A day of reck­on­ing is com­ing for the crim­i­nal over­lords. So said Jack Warn­er, Min­is­ter of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty, as he ad­dressed a town meet­ing in his Ch­agua­nas West con­stituen­cy on Tues­day night at Pre­sen­ta­tion Col­lege, Ch­agua­nas. Warn­er said he was mak­ing no apolo­gies for say­ing it was time the na­tion saw the re­turn of the hang­man and the use of the cat-o-nine-tails to flog crim­i­nals. "If these things worked well in the past, bring them back," Warn­er.

He said the time will come soon for the mon­ey laun­der­ers, politi­cians with crim­i­nal con­nec­tions and peo­ple who im­port guns to feel the full brunt of the law. Warn­er al­so spoke of plans to fast-track a com­put­er chip sys­tem to record mo­tor ve­hi­cle num­ber plates and plans to con­nect CCTV cam­eras from house­holds to the po­lice se­cu­ri­ty sys­tem.

Warn­er al­so slammed sec­tions of the me­dia who he said were bent on sen­sa­tion­al­ism. He said even though the mur­der rate had dropped since the Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship had been vot­ed in­to gov­ern­ment, the me­dia had failed to re­port this. He said the present fig­ure is 264, com­pared to 328, the fig­ure for the com­pa­ra­ble pe­ri­od in 2010. Warn­er said plas­ter­ing mur­ders on the front pages of the dai­ly news­pa­pers could act as fu­el for mur­ders "The mur­der­ers feel big ... give them the front page," Warn­er said.

He said in oth­er Caribbean na­tions mur­ders were rel­e­gat­ed to the in­side pages of news­pa­pers. Warn­er said some in the me­dia may al­so be glo­ri­fy­ing mur­ders in a bid to see the Gov­ern­ment col­lapse on the is­sue of crime. Warn­er said over 46,000 peo­ple had ap­plied to be Spe­cial Re­serve Po­lice of whom the Gov­ern­ment would be hir­ing on­ly 5,000. He said pow­ers of ar­rest would be giv­en to 1,000 sol­diers who would be on pa­trol in crime hotspots.

Warn­er al­so called on Ch­agua­nas may­or Or­lan­do Nages­sar to start clear­ing up aban­doned lots of land. He said the time had come for the may­or to put his foot down and stop law­less ac­tiv­i­ties which he said in­clud­ed peo­ple us­ing the roads as garages and a place to store all kinds of ma­te­ri­als, caus­ing a hin­drance and al­so a health haz­ard.