ttgapers.com

In yet another address to the nation, one of several in the 19 months of his current administration on the as-yet-unmanageable crime menace plaguing the country, Prime Minister Patrick Manning last week purported to present yet another plan of attack.

He said again that the government was intent on winning the war against the criminals. He talked again about "accelerating the implementation of cutting-edge technology, combined with improved intelligence to deal with kidnappers."

That address was delivered on July 28, and as if to make their own statement in response to the Prime Minister, the criminals signalled their disdain for what he was saying. The week ended with a series of killings which put the murder rate last Saturday at 150. But by yesterday that figure had jumped to 157, with a rash of killings over the Emancipation holiday weekend.

There is now the Special Anti-crime Unit established under the Brigadier appointed expressly for this purpose. There is the Firearms Interdiction Unit, the Anti-Kidnapping Squad, the Organised Crime and Narcotics Unit and other special forces in the police security apparatus which now involves permanent combinations of the police and defence force personnel. But despite all these supposed manifestations of official attempts to stem the tide, crime continues to be public issue number one for the society.

Again in his latest address to the nation, the Prime Minister talked of re-introducing measures denying bail to persons charged with kidnapping, as if that would make any real difference. What about the fact that persons accused of murder are denied bail? Can anyone truthfully say this in itself is any check against the wanton tendency of so many to commit this capital offence?

? Too many law-abiding citizens remain to be convinced about the effectiveness of this proposed measure when the record to date demonstrates an appalling lack of success by the police to capture kidnap suspects and bring them to justice.

For more than a month now two persons have been held by kidnappers, one of them a 10-year-old boy. With every passing day the distress being experienced by the relatives of these two victims grows while investigations seem to be going absolutely nowhere. In one case a ransom demand was met weeks ago and still the investigators remain flat-footed and empty handed in the face of this criminal absurdity.

A Special Reserve Police officer on his way home in a maxi taxi was shot dead in a most casual fashion by young hoodlums who started off with robbery on their minds when they held up the vehicle one night recently.

Taxi drivers are being held up, robbed, beaten and killed willy-nilly. House break-ins, larceny on the street and myriad other crimes, high and petty, continue across the land without abatement.

Additionally, it sounds trite to hear the Prime Minister repeating at this stage of the game that "the Minister of National Security has been instructed to revise his budget to provide critical resources to the new Commissioner of Police who is now paying special attention to certain hot spots which require constant attention."

It is more than fair to say now that nothing has changed in the 10 months since a new Minister of National Security was appointed following the Cabinet reshuffle last October. In the face of the plethora of news conferences and addresses to the nation to which the population has been subjected on this issue, there is an abysmal lack of confidence being expressed by many in the society about the ability of the authorities to get a grip on this galloping monster.

Cynicism, fear and foreboding pervade the land, as government representatives come up with one impotent set of announcements and pronouncements after another.