Police Commissioner George Jackson last night urged the community to help his officers reclaim the streets from criminals.

Speaking at his first major public meeting since taking over in the hot seat, Mr. Jackson stressed the need to install traditional values in children ? and admitted that several decades of ?enforcement-minded? policing had failed to provide a lasting solution.

Hitting out at communities that he said had become too materialistic and not family-orientated, he added: ?We can arrest and incarcerate until the cows come home.

?We are not going to change the culture until we start asking some tough questions. Our young men are not working, they are sitting out on the streets but they have the best of everything. Where are they getting the money from? What are they doing??

Mr. Jackson, who has built up a reputation as a fierce disciplinarian during three decades in the force, said his mother brought him up to be respectable, and added that his children ?know not to cross my path?.

He continued: ?We have to Police our communities together. We have to establish standards then things will change. We turn a blind eye too often and are too afraid to challenge issues that are affecting us.?

The Commissioner laid down his message at St. Mary?s Church, Warwick, at a packed public meeting attended by nearly 100 residents.

Many people who asked questions, after the Commissioner and other senior officers had spoken, said they were victims of crime.

There have been a spate of house-breaks in Warwick in recent months. And the meeting heard that current crime statistics showed that ? excluding Pembroke ? one in four house breaks in Bermuda were currently being committed in the parish.

Mr. Jackson, who warned that Police could not solve social issues, said a new Policing strategy would be outlined in the next few months.

No concrete details were outlined last night, but officers sent out a strong message that a more community-focused approach was in the pipeline.

New narcotics chief, Supt. Randy Liverpool, said Police were looking at making street enforcement a higher priority, with more officers flooding the pavements to combat the menace of drugs.

He said it was generally accepted that Customs caught about ten per cent of the drugs coming into Bermuda ? with the remaining 90 per cent filtering into communities.

?We have got to give that more priority,? he said, to applause from the audience. ?Street level activities are directly responsible for the quality of life in your community or lack of quality of life in your community.

?That?s something we are looking at giving priority. Pretty soon you will see more enforcement on the street.?

Head of operational policing, Ch. Insp. Michael DeSilva, also said the service would become more proactive in the community ? and the focus was shifting away from tackling ?big crime? that did not impact on the vast majority of Bermudians.

But despite the shift in emphasis he warned residents to have realistic expectations about what Police could achieve.

Notorious drug areas would not disappear overnight, he added, mentioning the declining family values and cultural changes for reasons why they continued to scar neighbourhoods.

He also said people had to be realistic when they called Police about drugs dealers, yet nothing appeared to happen.

?Dealers know that if you do not find drugs on their person you face an uphill battle,? he said. ?They know this so they put them behind a brick wall or in a hedge. Now we have to be a little bit more sneaky and that impacts on resources.?

He said that Police took housebreaking reports ?very seriously?. But he stressed the chances of becoming a victim was remote. Some 500 homes were broken into in Bermuda last year, he told the audience, and that meant that 24,500 were not.