RHON­DOR DOWLAT

Ahead of to­day’s re­gion­al sym­po­sium that will ad­dress Crime Vi­o­lence as a Pub­lic Health Is­sue—the Crime Chal­lenge, some re­gion­al prime min­is­ters are call­ing for a uni­fied re­gion in the fight against crime.

Do­mini­can prime min­is­ter Roo­sevelt Sker­rit, who will be ad­dress­ing the com­mu­ni­ty ap­proach, said there was need for the pop­u­la­tion to help in fight­ing crime.

Speak­ing with Guardian Me­dia up­on his ar­rival at the Hy­att Re­gency in Port of Spain, last night, Sker­rit called on the me­dia as well, to high­light the is­sues and play their part in crime fight­ing.

“The most im­por­tant thing is that we’re here to dis­cuss as heads and the rest of the com­mu­ni­ty. It will re­quire a so­ci­etal re­sponse to ad­dress crime that we can’t on­ly look to the gov­ern­ment to re­solve.

“The gov­ern­ment has its role to play, but every­one in so­ci­ety, if he or she plays his part, then cer­tain­ly we can have a bet­ter un­der­stand­ing of what we all need to do to ad­dress what has be­come a very con­cern­ing phe­nom­e­non through­out the re­gion,” Sker­rit said.

He added, “We’re all suf­fer­ing from this and it is a huge cost to our trea­suries, loss of lives and its true gun vi­o­lence has be­come a pub­lic health is­sue and we look for­ward to very con­struc­tive and sin­cere en­gage­ment,” he added.

Sker­rit in­sist­ed that with re­spect to the com­mu­ni­ty ap­proach, every­one had to play its part, in­clud­ing the church, the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty and schools.

He said, “I be­lieve that we need to re­vis­it the school cur­ricu­lum. We’re not pro­vid­ing enough time for stu­dents to have ex­tra-cur­ric­u­lar ac­tiv­i­ties and for stu­dents to in­ter­act and solve prob­lems to­geth­er. It is too ex­am dri­ven, so it’s im­per­a­tive we look at holis­tic child de­vel­op­ment.”

“You, the me­dia, we need not to fo­cus on glo­ri­fy­ing and lay­ing the blame and point­ing fin­gers. I think we have to use the me­dia in an ef­fort to so­lic­it the kind of sup­port and en­gage­ment of the rest of so­ci­ety,” he added.

Prime Min­is­ter of Grena­da, Dick­on Mitchell, said there may be in­ad­e­quate ac­cess to ed­u­ca­tion. He said, “There is a need for a sig­nif­i­cant re­view of the ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem to en­sure that we pro­duce less de­viant young peo­ple.”