Sascha?Wil­son

Crim­i­nol­o­gist Randy Seep­er­sad be­lieves the An­ti-Gang Act will have a re­verse psy­cho­log­i­cal ef­fect on crim­i­nal gangs, strength­en­ing them rather than de­ter­ring them. Dis­agree­ing with At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Anand Ram­lo­gan that the leg­is­la­tion was act­ing as a de­ter­rent, Seep­er­sad said as far as he was aware there was no ev­i­dence to sug­gest that. "Some­thing like that serves to em­pow­er gangs, in the sense that it is ob­vi­ous that right now it is a fail­ure, be­cause we know every sin­gle per­son who was ar­rest­ed un­der the act dur­ing the state of emer­gency has been re­leased." Seep­er­sad said he was not crit­i­cis­ing the law, how­ev­er. "I am not knock­ing the Gov­ern­ment's at­tempt to re­solve or to deal with the gangs. The leg­is­la­tion def­i­nite­ly shows the re­solve of the Gov­ern­ment to do some­thing about the prob­lem. "But at the same time, the fail­ure of the leg­is­la­tion was ev­i­dent dur­ing the last SoE. It sends a clear mes­sage that the Gov­ern­ment and the leg­is­la­tion can­not to do any­thing about it or deal with the gang prob­lem."

Com­ment­ing on Ram­lo­gan's state­ment that he had re­ceived in­tel­li­gence sug­gest­ing that the act was de­ter­ring young peo­ple from en­ter­ing gangs and gang lead­ers from re­cruit­ing them, he said, "I think it might not have that ef­fect." Seep­er­sad said crime sta­tis­tics showed rough­ly 50 per cent of mur­ders was gang-re­lat­ed. He sug­gest­ed that the Gov­ern­ment should re­think the leg­is­la­tion, which was passed last year, to make it more spe­cif­ic: "What type of ev­i­dence can be used, and more im­por­tant­ly putting mea­sures in place to al­low for the gath­er­ing of that type of ev­i­dence, in terms of foren­sic ev­i­dence, in­tel­li­gence, fin­ger­print tech­nol­o­gy, bal­lis­tics and prop­er mon­i­tor­ing sys­tems." He said a key fac­tor lack­ing in the leg­is­la­tion was pre­ven­ta­tive mea­sures.

Say­ing that was al­so lack­ing in the crime-fight­ing strat­e­gy, he said, "They take it from a re­ac­tive per­spec­tive...They wait for the prob­lem to hap­pen." He said pre­ven­ta­tive ap­proach­es in­clud­ed look­ing at the dy­nam­ics of com­mu­ni­ties, prob­lems that young peo­ple ex­pe­ri­ence, and rea­sons for join­ing gangs and en­gag­ing in il­le­gal ac­tiv­i­ties. Seep­er­sad said ed­u­ca­tion re­duced crime but on­ly ac­ci­den­tal­ly, as a by prod­uct. He sug­gest­ed that the "gang re­sis­tance through?ed­u­ca­tion and train­ing" ap­proach used in the Unit­ed States be in­tro­duced in the ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem. The Op­po­si­tion called on the Gov­ern­ment to amend the act af­ter charges were dropped against more than 400 peo­ple be­cause of lack of ev­i­dence.