Nicholas Laughlin's blog etc.

No answers, no fix, no plan....

The time has come for a reckoning. Let the slaying of the Lusignan 11 marshal all of our efforts. It is also time for the government, in particular the President and the Minister of Home Affairs to drop the pretence. The security situation is not under control. Within five hours there were two chilling attacks. The country's police headquarters in the capital came under unanswered gunfire and hours later 11 persons were slaughtered on the East Coast with the police putting in their usual late appearance. Anytime 20 to 25 men can storm a village and kill with impunity it rips to shred the pantomimes and fairy tales about crime being reasonably under control. It is a deception of magnificent proportions and has been routinely conjured up by President Jagdeo and his administrations.

The President and his administration have no answers on crime, have no fix on what is happening and have no plan to implement. President Jagdeo must take personal responsibility for this situation. With nearly a decade of increasingly autocratic rule he has failed to conquer crime and has caused a worsening of the situation by not tackling major menaces such as the drug cartels, narco-terrorism and money laundering. He has failed to launch adequate investigations of shocking crimes such as the assassination of one of his own ministers, the mayhem and brutality inflicted on East Coast communities, the unsolved murders of dozens of men, the reign of the death squads and the possible involvement of one of his ministers with the death squads. Notwithstanding this he quite opportunistically announced a major probe following the discovery of two weapons alleged to be linked to the PNC from the 1970s. Exceedingly strange.

What is now in the government's game plan is anyone's guess. The plodding citizen's security initiative and the still inchoate British anti-crime plan promise much but have not yet delivered. There has been much prating about the crimestoppers programme but no stopping of crime and the so-called drug master plan is being mastered by the cocaine barons and their minions.

More radical options should be contemplated and which options have been urged for at least the last 15 years i.e. recourse to crime fighters from professional bodies such as Scotland Yard and a thorough shake-up of the police and the installation of new leadership.

--From the editorial in today's Stabroek News.