WHY GUYANA’S ANTI-CRIME STRATEGY WILL FAIL!

Nov 23, 2015 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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We can learn a thing or two from the experience of Trinidad and Tobago in fighting crime. It is not however as if we have anything to learn from what that country has done; rather the learning experience is what the failure of security services has done to impact on crime.
Crime in Trinidad and Tobago is far worse than in Guyana and has been so for some time.
So brazen and powerful is the criminal underworld in that country that it did what many decades ago would have been unthinkable: the criminal underworld gunned down a leading member of the legal fraternity. This has happened more than once in Trinidad and Tobago, the crime capital of the Caribbean.
The lesson of the failure of crime fighting in Trinidad is that here is a country that does not lack the financial resources to fight crime. It has helicopters.
At one stage it even had a blimp that saw almost everything that was happening in the country.  Trinidad and Tobago has a well-paid, well- equipped and highly-trained police force. All those things however have not helped to reduce crime in that country. The more equipped the police got, the higher was the rate of violent crime.
Resources, training and better pay is not the solution to eradicating violent crime, at least not in Trinidad and Tobago. That is the lesson that Guyana should consider as it decides what to do with its own increasing incidence of violent crime.
If increasing law enforcement is not the answer, then what is?
The high incidence of gun crime is spawned by the drug trade which has made small guns and big guns more accessible to the criminals.  Reducing the drug trade, ridding the society of drug barons may therefore seem as one of the best options for reducing gun and other violent crimes.
But even the best resourced law enforcement agencies in the world, such as the NYPD, have not been able to rid their streets of drug trafficking and gun running. This therefore is not a practical solution even though it is something that every government says that it wants to do.
Asking poor countries to take on drug lords is asking them to commit suicide. The Americans do not seem to understand this issue and discredit their own efforts at preventing drugs from entering into their country by offering a pittance to countries in the Caribbean to fight crime. It simply cannot work and will continue to be a failure.
If a country with the financial resources at its disposal has been unable to keep the drug trade outside of its borders and to prevent many of its young people from being lured by the attraction of the underworld, then how are poorer countries also in the Caribbean expected to succeed in keeping its young away from crime and in preventing drugs from entering or leaving the country. It is a mission impossible.
The countries of the Caribbean such as Guyana however are paying a high price because of violent crime. Its young people are being corrupted by the drug trade and they are being gunned down in drug wars.
Also, the drug trade is allowing more guns to be made available in the society which is leading to more robberies and violence. Trinidad and Tobago is no longer a safe place.  Guyana, unfortunately, is also not a safe place.
The new government has not yet outlined an anti-crime strategy. It also has not produced its own Ant- Narcotics Master Plan. But in devising both of these documents, it must recognize that the traditional approach which has informed the anti-crime strategies of all the governments of the Caribbean has failed.
That approach emphasizes training and equipping the protective services.
That approach has been a failure and there are no better examples than in Trinidad and Guyana where the governments have pumped increases resources into the police services but with no commensurate reduction in crime.
Guyana has to consider market strategies, rather than security strategies, to bankrupt the drug lords. If you cannot catch them, then bankrupt them. Make the business nonviable.
In tomorrow’s column I will discuss how this can be done!
At the minimum, Guyana should give serious thought to raising the thresholds for what constitutes trafficking in marijuana. Our jails are being filled up with young men who are caught with small amounts of “weed”.
When you are released from jail in the country, no matter what is your crime, you find it hard to secure employment. If they are asked to obtain a police clearance, they cannot do so because they have a criminal record and very few employers are going to give then a second chance.
And so many of those who go to jail come out and are forced into a life of crime because nobody wants to employ a jailbird.
So, the first step in a new crime strategy is to reduce the size of the potential criminal underworld by denying it recruits from those who have served jail time.

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