Soyi­ni Grey

At the end of the two-day re­gion­al sym­po­sium to ad­dress crime and vi­o­lence as a pub­lic health is­sue, Cari­com heads is­sued a state­ment say­ing the re­gion has de­clared a war on guns. How­ev­er, two for­mer Min­is­ters of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty (Ja­maica and St Kitts and Nevis) cau­tion it may do lit­tle to pre­vent ris­ing crime.

One of them ex­plained that meth­ods of crime con­trol were of­ten con­flat­ed as strate­gies for crime pre­ven­tion by politi­cians who want to ap­pear tough for po­lit­i­cal cur­ren­cy, when so­cial strate­gies were more ef­fec­tive tools for crime re­duc­tion.

The con­sen­sus from the re­gion seems to be that while politi­cians treat crime pre­ven­tion as an op­por­tu­ni­ty to talk about joint po­lice and army pa­trols, and oth­er tough sound­ing mea­sures what re­al­ly seems to be ef­fec­tive are so­cial pro­grammes that of­fer skills train­ing and re­ha­bil­i­ta­tion to law-break­ers. Dwyer Astaphan, Min­is­ter of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty in St Kitts and Nevis from 2004 to 2008, says the re­gion has to put in the work to change the at­ti­tudes of its younger cit­i­zens.

“And this is where the hard work is go­ing to come in,” Astaphan said.

He be­lieves the ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem needs to be re­struc­tured to en­cour­age crit­i­cal think­ing in­stead of rote learn­ing, which he be­lieves is not of ben­e­fit.

He said through­out the Caribbean, there are dys­func­tion­al sys­tems that al­low cor­rup­tion, in­com­pe­tence and un­pro­fes­sion­al­ism to flour­ish. There­fore, the re­gion will on­ly see im­prove­ment when it seeks to im­ple­ment so­cial change.

“This thing is not just about ban­ning as­sault ri­fles. It’s about chang­ing peo­ple, chang­ing in­sti­tu­tions. It’s about re­mov­ing cor­rup­tion in high of­fice be­cause a lot of the crim­i­nal­i­ty gets treat­ed with a blind eye by peo­ple who could make de­ci­sions to stop it,” he said.

Pe­ter Bunting, for­mer Min­is­ter of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty in Ja­maica, now sits in Par­lia­ment as the MP for Man­ches­ter Cen­tral and Shad­ow Min­is­ter of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty. He said crime con­trol mea­sures are of­ten pre­ferred by politi­cians, es­pe­cial­ly when crim­i­nal­i­ty in­creas­es, but they are not ef­fec­tive.

“The crime pre­ven­tion mea­sures tends to be the soft­er mea­sures that politi­cians, you know, don’t nor­mal­ly go for,” Bunting said. “They want some tough talk­ing mea­sures when crime, par­tic­u­lar­ly mur­ders, spike. But it’s the sus­tained longer-term in­ter­ven­tions that are go­ing to make a dif­fer­ence, that will main­tain down­ward trend­ing vi­o­lent crime rates.”

He would know. Bunting was Min­is­ter of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty from 2012 to 2016 when the is­land saw its low­est an­nu­al mur­der toll in ten years. He said while the cur­rent gov­ern­ment led by Prime Min­is­ter An­drew Hol­ness has em­ployed states of emer­gen­cies they had not been able to match his suc­cess. How­ev­er, Bunting said he re­mains hope­ful that the Cari­com crime sym­po­sium will help Hol­ness’ come up with tan­gi­ble so­lu­tions to re­duce crime in Ja­maica.

While St Lu­cia is typ­i­cal­ly as­so­ci­at­ed more with tourism than gang vi­o­lence, re­cent months have seen a shock­ing in­crease in gun crime, forc­ing Prime Min­is­ter Phillip J Pierre to turn to the Re­gion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Sys­tem for polic­ing sup­port.

Fe­li­cia Du­jon, a St Lu­cian hu­man rights ad­vo­cate who lives in Bar­ba­dos, is the pres­i­dent of the Caribbean Men­tor­ship In­sti­tute, a non-gov­ern­men­tal or­gan­i­sa­tion com­mit­ted to build­ing men­tors and vol­un­teers across the East­ern Caribbean.

Du­jon was hap­py that the re­gion de­cid­ed to join to­geth­er to ad­dress its ris­ing crim­i­nal­i­ty, be­cause it has been “sleep­ing on this mat­ter for too long.”

“The gangs are gain­ing more mo­men­tum than per­sons that are hop­ing to change the lives of young per­sons,” she said.

Du­jon point­ed out that the re­gion has al­ways tak­en a puni­tive ap­proach at the ex­pense of re­ha­bil­i­ta­tive ac­tions. She con­sid­ers this way of think­ing as re­gres­sive and be­lieves re­al pos­i­tive change will in­clude com­mu­ni­ty ap­proach, civ­il so­ci­ety in­volve­ment and the in­volve­ment of young peo­ple.