THE EDITOR, Sir:THERE IS at least one serious strategic gap in Government's crime control and prevention planning. It's the feeble and uncoordinated action to galvanise crime-prone communities to prevent conflict on a scale sufficient to trigger a self-sustaining social chain reaction.
Our unrealistic expectation of community policing; situationally led mediation; retrospective management of communal violence and token and fragmented programmes for crime-prone youths have diverted our attention and downplayed the vast potential of a stake-holding, community engagement for peace. So have police investigative strategies which focus on convenient categories such as ganja in the 1960s, politics in the 1970s, narco-trafficking, domestic violence and deportees from the 1980s to the present.
While such categorisations help with the investigation of crimes, they are of little value in designing sustainable crime prevention measures since they aid police action after the fact in order to punish, while crime prevention focuses before the fact to influence human values and action at the level of the family and the community.
Moreover, most murders and violent crimes are localised community phenomena among people waiting for something more than houses, jobs and police patrols. In our culture, triggering communal action is the most effective means to control escalating murder rates.
So long as police crime control plans, alongside grand designs of unaffordable inner-city 'renewal' dominate our approach to violent crimes, we will bypass the rewarding developmental aspects of everyday communal value and interest-based rejection of violence. It's time we convert conflict into opportunities to guide other nations.
HAROLD CROOKS
Lluidas Vale P.O.
St. Catherine
