Cari­com lead­ers have come and gone, and crime has re­mained a front-burn­er is­sue. Per­haps a spe­cial ses­sion of Cari­com lead­ers was nec­es­sary if on­ly to im­prove ex­ist­ing mech­a­nisms for in­for­ma­tion shar­ing and joint ac­tion. Time will tell if any last­ing good came of last week’s meet­ings. It would have been ex­treme­ly un­re­al­is­tic to ex­pect that any col­lec­tion of the re­gion­al lead­er­ship would some­how have ad­vanced the fight against crime. If Cari­com could make no head­way in ad­dress­ing Haiti’s gang wars and vi­o­lence, how was it go­ing to ad­dress the rise of vi­o­lent crime across the re­gion?

Im­me­di­ate­ly pre­ced­ing the sym­po­sium was the re­port that nine po­lice of­fi­cers from the East­ern Di­vi­sion were ar­rest­ed by mem­bers of the Pro­fes­sion­al Stan­dards Bu­reau over al­le­ga­tions of mis­be­hav­iour in pub­lic of­fice, more specif­i­cal­ly for run­ning an ex­tor­tion rack­et. Even as the meet­ing end­ed, the mur­der toll spiked with five mur­ders in 12 hours with con­tin­ued calls for a crime plan, the re­sump­tion of hang­ing, and an in­crease in firearm li­cences. This Sat­ur­day’s head­lines re­port­ed that an­oth­er com­mu­ni­ty, Val­sayn, had in­stalled a new com­mu­ni­ty se­cu­ri­ty sys­tem to keep crim­i­nals out.

These three dis­parate events are con­nect­ed. They demon­strate that the crime sit­u­a­tion is flu­id and the crim­i­nal el­e­ment un­de­terred and more ag­ile than the state se­cu­ri­ty ap­pa­ra­tus. As the State in­sti­tu­tions seem to weak­en, com­mu­ni­ties with the means will take ac­tion to pro­tect them­selves cre­at­ing fur­ther di­vi­sions.

It could be ar­gued that the Cari­com sym­po­sium amount­ed to noth­ing more than a dis­trac­tion that set the wrong tone by lay­ing blame at the feet of many in­sti­tu­tions rather than ac­cept­ing re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for failed gov­ern­ment poli­cies and ac­tions. Caribbean Court of Jus­tice Judge Jus­tice Wit cor­rect­ly point­ed out that the Caribbean jus­tice sys­tem needs an over­haul not a change of judges. That ob­ser­va­tion is true of many state in­sti­tu­tions. These can­not be fixed by cit­i­zens, par­ents, or re­li­gious bod­ies. They re­quire the col­lec­tive in­ter­ven­tion of the po­lit­i­cal di­rec­torate to cre­ate a re­form agen­da and take de­ci­sive ac­tion.

Com­ment­ing on the An­ti-Gang leg­is­la­tion in 2017 then at­tor­ney gen­er­al Faris Al-Rawi not­ed that there were 211 gangs and 2,459 known gang mem­bers, more than dou­ble the amount es­ti­mat­ed in 2011. What ac­tions have been tak­en to ad­dress that sit­u­a­tion, and what was the na­ture of those in­ter­ven­tions? What were the re­sults and what is the cur­rent po­si­tion?

The point is that ac­tions can­not be re­ac­tive. If the prob­lem was de­fined in 2017, then ac­tions ought to have been de­signed to ad­dress the prob­lem. Change is nor­mal and un­less the Gov­ern­ment and its in­sti­tu­tion­al ap­pa­ra­tus ad­dress those changes, then it will be left be­hind as ris­ing crime clear­ly demon­strates that it is be­ing left be­hind.

The key take­away from last week’s sym­po­sium was that big grand events can­not solve our crime prob­lem. The crime prob­lem is a re­sult of many fac­tors which took years to reach this point. Re­vers­ing the sit­u­a­tion re­quires a holis­tic ap­proach at many lev­els to ad­dress the many fac­tors con­tribut­ing to breed­ing crim­i­nals. The Gov­ern­ment has all the mech­a­nisms nec­es­sary to ad­dress these fac­tors. What is clear is that it has not adopt­ed an in­te­grat­ed ap­proach to fo­cus its con­sid­er­able re­sources on the prob­lem. That re­quires co­or­di­na­tion, lead­er­ship, co­or­di­na­tion and agili­ty, skill sets that can on­ly be pro­vid­ed by the po­lit­i­cal di­rec­torate.