BREAK-INS have reached “worrying” proportions, with a burglary committed every four and a half hours, according to Commissioner of Police Darwin?Dottin, and most of the perpetrators are getting away.
This situation compares with a rate of one burglary every 14. 6 seconds in the United States and one every 37 seconds in Britain.
Those statistics were released by Dottin last night at The Nation’s town hall meeting on crime at the Lester Vaughan Memorial school, where a United Nations (UN) official advised Barbados to keep an eye on property crime and a local criminologist stressed the need for preventative strategies.
Dottin insisted the levels of crime were “relatively low” and there have been no major increases over the last decade, despite the occasional spurts.
“The difficulty has been property crime, particularly burglary,” he said.
The Commissioner did not supply a breakdown but panellist, criminologist Yolande Forde, said there had been 1 046 residential burglaries so far this year.
Full reports from the Nation’s Talkback meeting on Lockdown on Crime will be published in the Weekend Nation
