COMMISSIONER OF POLICE Darwin Dottin says its time to stop the blame game and has called on policy holders to put a programme in place to deal with deviancy in the society.
Speaking at a Press conference yesterday while announcing the arrests and charging of two young men in connection with the Tudor Street, The City tragedy, the top cop noted Barbados had changed and there was a need for emphasis to be placed on secondary and social crime intervention.
“There is a crying need to address some of the criminogenic conditions in our community and social crime prevention is designed to prevent people from becoming offenders through changing the social environment,” he said.
“It is too easy to cast blame and point fingers and allocate responsibility for particular agencies, but I think we need to move beyond that,” the top cop added.
Dottin said there was glaring evidence that some of our communities had young and highly volatile men who were living disorganised and chaotic lives where there was depravation decay.
“That has to be addressed,” he noted, while referring to the June 2004 National Commission on Law and Order and his recommendations.
“I recommend to all policy holders as a coherent and holistic approach to dealing with these others,” he said.
However, he reiterated there was no runaway crime situation in Barbados.
“If you plot crime in Barbados over the past 15 years, you would see that reported crime in Barbados is actually lower than it was 15 years ago.”
He also submitted that Barbados’ murder rate was extremely distant from others in the region and noted that regionally there was an average murder rate of about 30 per 100 000.
“…This year our murder rate is six per 100 000 considerably lower than the regional average.” (TS)
