Dear Editor,
Like clockwork, shots rang out all over New Providence on the weekend, leaving several dead and wounded victims.
It is fair to surmise that a good number of victims and perpetrators of the last 10 or so casual murders will be people on bail for murder and people convicted for carrying firearms and already released after pitifully short sentences.
Our administrative class has run out of anything to offer by way of solutions - apart from dull platitudes.
Meanwhile, we the population are expected to sit idly like tranquilized sheep watching the show as if those we employ to do something about it are mere subjects, rather than agents of our plight.
Very little is said (except once in a while by a commissioner of police) about the easy preventability of these murders - many of which simply would not have occurred save for failures of judges and politicians.
But slumbering politicians and roosting legal eagles suddenly arise from hibernation and spring into action when a politician from distant St. Vincent has the gall to call out the obvious issue of repetitive murders of and by people on bail for murder. They suddenly find the indignation to speak up.
And what they have to say is bogus twaddle.
There is nothing said or done by the Privy Council that requires Bahamian judges to immediately accede to applications for bail at the first instance, nor is there anything preventing them from generally denying bail for murder and letting the applicant appeal that decision to the Privy Council - keeping our streets at least marginally safer in the interim.
There is certainly nothing preventing them from giving people who carry illegal weapons 15-year sentences like in Jamaica, Cayman or Britain.
In fact, now that (thanks to Hubert Ingraham) there is nothing to stop them giving less than just four years, they typically hand out sentences of a year or two.
Many of these people go on to murder and maim within the 10-year period that they would still have been imprisoned in a sane country.
Bahamians need to be more assertive against those who fail them miserably and then bristle at criticism.
- Andrew Allen
The post Our administrative class is failing us on crime appeared first on The Nassau Guardian.
Click here to read more at The Nassau Guardian
