The Tribune

By KHRISNA RUSSELL

Tribune Chief Reporter

krussell@tribunemedia.net

LOCAL community activists are calling for a shift in the way the country deals with crime following a recent spate of murders.

Five men were killed in separate incidents between Thursday and Monday, sparking renewed public concerns about violent crime.

Pastor Carlos Reid, author and life coach, thinks not enough resources are being dedicated to prevention, intervention and rehabilitation. He said it appeared the focus was on incarceration.

This, he said, comes at a more expensive cost to the government when compared with ensuring preventative measures are taken.

He said intervention programmes were on the table during the last Christie administration, but following the Progressive Liberal Party’s election loss in 2017, the initiatives appear to have stalled.

“The problem is that there is nothing in place for prevention,” Pastor Reid said yesterday. “Under the last administration (the late) Dr Bernard Nottage he came up with some strategies that would prevent some young people from becoming criminals and that was shock treatment.

“We also had an intervention programme where the government received something from the IDB, $20m. This was supposed to fund a programme we called violence interrupters.

“What this would have done is these would have been persons from the streets that had criminal pasts that have influence in the communities that when they hear about a situation before it reaches a point where someone gets killed, we would go and intervene.

“Even if we have to bring persons from different communities together like individually and more like become mediators because that really what it was because after someone gets killed what do you tell their loved one? You can’t tell them anything.

“The dialogue needs to happen before the situation gets out of hand and that was really what we designed.

“We started the programme. The money was in place, and it’s been four-and-a-half years now and they said they needed to tweak the programme, but it never materialised.”

Apart from this, Pastor Reid said a plan was conceived to convert the former Her Majesty’s Prison to more of a rehabilitation facility. While the name was changed to the Bahamas Department of Correctional Services, he thinks the facility continues to operate without much of a rehabilitative structure.

“…That was done in name, but never mentally nor physically.”

He said while the prison continues to be a place of major gang contention, the problems there are compounded by how crime is handled on the streets.

“What we have been doing is taking the problem from the street and putting it in prison and then, because the Constitution states that a man is innocent until proven guilty, we have to give people bail.”

“It just don’t make sense what we are doing. We are not dealing with the problem from a systematic point. We believe that this Bahamas is a police state.

“Police within itself cannot solve crime. We need to be systematic in now preventing these young people from getting into the system.”

According to Pastor Reid, there is an ongoing war between factions in the Grove and Ridgeland Park areas that has gone without intervention, leading to some of the violent crimes the country has seen in recent days.

“…Because we did not deal with some situations early, it is now the rooster coming home to roost. Now after family members already get killed, what do you tell them to cause them not to retaliate?

“We have an onus to protect the citizenry. Now police are doing a good job with bringing the people before the courts, but that within itself is straining the public purse.

“It costs The Bahamas government $20,000 for every inmate at the Department of Corrections, but how much are we spending on prevention?

“We need to shift from where we’re just looking at crimes and detecting them to how we prevent them in the first place or else all of our money will be going to the prison.”

For her part, Family of All Murder Victims (FOAM) founder and activist Khandi Gibson agreed that retaliation is often hard to get away from.

Ms Gibson said: “It’s sickening the way these lives are being taken. From what we are seeing this is a war going on between Ridgeland (Park) and the Grove. ‘If someone kill my family you can’t tell me nothing.’ Pain is pain. People will say it’s senseless killing because it’s not your family, but for the person who lost a loved one it’s different.

“The police are doing all they can, but the answer to this crime is in our communities,” she continued. “But when people reach out to the relevant authorities with the information what becomes of their lives? Who will tell you who kill me?

“So, we now have to step up on witness protections and make sure they are secured because this is sad and at the end of the day these young men only seeing blood.”

In response to the most recent murders, National Security Minister Marvin Dames said on Tuesday that Bahamians have no reason to feel unsafe, insisting police have the crime situation under control.

Police suspect some of the recent murders are linked and are the result of retaliation between “rival” groups.

Mr Dames has said while overall crime continues to trend downward, the most recent incidents prove there is still work to be done.

He said many of the country’s crime problems stem from decades of neglect by Bahamian parents and adults.