Barbados faces heightened exposure to illegal firearms trafficking following a deadly security breach in Trinidad and Tobago, criminologist Verla Depeiza warned on Monday, as she called for urgent tightening of border controls and stronger enforcement measures to prevent weapons entering the island.
Depeiza was responding to a brazen weekend gun attack on a police station in Trindad’s southern city of San Fernando. A municipal police officer was shot and killed at the San Fernando City Corporation Municipal Police Station over the weekend.
The officer’s body was discovered around 4:40 a,m. on Sunday. Some 62 firearms and approximately 4 000 rounds of ammunition were also stolen from the station’s armoury.
Depeiza, the former Democratic Labour Party leader who was tasked with developing a national Report on Crime for the party, raised concerns that the stolen weapons and ammunition could find their way across the region and onto Barbados’ shores.
“Given what is happening on our street, our exposure is 100 per cent, because any leak is too many. The solution starts with vigilance at our borders, whatever that may look like, not just scanners. The vetting of the officers to ensure that they remain on the right side of the law. The expression used in the Report on Crime blueprint to rescue a nation is ‘untouchables’. We need to ensure that there are no untouchables and that, regardless of whom it is that we find involved in that illegal trade, they are punished.”
She also pointed to what she described as a weak nationwide commitment to tackling crime. “We do need to have commitment to cause. I think that’s the thing that’s missing the most and the commitment has to be across the board.”
The attorney-at-law suggested that young people involved in gun crimes are not the source of the weapons, but are instead being supplied.
“I keep saying that the youngsters that I see paraded before the court on firearms charges can’t actually afford firearms in any meaningful way, not the kind of firepower that we are seeing. The indiscriminate shooting suggests that ammunition is easy to come by, so therefore we need to go up a notch, next level. Who is supplying them? Who are the importers? How are they importing them? We make an assumption that they’re coming in through our regular ports, but our borders are porous.”
Multiple, often unmonitored entry points make the situation more complex, she added, pointing to a greater role for maritime enforcement.
“. . .Boats landing in fishing villages, they land along the coast they put up and drop anchor. There are different ways that contraband gets into the country. It suggests that there’s a larger role for the Coast Guard to play as well in policing our waters.”
The criminologist also urged full enforcement of existing policies: “Whatever the policy, if we don’t commit to it, if we go about it in some wishy-washy way. Then it is not going to work,” she stressed.
Depeiza further made an urgent call for early social intervention to steer young people away from crime:
“We need to be reaching our very young people and our young people to divert their attention away from whatever it is that has attracted them on that side of society, to build and inculcate in them what a good citizen is from scratch, the minute they become our captive audience in a school nursery, primary.”
She noted that focusing solely on apprehending gunmen will not solve the problem, as they can easily be replaced by those financing criminal activity.
The criminologist underscored the need to address the root social issues, warning that enforcement alone will fall short: “To be drilling it into our young people, we don’t have a choice. If we can man borders, we can do everything of that sort, but if we are not fixing people, then we’re really just spinning up in mud.”
She stressed that intervention must begin early: “From early it has to be that we don’t even leave room for that seed to grow. We need to be planting our good seeds so close together that we can’t get through. When you’re seeing 16 year olds committing serious crimes, it means that at 11 and 12, a teacher could tell you about their deviance, maybe even earlier than that, therefore we need to be dealing with these issues from early before they get so hardened that they’re committing major crimes.”
(LG)
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