The St James police have stepped up their community-based activities so far this month, as well as their efforts at working closely with school administrators in light of the recent killing of 15-year-old Irwin High School student, Raniel Plummer.
On April 18, Raniel was stabbed to death by a 14-year-old schoolmate. A knife was used to stab the schoolboy to the chest during an altercation.
In delivering the police report at Thursday’s monthly meeting of the St James Municipal Corporation (SJMC), head of the St James Police Division, Superintendent Eron Samuels, referred to the incident as having been “unfortunate”, while providing details about the police’s response to such incidents of school violence.
“This month, we have ramped up our community-based activities, and you will see the team doing a lot of work within the communities and also within the schools,” he said.
“As you know, we had a very unfortunate incident last month, and we are trying to ensure we don’t have a recurrence of that,” said Samuels.
He pointed to the police’s Safe Schools Task Force as one of the strategies being employed to ensure there is no repeat of last month’s tragedy at any school in the parish.
“We are working very closely with the schools through our Safe Schools Task Force to ensure we try our best to reduce the violence within the schools in St James,” Samuels stated.
Raniel was among the six persons to be killed in St James last month, the lowest murder tally for a month in the parish since 2016.
