Crime concerns

When a new administration takes over the reins of government, they are usually given a “honeymoon period” in which they are not challenged too aggressively.

However, from the reports in the press, it appears that the criminals in our midst have not only ignored the honeymoon for the new Minister of Public Security and the Police Force that falls under his bailiwick, but have actually upped the ante in challenging them.

In the first four months of the year, there was an average of 14 murders per month but following the elections that rate has increased by at least 50 percent. And this rise in murders is reflected across the spectrum of crimes, especially in armed robberies.

We do not believe it is useful to speculate on motives behind the increased criminality, but call on the government to send a strong message that it will be tough on crime. But in this regard, the new government might have made two missteps.

The first one was for the President to announce, in almost his first official act, that he was pardoning 60 persons who had been incarcerated for what must have been misdemeanours.

It appears, however, that this act could possibly have had the unfortunate consequence of signalling that the new administration might be soft on crime.

After all, no matter how innocuous the crimes the pardoned persons might have been committed, the magistrate or other judicial official must have had some rationale within sentencing guidelines to impose the sentences, after the usual pleas for mitigation.

The other crossed signal was for the new President and Minister of Public Security going beyond his remit to place on hold the reorganisation by the Commissioner of Police of his top brass.

Here was the top cop signalling to the criminals that in the new dispensation he was tweaking his apparatus to deal with the just announced slight increase in crime so that it did not get out of hand.

And it did get out of hand as we know to our cost. Whether this was a matter of “correlation” or “causation” is somewhat academic right now, since the “hold” on the reorganisation of the top tier of the Police Force has now been lifted.

In order to get a handle of the spiralling crime rate, the new administration has to understand and accept that the political campaign is now over and both its rhetoric and its actions must be directed towards curbing crime and not scoring points against the previous administration.

Take for instance, the action of the Junior Minister of Social Protection upstaging the Bartica Police by leading a charge of her old Women Miners colleagues against “Trafficking in Persons” (TIP) in a hotel. It turned out to be just a case of illegal entries and expired entry permits.

What the Junior Minister, who boasted in Wild West style, “I is Broomes, and I making a sweep”, must have done was to demoralise the Police who accompanied her because they could have conducted the same raid with much less fanfare and local annoyance.

If she had passed on the “tip” she claimed she received on “TIP activity” to the local Bartica Police, it is very likely that using their contacts in the community they would have found out it was going to be a wild goose chase.

To further reinforce the point that the new administration needs to focus on better policing and not “one-upmanship” is underscored by the same Junior Minister claiming “substandard” accommodations for the Bartica Police.

This might all be true, but wouldn’t it have been best to bring the said conditions to the attention of the Minister of Public Security so that he could work with the Police administration to rectify matters?

The issue of citizens’ security was one of the two the top issues in the campaign. It should now be dealt with condignly.