The Tribune

EDITOR, The Tribune.

At 4.40am on Sunday, I lay in my bed and listened to the multiple gunshots that took the life of a young Bahamian husband, father, son and entrepreneur Michael Deangelo Bethel while seriously injuring his wife and two other travelling companions.

This is the fifth murder that has taken place within half a mile or less of my home in less than two years, the most recent prior to this being the brutal and senseless killing of school teacher Joyelle McIntosh. We won’t even attempt to number the home invasions, rapes, personal assaults, burglaries and petty thefts that have occurred in the area during that time.

The Prime Minister boasts of his legacy and waxes eloquent about the new anti-crime initiatives he and his government are taking when in reality it is just more wind emanating from their collective orifices and gives no comfort to a population living in the shadow of the gun.

Our floundering Minister of National Security, Dr Bernard Nottage, has clearly been out of his depth since his appointment and given the ever escalating levels of violent crime on his watch if he won’t do the honourable thing and resign then he should be dismissed. Likewise the Commissioner of Police, whose position and tenure is constitutionally protected, should also resign as he clearly hasn’t either the testicular fortitude to tell the politicians when and where to get stuffed or the leadership skills required to rescue the RBPF from the swamp of political interference and corruption it is mired in.

A week ago, my wife and I were stopped at the very traffic light on the corner of East Bay and Village road when a police car pulled up next to us. I asked the occupants when the police would be doing something about the obviously stolen car parked behind the wall in the old Montagu Hotel property, that has been there for going on three months with new bits and pieces being stripped off of it regularly.

“Yeah man, we ga check it out fa you” was the reply as they motored away without a backwards glance. The police claim to want the help of the citizenry, but it would appear from recent news reports that a number of them have become criminals themselves as a life of crime in this country is obviously more lucrative and less stressful than law enforcement.

We don’t need more

anti-crime initiatives Prime Minister; we need an education system that prepares our children for real life not a life of crime. Fix our broken judicial system and Attorney General’s office. Instead of frittering our money away on frivolities such as BAMSI and Carnival, build a new detention centre in some suitably remote location where hardened offenders and murderers, if you don’t have the heart or the balls to execute them, are incarcerated for life thereby removing them permanently from society.

Utilise some of the programmes proposed by knowledgeable people who have studied the problem such as doctors Neville and Allen and the numerous crime committee reports that were previously paid for by taxpayer money and have mouldered on some archive shelf since. Moderniae the current prison facility into a rehabilitation and training centre and institute a system of community or national service for first time petty crime offenders and at risk youth that teach and give our hopeless young men that sense of worth and belonging that they crave and so sadly lack.

Where there is no vision, the people perish and the atmosphere of hopelessness and fear that now engulfs our society as a result of government incompetence and inaction where crime is concerned is beyond the telling of it.

IAN MABON.

Nassau,

January 4, 2016.