Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley has said a crime-fight­ing ex­pert will be brought in­to the coun­try soon to dis­cuss crime and vi­o­lence as a pub­lic health is­sue. He was speak­ing at a press con­fer­ence held in Bar­ba­dos on Sat­ur­day.

Asked by re­porters for ad­vice on deal­ing with a crime prob­lem in Bar­ba­dos, Row­ley said, “The peo­ple from T&T will raise their eye­brows at you ask­ing me for ad­vice in crime-fight­ing. The on­ly thing I would say the lev­el of vi­o­lence in so­ci­ety is a fea­ture of the mod­ern world.”

He added, “In our area, we have a num­ber of stim­u­lants of this vi­o­lence. We should be cog­nizant of that. We are now ac­cept­ing that it is some­thing we have to ad­dress on an on­go­ing ba­sis. It is not about lock­ing up peo­ple, shoot­ing crim­i­nals and in­car­cer­at­ing the pop­u­la­tion. There are deep­er is­sues in­volved that takes us to the source. It is not overnight so­lu­tions. We have been ex­tend­ing a lot of re­sources and ef­fort and hold­ing the line against the crim­i­nals.”

Row­ley al­so said what was fright­en­ing was that crime was large­ly dri­ven by young peo­ple.

“That is the fright­en­ing thing. The next gen­er­a­tion is (fu­elling crime). They don’t have a val­ue sys­tem or the val­ue of life. We are be­ing pen­e­trat­ed by our larg­er neigh­bours so the drugs and firearms trade is com­ing in­to our space and cre­at­ing prob­lems which we did not have 40 or 50 years ago. There is no tem­po­rary or quick fix sit­u­a­tion for crime,” he added.

The Prime Min­is­ter al­so said crime was poi­son­ing so­ci­ety.

“It is like an ex­ot­ic dis­ease that comes in­to an en­vi­ron­ment for plants and an­i­mals and once it is in the en­vi­ron­ment we have to face it. That is what we are fac­ing now. Prime Min­is­ter Mot­t­ley just spoke about view­ing vi­o­lence as a pub­lic health is­sue that af­fects so many peo­ple. It is so fre­quent and we have to treat it as a pub­lic health is­sue,” Row­ley said.

He said last week he spoke with Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Stu­art Young and dis­cussed bring­ing in ex­pert help.

“We are invit­ing an ex­pert in T&T to open a con­ver­sa­tion on this is­sue which is look­ing at crime and vi­o­lence as a pub­lic health is­sue. We have noth­ing in T&T that we can of­fer you that is dif­fer­ent from what you are fac­ing here. We are all fac­ing the same thing,” Row­ley said.

Bar­ba­dos Prime Min­is­ter Mia Mot­t­ley said her gov­ern­ment was tack­ling crime us­ing heavy law en­force­ment and strong so­cial work. She said the re­gion need­ed to look at crime as a pub­lic health is­sue.