We have to do something about the violence. Does this sound familiar?
Whether you are in any part of the Caribbean, the statement will have a ring of urgency in it.
But New York State Senator Eric Adams, who represents a large Caribbean immigrant community in Brooklyn, was focusing on what’s happening in New York City in general and Central Brooklyn in particular. The latter is an area where tens of thousands of West Indians live; and almost every day, someone is shot and many of them die. The large community has one of the highest homicide rates in the city.
Adams was addressing more than 120 guests at a pre-carnival parade breakfast, a few hours before revellers and at least 1.5 million spectators gathered on Eastern Parkway to participate in the 44th annual West Indian carnival on Labour Day Monday. That he would use the occasion when people’s minds were on colourful costumes, pulsating reggae, soca and calypso music, and on having a good time, to speak about murder, the proliferation of guns and ammunition and their use by young people spoke to the looming crisis caused by gun violence.
“We must stop the violence,” asserted Adams, a former police officer.
In the 48-hour period before the West Indian carnival began, 24 people were shot: one killed and several critically injured in Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx and Manhattan. But by the end of the extravaganza four more victims were added to the list of homicides. Several other victims were shot but are expected to survive their injuries.
Between Friday and Monday evening 48 victims were shot, two of them police officers. Five people died in the mayhem.
The bloody rampage forced Mayor Bloomberg to call the period “unconscionable” and he demanded action by the United States Congress to curb the flow of guns onto the streets and into the hands of young people who often have little regard for human life.
It’s the same kind of lament we have heard in Barbados in recent weeks from rich, poor and those in-between as the murder count rises.
The killings in Brooklyn weren’t in any way associated with the carnival, but unfortunately they were presented to the public by the major news organizations as tragedies that “marred the West Indian” festival. Never mind that they occurred several hours before the festival began and after it ended. Some of them took place quite a distance from the carnival.
What’s happening in New York must be of more than passing interest to Barbados, not simply because thousands of Bajans live in the city. The root causes of the mushrooming crime wave are somewhat similar: the flood of unlicensed guns, drug trafficking, people with a callous disregard for human life, growing lawlessness especially among the youth, indifferent parents, rising unemployment and poverty.
The prevalence of guns in Barbados and the Caribbean is directly tied to the manufacture of the weapons in America and Europe, and until these countries do something about that situation at home, as Mayor Bloomberg has demanded, the island-nations and coastal states in our part of the world will continue to suffer.
