Former Minister of National Security Cynthia "Mother" Pratt says both major parties have been guilty of politicizing crime over the years.
However, she said this week it was the opposition Free National Movement (FNM) that threw the first blow - during the run-up to the 2007 election when she was in office.
"Let me ask you this, do you think they were political when they attacked me from the platform at R.M. Bailey Park?" Pratt asked, referring to FNM officials who repeatedly accused her of being too soft on crime.
"I rest my case. That's where it started. Both were wrong. It doesn't make it right who did it. It was wrong from the beginning. But if it hadn't started from the beginning, it wouldn't have continued.
I was attacked. It was wrong then. It is wrong now." Some will believe Pratt's comments were heartfelt, others that they were just another case of finger-pointing.
Regardless, the fact is that when it comes to our national crime problem it is not necessarily the case that all allocations of blame are detrimental.
The FNM, it is true, criticized Pratt for failing to bring crime under control between 2002 and 2007.
Today, however, at a time when the murder rate is 15 percent up over the same period last year, the opposition has attacked not so much the PLP's failure to curb violent crime, as the vast gulf between the campaign promises of 2012 and its dismal performance once in office.
Also this week, FNM Deputy Leader Loretta Butler-Turner accused the government of being "clueless" when it came to crime. She added: "The government said that they had the panacea, the magic bullet... Unfortunately, they sold the Bahamian people a dream."
Butler-Turner was responding to the admission by Prime Minister Perry Christie, following the murder of his press aide during a weekend that saw five killed, that the government must go "back to the drawing board" in its efforts to fight crime.
Pratt joined a growing chorus of sympathizers who have been arguing of late that the government cannot win the war against crime alone.
This assertion is correct; but so is the response of the PLP's detractors - that if this was the case, it never should have claimed otherwise in the first place.
Bahamians remember the PLP's bold, confident promises on crime, as well as the murder count billboards it erected around New Providence in an effort to discredit the former FNM administration, which both Pratt and Christie have since admitted were a mistake.
Yet that mistake, those dubious promises, constituted one of the main legs of the campaign platform that saw them elected to office on the hopes of a frightened populace desperate for answers.
At the end of the day the efforts of their political opponents to punish the PLP for exploiting public fear while lacking the tools to back up the promises the party made will have been more than worth it if they discourage such irresponsible behavior from politicians in the future.
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