Manchester police chief flags lottery scam surge and rising gun crime

MANCHESTER, Jamaica — Odean Dennis, the parish’s newly appointed police chief, has urged residents to watch carefully for unfamiliar faces in their neighbourhoods, citing a sharp rise in lottery scam activity in communities that were once quiet.

“One of the key things I am seeing as being [prevalent] in the parish is the number of scammers, it is almost as if they have found Manchester as a safe space and they have come into the place and infest it for want of a better term, it is something that I see that we are going to have to do significant work around,” Dennis said Thursday while addressing the Manchester Chamber of Commerce at the Golf View Hotel in Mandeville.

Speaking to the business audience, he argued that people in the parish have grown overly open to outsiders.

“One of the issues with parishes like Manchester, and I saw a similar thing when I was working in Trelawny, is that the citizens of these parishes are very welcoming and as a result of that when persons who are strangers come in they readily accept them,” Dennis said.

He warned that landlords and residents who do not suspect trouble often discover the risk too late.

“Unknown to them is that these persons are coming with baggage and the type of baggage that you don’t want to associate yourself with… Some of the time people will come and give the homeowners a year’s worth of rent and that ready cash quickly gets you to accept those persons and the baggage that they come with,” he said.

Dennis also stressed that Manchester had long been regarded as largely peaceful, with far fewer conflicts than the gun-related violence now being recorded.

“Usually you would hear that these incidents are interpersonal incidents that involve relatives or associates within a community who may get a little bit heated and then you hear that some form of cutting tool is brought into play and people lose their lives as a result,” he said.

“Now what you are hearing is guns and the prevalence of the gun as the tool that is being used to perpetrate in these attacks in the parish and it seems as though this is the norm, it is something that I am unfamiliar with when you look at Manchester and what it used to be,” he added.

His remarks came after the Thursday killing of Andrew Williams, a 57-year-old landscaper, who was shot in Trinity district near Porus. Dennis said investigators are pursuing leads in the matter.