PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad, CMC – Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley Monday called for concrete recommendations to be adopted at the end of a two-day regional symposium on violence that Caribbean Community (CARICOM) leaders regard as a public health issue.
“I believe we would do ourselves an injustice,” she said if the delegates left here without adopting decisions to be implemented across the region.
“We need the CARICOM arrest warrant, we need to have the exchange and rotation of judges…we need to have an enlargement of the jurisdiction of magistrates, we need cooperation on forensics, and we need to….deconstruct all the rules in our police service and reconstruct them,” Motley told a panel discussion of regional leaders.
Mottley, an attorney, noted that many years ago, “people did not get bail for murder.
“Now, when I look at the stats, not just out of the Bahamas, Barbados, and throughout the region, the people causing the most significant problems are charged with two, three, four murders. Something is fundamentally wrong.
“So I ask myself two fundamental questions. How will we deconstruct and reconstruct to meet the reality of this jurisprudential development undermining the rule of law in our countries? We will have to find ways of cooperating from the level of the police to the story of the courts, but in particular, forensics.
“If we can get people to court within nine to 12 months, you have a good chance of a person not being given bail. Beyond 12 months, any number can start to play,” Mottley said, questioning why countries have been establishing forensic labs individually.
She also questioned why the region is not involved in “proactive prosecutions rather than reactive prosecutions,” noting that 90 percent of the prosecutions in the Caribbean are as a result of a crime perceived of having been committed as opposed “to people systemically going after people in a structured way.”
Mottley said regional countries, having agreed that security would be the new pillar for the region’s socio-economic development over the last 20 years, “have yet to follow through on functional day-to-day cooperation that can make the difference there.
In her contribution, Mottley agreed with sentiments that the United States had “no moral authority” to speak out on gun-related violence.
Earlier, Jamaica’s Prime Minister Andrew Holness said that the region as a collective group must agree that more excellent resources must be placed on international security in the police services “into our ability to gather intelligence, interdict, and prosecute.
“But we must also consolidate our efforts to lobby the United States particularly to assist us as we have assisted them in the war on drugs. They must assist us in the war on guns,” Holness said, describing the present situation as “the most significant unfairness that we have diverted resources from other areas in which we could have spent it to fund and support a war on drugs…
“There seems to be no interest in stopping the other part of the trade, which is the guns. Guns fuel crime. They are an accelerant. They are needed to protect drugs that are transhipped to our borders. They are then turned to deal with other forms of criminal activity”.
Holness said in the case of Jamaica, the weapon of choice is no longer the Russian-made AK-47 but the AR-15 and the Glock, which are guns manufactured in North America.
“So collectively, as the leaders of CARICOM, we must raise our voice on this. We must appeal to our friends in the North to increase their efforts to prevent the flow of guns into the region,” Holness said, adding,” We cannot negate our responsibility in protecting our ports of entry.
“We must also increase in a consummate way our spending on securing our ports, airports, and our points of entry and increase our ability to detect the entry of illegal weapons, and we must also change our laws so that they align with the new and sophisticated crimes that are being committed and the flow of weapons into our country,”
Holness said the issue of crime and violence also has to be treated from the public health standpoint, noting that Jamaica has established a national commission on crime prevention.
“We feel in our country that the propensity to use violence and force to solve conflict is almost cultural. It has become a societal response, and it is therefore not merely a policing problem, not merely a law and order problem., it’s about the social and emotional of our citizens to regulate themselves. It’s about the mental health of our society”.
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