Deadly crime spree

This weekend citizens should have been free to devote, as individuals and families, our fullest attention on the leisurely pursuits of life. Instead, we have been brought low by a series of events, starting with a spate of murders since Friday. Namely, the killing of a cop’s mother outside a church, the shooting of five people on a Saturday afternoon, and the discovery of US$2m at the Pt Lisas Port.

At heart, these crimes signal a deepening of a gun and drug culture and suggest continued penetration by criminal elements from outside our borders.

Political commentators will be quick to say none of this is good news for the administration of Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley.

His political party speech a week ago placed him even more directly in the fray.

But an escalation of crime is not good news for anyone whether PNM, UNC or other.

We call for a national resolve to tackle this issue. Already the political and pragmatic obstacles to this are considerable.

It is only natural for there to be unease in a situation where criminals are not being apprehended, where the justice system is behind pace and where murderers seem to be more brazen. Witness the remarks of members of the Seventh-Day Adventist church, and those of the new head of the Northern Division, Mc Donald Jacob, who was deeply troubled by the D’Abadie killings.

But both the Snr Supt Jacob and the president of the Southern Caribbean Conference of the Seventh-day Conference, Leslie Moses, have appealed for courage and support not only of relatives of victims but of the police. Jacob even seems to marshalling resolve to not give in to gunmen.

We must follow suit and not cower. All of us have a role to play.

Meanwhile, the US currency find suggests a deepening of international illegal activity in the country. The easy access through a port is troubling. It is, however, hard to say whether the find is simply the tip of a iceberg that has long been floating in our waters.

We must commend, though, the Customs and Excise Division as well as the police for their interception which itself suggests some headway in intelligence gathering. However, there remains the perception that the systems in relation to the latter must be strengthened, along with measures to police our borders and control guns.

While we often decry the porous nature of our borders, the regional and international assistance being sought in this investigation shows how things work both ways. We have long stopped being just isolated islands.

Indeed, we never were.

We must stress the need for committed cooperation in the crime fight at all levels, including political. Given the pace of implementation of measures covered by the last Government/ Opposition crime talks, we not satisfied that the political directorate is working as well as it can on this matter.

If the plan to eliminate PIs and the pledge to hold further talks are not kept, all of the efforts thus far will be rendered nothing more than a lost opportunity for the nation’s leaders to truly work together to deal with this scourge.

It’s high time for a united stance. For now there is little to console the victims of crime and the innocent bystanders who are now in the line of fire. We express our deepest condolences to all who have been thus far affected by these atrocities and warn than we are all implicated in getting this situation under control.