The crime statistics are frightening

Sep 13, 2015 Features / Columnists, My Column

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When I saw the police crime statistics on Friday I shuddered. I saw that we were having about 12 murders every month. That is a shocking figure. Road accidents at that rate are alarming so imagine when murders match road fatalities in a country with fewer than a million people.

An international organization ranked Guyana 44^th in the world when it comes to homicide. There are nearly 200 countries in the world. I got to thinking about what could cause this spate of killings and I am stumped. Gone are the days when people simply quarreled and walked away or when men battled it out with their fists. Everyone who gets angry kills, it would seem.

There were nearly two dozen execution-type murders, all of the victim being young men barely out of their teens. At one stage I thought that these were drug related but then I noticed that many of the victims had criminal records. It could have been a case of criminal gangs exacting vengeance on another gang.

In one case a victim of such killing was said to be an individual who although no more than 22, had no problem with robbing fellow criminals. When his killers cornered him he had a gun but he displayed all the evidence of fear and never thought of using his gun. The police never said whether they recovered a weapon.

Then there were the domestic murders that were disguised to look like robbery murders. A man kills his wife and reports that criminals entered his yard and killed her while he hid. Another man hires some people to beat him and his wife because he wants her to stay in the union. To their credit the police were not fooled.

As if the murders are not bad enough there are even more rapes. Sex is a driving force behind most things. Among the lower animals there are fights for the right to have sex with a female. Some of these fights have been so violent that animals have died. But such fights only occur when the female is ovulating. In short, sex is only for the purpose of recreation; never for pleasure.

In the case of human beings, it is different. Sex is more for pleasure than for recreation. There are prostitutes for some men. These days there are even men for some men and women for some women. All this happens outside a normal relationship although I am not certain what a normal relationship is these days.

The other day someone hacked into a file controlled by Ashley Madison. Normal men, or should it be men in normal relationships were found to crave the services of women outside their marriage. One of them was a pastor who later committed suicide.

Tiger Woods was not considered a normal man because he cheated on his partner. He had to undergo counseling and in the end his marriage folded. In Guyana there are no known dating services but there are the prostitutes. Yet cases of rape are skyrocketing.

The authorities say that the perpetrators are often people who are close to the victims. Increasingly some of the victims are pre-pubescent. These are sick men. It could be that there were these cases all along but these days there are probably many more reports.

Just this past week a judge sent a strong message to one such rapist. She imposed a sentence that would see the man spend most of his natural life in jail. But are others taking notice? So there we are, a country that is bent on killing and raping. The police crime statistics shocked me.

And things could only get worse. There was the belief that those deported from overseas had brought a new level of crime but it turns out that our own people are capable of conjuring up the crimes. I am certain that the reported rapes are just a fraction of the cases. Guyana must be a dangerous place but try telling that to the people who are pushing tourism.

At one time I said that crime and poverty are closely linked and I still think so except that some of the criminals are wealthy or should be. One of the fellows killed recently has been known to handle a lot of money but what he did with it is unknown. His mother was reported to be saying that she is waiting on some relative to help with the funeral.

I happened to be talking with a pastor who is firm in the belief that the declining numbers of young men who refuse to be lectured in morals are those who invariably turn to a life of crime. These are young men who seem unafraid of the jail until it faces them squarely.

I know men who are now desperately seeking a way out of jail having spent a long time for some violent crime. The only thing is that the jail doors are not ready to open. I would expect that those on the outside would value their freedom more than anything else but they do not.

Perhaps they are among those who believe that they would never be caught but there comes a time when every criminal is caught. So here I wonder whether the murders would end. Some of the murders are linked to drug smuggling which is another problem. With drugs comes guns and with guns comes death.

Guyana is dangerous, if only because some find it fashionable to kill.

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