Terrible times indeed

That some miscreant could even contemplate to take the life of an innocent human being to supposedly send a message to someone else — in this case Mrs Dyer-Francis’ policeman son — must shock us all to our very core.

This marks a new low, even for a society seemingly inured by a two-decade bloody litany of murders, from infant to pensioner, from housewife to husband.

The coldly calculated murder comes amid a week of shooting sprees — from Curepe to D’Abadie to Mount Lambert — and a month-long spate of domestic violence killings. So far more than 400 people have been murdered this year, with no indication of abatement as we end 2016 and head into 2017 (with a New Year’s homicide upsurge expected due to “house cleaning” by rival gangs).

Yet the murder of Mrs Dyer- Francis is particularly heinous as we must ask ourselves to what level of barbarism has the nation descended when evildoers can pick and choose which lives they will expend to send messages to the victims’ loved ones who are left behind to grieve? Even if criminal gangs live by an adage of “an eye for an eye” against each other, what “code” of honour among thieves does the killing of an innocent elderly woman comply with? None! Just as importantly, what can we now expect from law enforcement authorities who have an unenviable homicide detection rate of just 17 percent? The Police Service’s failure to crack crimes happening in broad daylight has given criminals the licence to commit their dastardly acts, and must be reversed now.

They must address the causes of crime and clamp the lid down on this bubbling cauldron of criminality.

We have said this ad nauseam.

Minister of National Security Edmund Dillon told Newsday on Sunday that the police will try new strategies for detection by way of a higher police presence and better intelligence-gathering, and we hope these are hard new measures and not mere tinkering.

Further, he rightly appealed to people to cease the violence that is destroying the nation, where neighbour kills neighbour, and brother kills brother.

The machinery of crime detection and prosecution against hardcore criminals must be supplemented by efforts at moral suasion to dissuade people from the lure of criminality, whether the fatherless boy open to the lure of the neighbourhood gang leader who offers a sense of self-esteem, or the suspicious spouse contemplating murder.

Deliberate criminality is all too much a feature of national life to which, in a manner of speaking, we should train all guns. But rampant criminality is also just a facet of lawlessness, another of which — the recklessness on the nation’s roads that is also snatching away too many lives — must be curbed by more sustained police action.

Law enforcement has to be made to arrive at the point of rigorously seeking to maintain the public’s confidence, even as regrettably a scenario now unfolds of a police involvement in a $400,000 heist, which will surely lead some impressionable youngsters to say to themselves, “If the priest could play...” While the killer of Mrs Dyer- Francis showed no sense of right and wrong, we as a society must resolutely reject such a premise, and assert our basic humanity.

Minister Dillon and the national security apparatus must do more to help us do just that and rid ourselves of these terrible times.