Editorial | CARICOM crime plan right, but…

The promise by Caribbean Community (CARICOM) leaders to adopt a region-wide public-health strategy for fighting crime is a sensible idea that will hopefully yield good results.

But while this newspaper largely supports the proposed initiatives in the declaration from the recent symposium on crime in Port of Spain, CARICOM governments are advised to tread carefully on, and give deep thought to, actions that might infringe on the freedoms that make this region a bastion of democracy.

The specific concern is the suggestion, without data or other forms of empirical evidence, of a great tilting of the balance away from safety of citizens to individual rights. One of the ways it was signalled that this might be addressed is by making it more difficult for accused people to receive bail.

Good intentions, however, if not properly monitored, sometimes lead to unintended consequences.

This matter, therefore, demands robust, evidence-based debate, rather than the introduction of policy driven by subjectivity, populist sentiments or a wish to make it easier for law enforcement. In that regard, regional groups concerned with the protection of human rights should pay close attention to, and be actively engaged in, this debate.

EPIDEMICS ARE SOCIETAL CRISES

The English-speaking Caribbean’s record on democracy notwithstanding, it is acknowledged that the area, in common with the rest of the region, is one of the world’s hotbeds of violent crime. The region’s homicide rate is over 30 per 100,000. For instance, in Jamaica, which recorded just shy of 1,500 murders in 2022, the homicide rate was 54 per 100,000. In Trinidad and Tobago it was over 39/100,000, while in Guyana it was 20. St Lucia, with around 185,000 inhabitants, had a homicide rate last year of 27 per 100,000, down from 41/100,000 in 2021.

As the CARICOM heads of government put it in their Port of Spain declaration, the community is facing an “epidemic of crime and violence … fueled by illegal guns and organised criminal gangs”, which threaten “our democracy and the stability of our societies”.

Epidemics are societal crises, responses to which aren’t the same as those for the healthcare problems of individuals. Usually they demand national mobilisation, starting with defining the nature and scope of the disease to be confronted, identifying the risk factors associated with it, implementing intervention strategies at scale, and putting in place prevention, monitoring and mitigation policies and programmes.

In other words, public-health-intervention initiatives, if they are to be effective, are whole-of-society projects – an approach to which regional governments have pledged commitment, acting cooperatively.

While the region’s plans are so far short on details, the proposal for the overhaul of criminal justice systems to proactively manage and prosecute criminal cases, while at the same time diverting at-risk young people from crime, are worthy ideas. So, too, is the suggestion for the sharing of forensic capabilities and “the intra-regional rotation of judges and magistrates to admit or foster their greater exposure”.

If it happens, it would deepen the functional cooperation element of CARICOM, the area in which the community has had its greatest success. But given CARICOM’s history of failing to implement its agreements, the leaders shouldn’t be surprised if there is a high degree of scepticism of the plans coming to fruition – at least in an integrated fashion.

LEGITIMATE NEED

Several of the proposals, however, don’t need regional coordination for their implementation. They require only national action.

For instance, Jamaica’s Parliament is currently considering a major overhaul of the island’s Bail Act. Among the complaints of Jamaica’s law enforcement is that judges too easily offer bail to criminal suspects, especially those accused of murder.

That concern is echoed across the region, contributing to the supposed judicial imbalance that contributes to what the heads of government described as a “debilitating effect on the rights of the community to live in peaceful societies”.

The negative impact of crime on the quality of people’s lives in the Caribbean is real. The need to respond is legitimate.

But scale matters. In other words, CARICOM’s leaders mustn’t take what might be aberrations to be the norm, while the real problem goes undiscussed and unaddressed. The reasons for glaring and perverse acts, too, must be interrogated and those cancers excised.