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Crime and Response

Aug 06, 2012 Editorial

Earlier this year, the police announced that while the overall level of crimes committed in our country fell by some 8% over last year, the rate of armed robberies rose alarmingly by some 21%. Since that time, going by press reports, that trend has not only continued but has accelerated. The Guyana Police Force seems completely at sea on capping this dangerous development.
Basically this surge in violent crimes is the result of a confluence of several factors – each of which will have to be addressed if we are to reverse the trend. First there is the violence that has been keeping pace with the rise of the drug trade for the past two decades.
Guyana is now an established drug transhipment point as was highlighted over the weekend by the seizure of 20Kg of cocaine at CBJ International Airport and 170Kg in Canada in June. The drug trade is notorious for its violent modus operandi.
Associated with the drug trade is the increase in drug usage in Guyana, which creates a new urge for quick money to feed the drug habit. Violent crimes are one of the recourse to secure the ‘fix’. Then, we have to look at the continued breakdown of the family structure in which we seem determined to follow the North American pattern down to the bitter end.
While we have not yet developed the marauding youth gangs that are characteristic of the American scene, there has been a surge of violent crimes by youths that come from broken or dysfunctional homes.
Lastly we have to admit to the failure, not only of the police but to its cohort – the criminal justice system – which complains that it is overwhelmed.
This saturation of the court system has led to a paradoxical situation. On one hand offenders are remanded for long periods before trial during which time they earn graduate degrees in crime and violence in the overcrowded jails and on the other hand when they finally go to trial they enter a revolving door situation.
In the public discourse about how to deal with this tsunami of violence, we generally see two competing views. One is the traditional law enforcement approach, which says crime is caused by criminals and the way we deal with crime is to use aggressive enforcement policies and to deter or incapacitate criminals through incarceration.
On the other hand, there is what some call the ‘social rehabilitation’ response to violent crime. That approach tends to see crime as caused by societal ills and seeks to deal with crime by remedying these ills through social programs. Proponents of this approach say that violent crime cannot be dealt with only by suppression but its root causes must also be attacked.
We believe that we need both approaches, properly understood, acting together. We do have to take aggressive steps today to deal with the criminals of today. But, we also have to take steps and we do need programs to prevent, as best we can, the youth of today from becoming the chronic offenders of tomorrow.
Too many advocates of the ‘root causes’ approach, however, give short shrift to the need for tough law enforcement. They just cannot bring themselves to deal with criminals decisively and they tend to dismiss reliance on police and prosecutors and prisons as unenlightened. Many times they will insist that we should be spending money on schools and housing and so forth rather than on police and prosecutors and prisons.
We will have to prioritise our approaches and we hold that a strong law enforcement approach has to be paramount. This has to be so for the simple fact that in this pervasive atmosphere of fear and violence that we see in certain city neighbourhoods, even the best designed social programs cannot take root.
The problem is that our efforts to deal with underlying social maladies are being strangled by crime itself. It should be increasingly clear that suppression of crime is a prerequisite for any of our social programs to be successful.

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