KINGSTOWN, St. Vincent, CMC – An opposition legislator proposes a “boot camp” style program to help steer at-risk youth away from crime in St. Vincent and the Grenadines.
The opposition spokesperson on national security, St. Clair Leacock, who is also a vice-president of the main opposition New Democratic Party (NDP), said 90 to 95 percent of the homicides in the country are committed to the southern bel, namely South Leeward, Kingstown to East George and almost 95 percent of the victims are under the age of 40.
“I’m concerned about what’s happening in St. Vincent and Grenadines,” Leacock said, recalling his experience as a cadet in the 1970s and 80s and a flourishing exchange program in which cadets from Canada and the Caribbean participated in an exchange program.
“I used that design to say, maybe in our foreign relations call, maybe in our home affairs requests, we can call for a similar kind of assistance, either from the US Southern Command or again, from Canada or the United Kingdom, to assist us in a similar program, not necessarily confined to the cadets themselves,” said Leacock, a former commandant of the St. Vincent Cadet Force.
“It may even broaden it to sports and cultural groups. But, fundamentally, the time has arrived for us to have what I call a kind of boot camp program in our islands,” he said, noting the success of the Coast Guard and other youth summer programs.
“But a lot of our young people need to be put into a boot camp program to discipline themselves, to regiment themselves, and to order themselves,” he said, adding that his proposal would prevent young people aged 25 to 40 from leaving society.
“And remember, I’m always making this case, an argument for us to be a second-chance society,” Leacock said.
“There’s something that happened that we don’t know about,” he said and spoke of his experience in his constituency and the communities “where some of these crimes occur.
“Because sometimes you hear people say, ‘Well, boy, the people here were under a virtual curfew.’ ‘They were under siege.’ ‘This happened, that happened, and the other happened.’ ‘People saw this that,’” Leacock said, adding that he was speaking generally and not about any specific case.
“Our society is very aware, very often, of young people who are losing their way… when something is going wrong or not so right about an individual. But it remains nobody’s business.”
Leacock said that in the past, people had their children in their 20s, became grandparents over the next 20 to 25 years, and became great-grandparents in their 70s.
“A lot of 30-year-olds can tell you they have grandchildren. People don’t have time to parent their children, much less to grandchildren and other children,” Leacock said.
He said the point is that the country needs to have, whether it be the social welfare department or an amalgam of government ministries, “trace programs where they can begin to say where these things went wrong, where suddenly a talented guy… start to get violent in your own very own football club and they start to [take up] the new company. But again, it’s nobody’s business.”
Leacock said that society needs to start doing the traces, but, at the same time, have counselors or some other people start taking an interest in society “to begin to pay more attention to those young people who are falling through the cracks, to get them back on the straight and narrow and to get them into second chance opportunities to save them from yourself.
“There’s an urgency for that and to confront, aggressively, this evil culture of crime and violence that’s emerging in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. We can’t just leave it to a politicization of the argument. It has to be deeper than that,” Leacock said.
“We need to have systems in place to address what I call systems failure among our young people, to create a new second chance opportunity,” Leacock said.
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