By Gordon Barlow

They are disrupting our peace of mind – as if we don’t have enough to worry about with a dodgy financial future ahead of us, both as individuals and as a community.

Nobody seems to have much idea of how to stop the current slide into violence. We seem content to lay the blame on the usual scapegoats. Poor parenting skills, incompetent policing, low Police morale, leniency by judges and prisons, illegal immigration... We tend to rant about all those, but without coming up with anything new.

Here are four brief pieces of advice, to start with.

First: everybody should shut up about poor parenting, especially by single mothers. Single mothers have been around since our earliest settlers. There is nothing new about that phenomenon. The absence of fathers in many households is a shame in theory, but Cayman’s children survived those absences back in the days when fathers spent more than half their lives at sea.

Before that, the deliberate destruction of African family-life by slave-owners began the Caribbean tradition of fatherless families. We can’t sensibly ignore that fact of history, and its consequences in today’s society.

Raising kids is a tough job for mothers whether single or married. Not all mothers are temperamentally suited for the job, and some make a mess of it. But “some” have always made a mess of it. Successful parenting is largely a matter of luck, anyway.


Adequate punishment

Second: everybody should stop urging the Police to assassinate suspects. “We know who they are, but we can’t touch them” has been the cry of incompetent coppers throughout the centuries, and is pure humbug. If our Police were ever given a wink and a nod to take out individuals they “know” to be criminals, our society would be creating a Frankenstein’s monster. Come on. We’re not ready for a Police state just yet.

God knows we have enough worries already about Police and Immigration officers disrespecting our laws. Marl-road reports of Police perjury are unnerving. If even half of them are true, how come there has never been a single prosecution for perjury?

Isn’t our Prosecution Service supposed to be independent of the Police?

The Governor should change the promotions system in all law-enforcement agencies, and sideline those individuals whose actions diminish the public’s respect for the agencies. To date, they seem to be promoted instead. Also, let the agencies’ activities be more transparent. If the Governor wants specific recommendations, he should read the 1998 report of the Vision-2008 Open Government committee.

Third: our MLAs should change the laws so that each convicted violent criminal is kept in prison for as long as it takes his victim to recover, physically and mentally, plus the term of the court’s sentence. That might, with luck, limit the degree of violence used in robberies.

It’s totally unfair for an attacker to be out and about while his victim is still on medication for injuries relating to the attack. Indeed, it amounts to a breach of the social contract between a community and its members. It is an invitation to victims to take the law into their own hands.

When a victim is still in pain from a wound inflicted by someone who is back on the streets after “paying his debt to society”, it is very tempting for the victim or his family to declare war on the criminal. If society doesn’t deliver adequate punishment, the injured parties might require the perpetrator to pay his debt to THEM. If that means contracting with some other bad guy to collect on the debt – too bad.


Overstayers

Fourth: we should all discount the myth that “overstayers” become criminals. Foreigners who lose their jobs but hang on in Cayman looking for other work don’t become criminals, except very rarely. Does being unemployed really push honest people into crime? By that logic, the thousand or so permanently unemployed Caymanians are criminals. Should we round them all up and throw them in jail?

Yes, yes, the presence of overstayers infuriates native Caymanians; but they need to bear in mind that many of us legal immigrants have a soft spot for our fellow expats. In general, we wish them well. In most cases we would never dream of turning them in to the authorities for overstaying. Our instinct makes us the ally of anybody on the run from the Gestapo. We are all members of La Resistance, mes amis.

(Immigration has just rolled over a domestic servant who has been domiciled in Cayman for 25 years. Isn’t that mean? How can any decent person respect people who do that?)

Of course that’s not a helpful attitude in the battle against crime; and of course we need to change it. Native Caymanians need to persuade us change it – but the key word is “persuade”. Not “force”, and not “bully”.

This stand-off only benefits the criminals. But then, as we all know, the deep mistrust between our two communities benefits the criminals, too. Yet nobody in authority has ever seriously tried to dissolve that mistrust. So, each community drifts along ignoring the other’s priorities. The criminals must find it all a huge joke.

When, oh when, will our rulers (both in London and locally) come to their senses in this matter?