at one hundred and twenty-one. Today, we got the opportunity to ask Ministry of National Security George Lovell for his input on the increase. He says they anticipated it…and at least, according to their projections, that figure should start going down.

Ret’d. Col. George Lovell, C.E.O., Ministry of National Security

“The figures that we currently see, while it’s at one hundred and twenty-one or one hundred and twenty-two, is one of the lower figures in the last five years – the second lowest to last year’s figure. And when we do our analysis – my analyst shows me that when you do projections – because we were looking at how things would be going all the way to 2020 and how we can bring – because our plans at the Ministry of National Security is to bring our homicides rate per capita to about eight per hundred thousand. And we believe we can do so, and we have a plan to do so. But what that graph shows us is that in doing so we would have seen a rise in 2014, and then there would be a gradual dip going down to 2020. There has been quite a great deal of investment that we have put into our law enforcement entities which sincerely I believe that the investment that we put in has planted the seeds that will be sown later on. These aren’t things that we will see happening immediately.”