Start helping yourselves from within your communities

Dec 29, 2011 Letters

Dear Editor,
If the abduction and rape of a 5-year-old child at Canje has not sparked a national outrage, then we have become bereft of human feeling and are no different from the perpetrator(s) of the heinous act. And, subject to usable information given to the Police, delay in appropriate action can only exacerbate the situation.
Over the past two years, the Canje area has been a hotbed for robberies, drug use and other criminal activities.
And residents continue to appeal for the intervention of the Authorities. But what are the residents themselves doing about a response by and from within their community? Isn’t there a responsibility on their part to exorcise those who wreak havoc amongst them?
I will bet that the youths in the area are the “baddest” when they are in the rum shops, but they tuck their tails between their legs when they are sober and confronted with having to defend their community, and indeed the integrity of their immediate homes. I will bet further that the majority of residents of Canje know who the junkies are, who the thieves are, who have illegal weapons, who are in cahoots with rogue elements within ‘B’ Division of the Police Force.
Does Canje lack leadership to the extent that a group of 10 persons cannot initiate a collective response to the most crucial ills of the community?
To those commuinities who are seeing a rise in crime in your area, I am saying without fear of contradiction, that you have encouraged it. You have stayed silent when your child smoked his first joint or stole the first bicycle.
You paid the Police a bribe to drop a matter when you were about to be charged for cursing your neighbour. You bought your driver’s licence. You knew when the drug dealers in your area were just small peddlers.
You chastised the Community Policing Group for not being on Patrol, when you should have been a member of the same Policing Group. But you saw community security as everybody else’s business but yours. Well, you are reaping the reward of your silent but active encouragement of wrong things. So, stop screaming for outside help and start helping yourselves from within your communities. Take back your communities from the thieves and the druggies. The law-abiding citizens in a community are hundreds, thousands. The miscreants are a handful. Where is your collective fortitude?
Who am I to take the moral high ground? I am in it. I fight against what I perceive as the ills of my community and further afield. And I was part of an audit of Community Policing throughout Guyana. I happen to know.
Taajnauth Jadunauth
Community Activist

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