Crime, like the poor, will always be with us, but in recent times there has been more than the ordinary outpouring of concern about the level of crime in our society. In fact, so deep is that worry that whatever is said officially about the drop in crime, little of it seems to meet with the approval of the public.
The official statistics say one thing, but public perception and anxiety portray another.
Part of the problem in our country is that the nature of the crime has changed; an insidious violence has attracted the uncomfortable attention of the entire community.
Another worrying problem is that some of our young men seem bent on making it hazardous for members of the public to wear neck chains or to publicly use their cellphones, for these two items have become hot targets for a class of criminals whose deviant practices have caused most right-thinking people to be more acutely conscious of their personal safety.
Within the last 12 months, some criminal incidents have driven home the stark reality, whether at home or going about one’s public and lawful business, that one has to take extra precaution against criminal attack. The Campus Trendz tragedy, the rape of a woman in her St John home by an intruder, and the Chaderton double murder in St George are three shocking incidents that have imprinted themselves on national consciousness.
Calls for the return of the dreaded cat-o’-nine-tails and for the gallows to swing have been heard on the airwaves, and the revived discussion about the “boys on the block” and the impact of the recession on criminal behaviour has been rampant and oft-times uninformed.
Such discussion reflects a serious worry and frustration, even in the face of repeated official assurances that everything is being done to curb the rise in violent crime in particular. We accept the assurances of the Commissioner of Police that all is being done by the Royal Barbados Police Force to tackle the problem.
But we are not unmindful that our lawmen are investigators and not magicians.
We should therefore not expect by their stated commitment unrealistic quick fixes of them, plunging ourselves in a sense of false security. In some matters we will have to be patient.
Of course there are many reasons for and causes of this rash of violent crime, not the least of which is that there has been a subtle shift in values and morals in our society right under our noses. The technological cultural penetration from abroad has dropped new and dangerous seeds of deviant behaviour in our land, and easy travel between countries has also helped to internationalize some aspects of local crime.
At the same time we have forsaken the moral and other landmark values-based socialization that took place almost routinely in our schools and churches and in the village mission houses.
Nowadays the influence of such readings as Aesop’s Fables and the tale of the hare and the tortoise, or the parables in the Bible, among others, all appear to have become sacrificed on the altar of materialism, with the result that a get-rich-quick mentality has become the order of the day.
We have abandoned the exposure of our children and young people to the conditioning power of the principles of good social behaviour and left their fertile minds to be totally influenced and corrupted by antisocial influences, in many cases foreign to what was once our embedded culture.
Unfortunately, these deviant influences have gripped our society, and the fight to take it back cannot be that of the authorities alone; but must now be fought, as it always has been, by everyone, particularly parents, teachers and religious leaders.
And on top of all this, we must ensure that true rehabilitation takes place in our prisons, so that Dodds does not become a tertiary institution for young criminals.
