Crime out of control, country ungovernable says Friday

St Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG) needs a comprehensive strategy to fight crime says Leader of the Opposition New Democratic Party (NDP) Godwin Friday.

Friday, who this week once again called on the government to establish a working crime fighting plan, said it seems as if a comment made a few years ago by a member of the Unity Labour Party (ULP), that the country would be made governable has manifested itself.

The “ungovernable” comment was made after the loss by the ULP in the 1998 general elections,” he recalled.

“The ULP said they would make the country ungovernable and they seemed to have achieved that…. Here you have a situation with people in broad daylight, getting gunned down and so forth, and you have mass shootings in Kingstown. All of these things, because you have no accountability, because they haven’t arrested or prosecuted anybody for many of these offences,” Friday continued.

“…and this is something that is unacceptable, and they can’t just say ‘this is what our lot is and this is what it is going to be going forward in St Vincent and the Grenadines’…”.

Between Friday, September 27 and October 2, five homicides were committed on mainland St Vincent with one of them seeming to point to a robbery gone wrong where a licensed firearm holder discharged his gun at three men who were trying to commit a robbery in Peruvian Vale.

“We can do better and the reason we are the way we are is because we have in the current government, incompetent people who there for talk and talk but they are not delivering for the people, and one of those areas is in security,” the Opposition leader charged.

“The crime situation is one that needs to be turned around because…the level of investments we get from overseas, the crime situation affects that directly, and then of course, we have the situation of our health care system.”

Friday said that one of the primary things that a government can give to its people is security, and security comes by dealing with crime, therefore making it safe in the communities.

Another thing he said the government needs to provide is good healthcare, and the proper facilities should be there when people get ill.

“We don’t have that in St Vincent and the Grenadines…” the New Democratic Party President said.

His comments about the crime situation was also supported by Vice-President of the NDP, Major St. Clair Leacock who, also speaking on the NDP’s New Times programme on Nice Radio, said when you look at the prison population, the majority of persons are in the age group 20 to 30 and not too long ago, people from certain schools never found themselves in prison.

“…you would be surprised to see the amount of criminal elements and gang members who are people who have come through the portals of secondary schools,” Leacock pointed out.