Rhon­dor Dowlat-Ros­tant

With 24 cas­es of lar­ce­ny and bur­glar­ies and four home in­va­sions in re­cent times, the most re­cent one four days ago when an el­der­ly woman was held up at gun­point in her home, res­i­dents of Fe­lic­i­ty yes­ter­day unit­ed to fight back against the crim­i­nal el­e­ments.

Com­mu­ni­ty leader Imam Rasheed Karim, Ch­agua­nas May­or Faaiq Mo­hammed and Ch­agua­nas MP Di­nesh Ram­bal­ly head­ed a walk­a­bout and small mo­tor­cade be­fore be­gin­ning a pe­ti­tion and seek­ing in­for­ma­tion from res­i­dents re­gard­ing the in­crease in crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ty in the area and how it had af­fect­ed them.

The men in­tend to hand the pe­ti­tion to Min­is­ter of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Stu­art Young and Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice Gary Grif­fith plead­ing for re­sources to fight the crime and erad­i­cate all crim­i­nals and mis­cre­ants from the com­mu­ni­ty.

Res­i­dents are hop­ing for the set­ting up of a po­lice post, in­creased po­lice pa­trols and a meet­ing with Young and Grif­fith.

There are some 8,000 to 10,000 res­i­dents in the Fe­lic­i­ty area alone.

Just be­fore the start of the walk­a­bout, the men urged a few res­i­dents who turned out in sup­port of the ges­ture to “take back their com­mu­ni­ty from the hands of crim­i­nals by unit­ing for the fight.”

Ram­bal­ly said they had start­ed to work with the com­mu­ni­ty in a bid to get re­sources pooled in a suc­cess­ful man­ner.

“We have a meet­ing with the head of the Cen­tral Di­vi­sion po­lice to see that they are well ahead of the con­di­tions the res­i­dents are liv­ing in. We have been try­ing to ed­u­cate the com­mu­ni­ty, now is the time to be­come our broth­er’s keep­er. We have set up a com­mit­tee to get plans rolled out as to how we can start our own ac­tiv­i­ties,” Ram­bal­ly said.

“We need to send a loud mes­sage via this walk­a­bout and small mo­tor­cade to the crim­i­nal el­e­ments that we are tak­ing a stand against you and this march is just the be­gin­ning of things to come.”

Mo­hammed as­sured that he will at­tempt to re­store the sense of se­cu­ri­ty and com­fort in the com­mu­ni­ty by rolling out more mu­nic­i­pal po­lice pa­trols.

“My cor­po­ra­tion is ac­quir­ing two mu­nic­i­pal po­lice ve­hi­cles and I have in­di­cat­ed to the mu­nic­i­pal po­lice that we would do pa­trols from mid­night to 5 am. I am al­so look­ing to es­tab­lish a meet­ing with the Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice,” he said.

“We all need to be vig­i­lant and stand to­geth­er and unit­ed to run the crim­i­nals out of Ch­agua­nas.”