By Gordon Barlow

Disrespect for the rule of law is what governs criminal behaviour at all levels of society. The disrespect is not confined to our burglars, robbers and casual muggers.

Most of Cayman’s law-breaking goes on inside air-conditioned offices, and is never prosecuted. Mainly, its victims are migrant workers, because there is a lot of money to be made by abusing our indentured-labour system. The immigration authorities keep a solid wall of secrecy around all work permit decisions. The Freedom of Information Law doesn’t reach inside that wall – which is why so many of us dismiss the whole Freedom of Information exercise as a waste of time.

Are we as a society genuinely interested in suppressing crime? Hmmm - only carefully selected crimes, apparently. Too many of us fail to acknowledge any connection between collar-and-tie crimes (corruption and manipulation) and the “manual” crimes of the unwashed and unprivileged.

In practice, the latter are inspired by the former – and sometimes instructed by them. Collar-and-tie criminals sometimes need the help of young men with guns.

It is regularly reported that each political party in Jamaica has its own gang of thugs. The commanders are safe from both injury and prosecution; the gunmen die in the streets and prisons.

Will Cayman follow Jamaica’s lead in this matter?

Who would bet against it?

There are warning signs in the savage rhetoric of political extremists on the Cayman News Service website. Some of it comes pretty close to incitement to violence against selected groups and individuals. Elsewhere in the world, incitement of that nature leads to actual violence, especially against immigrants and their defenders. There is good reason for us to fear it here.

The main danger comes from the well-educated commanders – the hidden “Fagins” I referred to the other week. Without them, the gangs have no focus.


Low-level serfs

Yet the commanders are never subjected to investigation, as far as we can tell. The only people in jail for drugs offences are the low-level serfs.

Why is this?

Are the higher-ups too protected by their positions and money, and maybe even their connections?

Of course they are.

It’s relevant to note here that our two major communities (native Caymanians and immigrants) differ in their attitudes to local crime. In general, immigrants tend to regard all crime as crime – no exceptions. In general, Caymanians tend to concentrate exclusively on illegal immigration and crimes of violence.

The different emphases are a barrier to unity of purpose, in the reduction of crime as in so much else. Can the two attitudes be reconciled? Maybe, maybe not.

To migrants at the bottom of the food chain, a midnight raid by police or immigration agents is as frightening as a home-invasion by robbers is to the rest of us. To many Caymanians the Immigration Enforcement Unit’s officers are heroes; to the vast majority of immigrants they are the Gestapo.

The last time a Filipino cooperated with the police in a robbery investigation, he was killed by a forklift the day before the accused robber’s trial. Nobody was ever arrested for the death, and to the best of anybody’s knowledge the police never even called it a crime.

We all – native Caymanians and immigrants alike – have to ask ourselves, why should any Filipino (or any immigrant from any other ethnic group) admit to witnessing a crime ever again?

Which of us would, in their shoes?


More burglar bars

I have long called for the creation of a Community Relations Board, whose purpose would be to find common ground between Cayman’s communities, especially on the issue of crime. It would have to be a genuinely non-political Board, and contain representatives from all the major ethnic groups in Cayman. Of course that’s exactly why the idea has never been taken up by the politicians.

So, there may not be any practical alternative to the present divided-community approach to the young men with guns. If the governance of Cayman doesn’t need the participation of non-Caymanians, that may have to go (to some degree) for the fight against crime and criminality too.

As we all know, it is the semi-slavery system of indentured labour that alienates our poorer migrants and their sympathisers. Until Cayman’s voters are ready to acknowledge this system’s abuses as crimes, cooperation is bound to be limited.

How could it not be?

And, to bear down on the crux of the problem: how does this non-cooperation help us deal with the young men and their guns and knives?

All we can do, it seems, is to leave it to police and immigration officers to decide how to deal with the burglaries, robberies and shootings, in consultation with the politicians and the tie-and-collar manipulators. All decisions will be based on opinion polls and orders from London.

The polls will say to hire more policemen, and arm them; make prison less comfortable; make sentences longer; allow the police to be more brutal; allow householders to own guns and kill burglars; scrap all human rights; and so on.

Individuals will take their own protective measures, culled from police-procedure novels and television programmes. More burglar bars; karate lessons; pepper-spray containers in handbags and pockets; broken glass glued to the top of every wall...

Where I live, we don’t even have walls between the houses. So now we’ll have to build walls. I guess the broken glass will be easy enough to find, as time goes by.