Richard Lord

Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter, Mar­tin Joseph, says he may not be in of­fice when there is a sig­nif­i­cant re­duc­tion in the coun­try's mur­der rate. Joseph said this in re­sponse to a ques­tion dur­ing yes­ter­day's post Cab­i­net news con­fer­ence at the Diplo­mat­ic Cen­tre, St Ann's.

He said there are 297 mur­ders in the coun­try for the year so far, while for the cor­re­spond­ing pe­ri­od last year the mur­der tal­ly stood at 278. Joseph not­ed that this rep­re­sents a six per cent in­crease in homi­cides. He said, how­ev­er, that the de­tec­tion rate was "tick­ing up" to 20 per cent for the year while it stood at about 17 per cent for the cor­re­spond­ing pe­ri­od in 2008.

"I may not be the one bring­ing good news, but a fu­ture Min­is­ter of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty will not have to be sub­ject­ed to this kind of pres­sure that this cur­rent min­is­ter is sub­ject­ed to," Joseph said. He added: "I recog­nise that,be­cause we are build­ing the sys­tems and the un­for­tu­nate re­al­i­ty is that the sys­tems are tak­ing some time ." He said be­ing crit­i­cal of the po­lice would not solve the prob­lem. He said he had every con­fi­dence in act­ing Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice James Philbert. "This Min­is­ter of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty has no dif­fi­cul­ty with the way in which the cur­rent Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice is dis­charg­ing his re­spon­si­bil­i­ties," Joseph added.

He said ini­tia­tives aimed at re­duc­ing the in­flow of drugs in­to the coun­try were achiev­ing pos­i­tive re­sults. "You are start­ing to see a re­duc­tion in the in­flow of the drugs com­ing in(sic)but there is a flip side to that... as we start to re­duce the in­flow you have more turf wars for what lit­tle is avail­able, so that it al­so re­quires a dif­fer­ent type of re­ac­tion," he added. Asked to elab­o­rate on his drugs re­duc­tion claim, Joseph said he was mak­ing that state­ment on the ba­sis of the fact that the law en­force­ment au­thor­i­ties have been seiz­ing more drugs.