It is widely accepted that citizen security and public safety are the main challenges threatening Jamaica’s growth and
development. With support from the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) CAPRI thus undertook the
Transforming Citizen Security a Yaad project (CSAY). Through this project, which ran from May 2017 to March 2020,
CAPRI produced four reports, on pertinent issues related to citizen security, and a draft crime scorecard. Each report
was launched with a live-streamed public forum that brought together relevant key stakeholders, and where the public was
directly engaged. A number of highlevel key stakeholders participated in the creation of the crime scorecard, with the next
expected step to collaborate with a relevant government agency, and perhaps another civil society organization,
to operationalize it, so it can fulfill its tremendous potential as a tool of improving the state’s accountability to
its citizens.
The reports covered police reform, the efficacy of anti-violence interventions, the relationship between scamming, gangs, and
violence, and an in-depth analysis of Jamaica’s contemporary gang dynamics. These were four critical issues that, expert
stakeholders agreed, would benefit from up-to-date, evidence based research and analysis, to move the debate, thinking, and
policy forward.
