THE constabulary has decided to again release monthly crime statistics to the media, after having them locked up for just over seven months.

Police Chief Lucius Thomas told reporters at a press conference at the Police Officers' Club in Kingston yesterday that effective immediately the monthly crime statistics will be available through the constabulary's director of communications, Karl Angell.

"All I ask is that you give the hard working civilian and police personnel of our Stats Department seven working days after the completion of each month before requesting the monthly crime stats," Thomas said.

"The media will no longer have to write to me asking for permission to get the stats, everything will now be channelled through Mr Angell," added Thomas.

The police came under heavy flak last year from the press, rights groups and the parliamentary opposition when it announced during the first week of June that it would no longer be releasing the monthly crime statistics.

Superintendent Ionie Ramsay-Nelson, director of the Constabulary Communication Network (CCN) - the police's information arm - said then that the decision was taken after the head of the statistics department suffered a heart attack, which she said, was brought on by work pressure.

She said, too, that the CCN was already compiling information and sending it out to the media three times a day, and suggested that each newsroom had to develop its own system to compile the monthly data.

The information sent out daily by the CCN did not give data such as stolen firearms, sexual offences, robberies and motor vehicle thefts.

Ramsay-Nelson's announcement was, however, going back on a commitment given by former police commissioner Francis Forbes, that in addition to the three daily crime reports from the CCN, weekly statistics would be made available. Forbes had also given an undertaking that journalists who already had police approval would continue to receive crime stats directly from the Statistics Department.

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