Diego Mar­tin Re­gion­al Cor­po­ra­tion chair Su­san Hong says the Care­nage com­mu­ni­ty has been plunged in­to deep grief and hurt fol­low­ing Fri­day’s po­lice-in­volved shoot­ing where three peo­ple were killed and two oth­ers in­jured.

Hong said she be­lieves heal­ing will come with much prayers and in due time.

She made the com­ment as she ad­dressed a Crime Stop­pers cot­tage meet­ing at the Care­nage Fish­ing Cen­tre last evening.

Hong said every­one has a role to play in en­sur­ing that each com­mu­ni­ty is safe and called for com­mu­ni­ties to ful­ly sup­port Crime Stop­pers as this could con­tribute to bet­ter se­cu­ri­ty for all.

“Crime can­not be con­tin­ued...we need to work to­geth­er to bring back our coun­try. We have to be ob­ser­vant. Be our broth­er’s keep­er,” Hong said.

She said the re­gion­al cor­po­ra­tion will be fos­ter­ing a long-term part­ner­ship through ed­u­ca­tion ac­tiv­i­ties be­tween com­mu­ni­ty and law en­force­ment agen­cies.

“If you have in­for­ma­tion on crime please call Crime Stop­pers...you do not have to ex­pose your­selves or fam­i­ly to any dan­ger be­cause of the strict anonymi­ty that ex­ists, she said.

Crime Stop­pers ex­ec­u­tive man­ag­er Gar­land Samuel and his team met Care­nage res­i­dents dur­ing the event.

Speak­ing with Guardian Me­dia be­fore the event start­ed, Samuel said the meet­ing’s main ob­jec­tive was to pro­mote Crime Stop­pers and its ben­e­fits to peo­ple who re­port crimes and crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ties in the hope of erad­i­cat­ing crime, mak­ing nec­es­sary ar­rests and/solv­ing cas­es.

Asked if it was a de­lib­er­ate plan to hold a meet­ing in the area fol­low­ing Fri­day’s po­lice-in­volved shoot­ing in which three peo­ple were killed, in­clud­ing a teenag­er girl, and two oth­ers in­jured, Samuel said it was co­in­ci­den­tal as the meet­ing was ad­ver­tised five weeks ago.

Told of sev­er­al shoot­ing in­ci­dents in the area over the past two months and asked if peo­ple had called and giv­en tips, Samuel said be­cause of the anonymi­ty of the or­gan­i­sa­tion he could on­ly say Crime Stop­pers has been able to give po­lice in­for­ma­tion which al­lowed them to re­trieve one il­le­gal firearm per week in the past five weeks.

“We want to re­mind peo­ple about our ser­vices. Crime Stop­pers of­fers the abil­i­ty to re­port any type of crime through our hot­line at 800 TIPS on­line. Our anonymi­ty is based on two el­e­ments which are a per­son who re­ports the crime re­mains anony­mous and sec­ond­ly, the ac­tu­al crime that was solved al­so re­mains anony­mous. In that way the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of tips is pro­tect­ed,” Samuel said.

In cel­e­bra­tion of its 20th an­niver­sary this year, Crime Stop­pers has in­creased its mon­e­tary re­ward from $10,000 to up to $20,000 to the end of the year. To date, there have been 600,000 calls to Crime Stop­pers which re­sult­ed in 1,650 ar­rests, 20,000 tips and the seizure of over $295 mil­lion worth in nar­cotics.