Minister of National Security, Dr. Horace Chang has issued another call for ‘hard policing’ in communities that are plagued with high levels of lottery scamming.

This phenom, as underscored by Dr. Chang presents an emerging crisis because criminals not only use these funds to “buy guns that kill people, undermine and corrupt institutions” but they risk to the stability of the country’s economy.

Dr Chang argued that the proposed social programmes will not change criminals who bring in approximately $1 billion into Jamaica annually through lottery scamming.

As such, Dr Chang postulated that more stringent measures such as implementing stronger policing tactics through the State of Emergency must be instituted in order to adequately deal with this issue.

“You cannot deal with hardcore killers without strong policing, specially trained men. A man who is scamming US$100,000 a month and have guns or hire gunmen beside him, whichever way, we can’t talk about counselling them and giving them $5,000 a week. It’s absolutely ridiculous,” he argued.

“We’re not converting the army to police. The army are trained to fight men with guns and criminals are out there with heavily armed weapons, better armed than the police sometimes ” he added.

Meanwhile, Dr. Chang also outlined that there will be a reorganizing of the police geographic areas.

This proposed arrangement will see six divisions in the Corporate Area along with St. Thomas becoming the new Metropolitan Region.

In addition, the police divisions of St. Catherine and Clarendon will become a new Area.

Minister Chang also indicated that the current Area One will also be modified with St. James, Hanover and Trelawny having their own administration while Westmoreland, St. Elizabeth, and Manchester will become one Area.