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Rethink crime prevention
By Peter Polack Cayman Islands police recently revealed that over 800 suspect residents of that small island are under the restriction of their liberty, whilst investigations stumble on into the sunset. Alarming enough for a figure that high, it comes from one of the smallest islands in the Caribbean, coincidentally a British possession. This number is likely to double if you include accused persons before the court as they meander towards some form of justice.
This is unaffected by their $100 million budget dedicated to other corners of law enforcement, but not crime prevention.
This scenario is duplicated throughout the Caribbean with little or no attempt to substantially repair a failing system.
If that were not frightening enough, over 20 per cent of the Cayman Islands [population has] a criminal conviction, giving new meaning to the annual Pirates Week.
The recently elected government of those small islands has failed to address a perpetual problem, more shameful given the mass shooting in the constituency of the premier without substantive youth intervention thereafter. That government spent some time on their early ascension to office to ensure budgets for their government chauffeurs while some principled ministers refused that office bonus.
This diorama is exhibited throughout the Caribbean at many levels but with the same entrenched, archaic, colonial law enforcement and legal system, the handmaidens of failed governments. Some accused have languished in Jamaican prisons for decades only to be released short of the grave with nominal payments.
There are new things available to the forward thinking.
Simple correction
Law-abiding people are generally unconcerned about crime, police, courts or prison as they go about their daily business in the supermarket, banks and sidewalks, often surrounded by suspicious persons on police bail, accused persons before the courts as well as repeat offenders released from prison. If this situation came to mind, people would be afraid to venture into the streets.
Governments are renowned for kicking the failed systems of crime prevention and the administration of justice down the road.
At one time in the Cayman Islands, a former director of public prosecutions, now judge, sought to put forward the ridiculous assertion that criticism of the administration of justice system would bring it into disrepute. It is that kind of thinking which has kept that failed system in park.
There is no new thinking and even fewer resources for giant court lists and overcrowded police cells and prisons.
A simple correction that would start to help things along is the change of court or police dates by administrative acts, often time used in some lower courts. People need not attend court unless there is a trial, or the police, for charge or release. The repeated and voluminous bail documents only add to the bureaucratic nightmare.
Jamaica’s justice minister has sought to address this problem using a solution from Rwanda. It is a step but not a stride in the right direction given the history of government in power. Others should follow and supersede that baby tippy toe.
Crime penalties
Another helpful strategy would be for the man in the street to understand there is no correlation between an increase in crime penalties and a decrease in crimes. It does not work, just like a decrease in murders often leaves equally serious crimes like rape, assault or house invasions, high or on the increase.
Big announcements about larger penalties for crimes is an old, musty chestnut used by politicians, in cahoots with their legal advisors, foisted on an unsuspecting public to give the impression something is being done. Nothing is being done and a blind man can tell you that crime must be attacked before it starts.
More changes are available but they cannot come from inside the belly of the beast.
The answer is not importing more steel for more security grills. The answer has to come from viable, modern proposals by new political thought, not the old, entrenched status quo promising not to run again next election.
The time is now and the diaspora should not support a Potemkin or fake administration with failed anti-crime strategies. There are many young politicians with modern ideas, not from the realm of nepotism, that need to be given a chance to save the Caribbean. We can only help ourselves.
Round and round the merry-go-round.
Peter Polack is a former criminal lawyer in the Cayman Islands for several decades. He is also the author of several books, with his latest being a compendium of Russian espionage activities of almost 500 Soviet spies expelled from nearly 100 countries worldwide from 1940 to 1988.
Source: Nation
Has the recently held elections in Barbados not indicated that the spate of crime and violence, particularly the murder rate, not been normalized? For nobody really cared. This was never a burning issue, though serially raised by the then Leader of the Opposition.
And if those elections suggested that Bajans give not a flying uck, why persist? Certainly, this dictatorial government, making history by getting three 30-loves in a row, is not under any real pressure to do anything bout um, even if they cared. And there’s no need to.
So let’s stop fooling ourselves. For this is the brave new world of Huxley.
The elections showed that the government in waiting was not perceived to be ‘fit for purpose’.
This writer disagrees. For that simplictic political geometry alone cannot explain the new elected dictatorship culture which the population of voters seem insistent on, over three cycles now.
We see no set of factors making the then opposition, and indeed this current administration markedly different, in any other way, from what we’ve had before.
Look at the 30 people on one side. These people are as kakistocratic as in the days of Peanuts Morrison.
Of course, if the DLP had won the judgement would have been the same by this writer. While scribes like you would have been seeing RAT as a new political god, like all previous prime ministers became.
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