RECENTLY THE commissioner of police drew on the work of an American criminologist, James Q Wilson, to explain the growing crime problem in Barbados. Two things were wrong with that analogy. First, there may be lots of things wrong with Barbados, but it is not a broken society. Second, ignoring the authoritarian beliefs rooted in Wilson’s broken window theory, nothing about crime in American inner cities – or European ones for that matter – can parallel life in traditional Barbadian towns and villages. I am slightly older than the commissioner and have experienced a different Barbados, but the one he recalled, despite the hysteria, is not one I am familiar with. In any case, if local so-called organised crime is so prevalent, then the police should put on a show of force to show who controls the streets. Not by setting up task forces and specialist squads and such other grand theatre, but by sending frontline uniformed officers where the gangs are and facing them down. Police should set up mobile stations, under the leadership of inspectors and sergeants, in the very streets where the criminals operate, whether it is in the Pine, Licorish Village or Royal Westmoreland. Where is police intelligence? No part of Barbados should be beyond policing. As to the gated communities, if police are denied access to these residences, they should arrest the silly gatekeepers, surround the buildings with armed officers, then bulldoze them to the ground if they fail to cooperate. But first, we must get the legislation and policy right. The attorney-general’s office is responsible for criminal justice policy, while the commissioner is responsible for operational issues. Rather than come up with some dynamic plan to reassure people, we have a commissioner referencing some right-wing, flawed criminological tract. In its original context, it is a rabid nonsense that has led to the criminalisation of anti-social behaviour in poor districts, while leaving the mega fraudsters and bankers of Wall Street, such as Bernie Madoff, to operate with impunity. In Barbados, we have super-rich foreign-born gangsters polluting the West Coast with their drug and gun running and money laundering. Good police intelligence would sort this out. The police need to remove some of the gazetted commissioned officers sitting behind mahogany desks at HQ and get them on the streets. How can we justify a small police force of 1055 constables, 240 sergeants, 63 station sergeants, along with a head office staff and management team of 46 inspectors, six more station sergeants, 17 sergeants, 10 constables, 25 clerical officers and ten stenographers. Most of these positions could be abolished and the savings used to hire more frontline officers and improve their equipment. By getting rid of 23 of the inspectors, that would save $1.3m, the ten stenographers/typists, a position that went out with the personal computer, would save a further $332 000, reducing 15 assistant superintendents to seven would save a further $544 000, giving a grand total of $2.1m. Just think how far this could go in the fight against crime. It goes further than this. Our fundamental weakness as a young democracy is the absence of a robust civic culture. But there is also an economic cost to crime: increasing the number of police, the cost of the criminal justice system, private security guards, installation of anti-burglary grills and alarms, prison staff and running cost, the wasted investments in education, the lost of economic productivity, the cost of criminal injuries and medical treatment and public fear. A lot of this can be prevented if only the professional middle classes volunteered two hours a week to help the boys on the block. One way or the other we have to pay for this marginalisation.
•Hal Austin is an award-winning journalist with the Financial Times. He is Barbadian and may be reached at hal.austin@ft.com