Must It Take Another Shit Storm In William Peter Boulevard Before Government Comes Down Hard On Crime?

As if the original declaration by a high ranking law enforcement officer were not sufficiently depressing, this week the prime minister grabbed his first opportunity to endorse what media personnel had been told a few days earlier: that the current crime situation is without precedent. The police statement was far from factual. But even if it were valid, it would also be an unspoken admission that the officer in question, along with his fellow protectors of our lives and property—the prime minister too—had let the nation down in the worst way. 

I can just imagine the drugged-up perpetrators of the “unprecedented” criminality in their smelly rat holes whooping and high-fiving one another as the officially endorsed words of officer Nicholas came over the various media outlets. Imagine the island-wide jubilation had the prime minister been able instead to truthfully announce at Monday’s pre-Cabinet that the number of violence-associated arrests and convictions in recent months was at an all-time high!     

Reality check: Crime in our simply beautiful country has nearly always been off the charts. Fifty-something years ago we had one or two TV stations that broadcast to a handful of luxury-home owners whose concerns were unrelated to the rest of the population, and one newspaper of significance that blindly supported a government overly concerned with keeping our bad news to ourselves—in the best interests of tourism and “our precious overseas image.” If a rum-soaked participant at a cockfight stabbed a fellow loser in the chest and killed him, chances are it wouldn’t make the news. If it did the story would likely be reported in four or five blah lines buried somewhere near the back of the paper. The English owner-presenter at the TV station, barely able to pronounce the name of the village where the incident occurred but acutely aware of the inherited colonial laws that governed the reporting of such matters, would provide little more than the dead man’s alias and his presumed age. Seldom was his killer mentioned. Press conferences were unheard of.  

Fast forward to 1971 when I first returned home after countless years abroad to take up an offer by Sir Garnet Gordon of the Voice editor’s chair. I was at the time based in New York, at the peak of my career as a professional bodybuilder and editor of Joe Weider’s Muscle Builder magazine. Sir Garnet’s invitation amounted to an offer I could not refuse. However, there was one small hitch. He wanted me to start work immediately when I had long committed to two stage appearances in Brussels and in London. We decided finally that I would come home then take time off to fulfill my overseas obligations. I had been with the paper three months or so when I boarded at Hewanorra a flight to London. 

The morning following my appearance in Stratford, I flew to Geneva. I was off-island just four days. The moment I landed again at Vigie, all I heard were unbelievable accounts about an incident most horrific that had occurred in my absence. More reliable information awaited at the Voice, courtesy a visibly shaken Sir Garnet: His Scottish friend and work colleague John Etherington, and his white Barbadian wife Majorie, had been murdered and their house burned down several hours before my arrival. Etherington had been the general manager of Geest Windward Islands Estates. Besides being the publisher of the Voice, Sir Garnet was chairman of Geest Industries, generally considered the company most responsible for the country’s banana-flavored economy. The newspaper publisher and the murder victims were, so to speak, family—closely related!

But I must not digress too far. The shocking details of the Etherington story can be revisited in “It’ll Be Alright In the Morning,” first published in 1979 and now into its fifth printing. I’ve recalled the case as I have because I know only too well how little of it is known to Saint Lucians. Even older citizens seem to have forgotten the roles played by leading local politicians and their manipulative powerhouse allies in their determined efforts to bring to justice those responsible for the murders many came to believe was a threat to their livelihood far worse than black sigatoka!  

In my earlier cited book I described the Etherington killings as the most grotesque in Saint Lucia’s criminal history. Time has not changed my mind. So much for the notion that the crimes committed today are not only more gruesome, but also unprecedented. Between 1987 and 1997 there have been unspeakable rapes of females barely six years old as well as centenarians, murders of natives and visitors, the majority unresolved. In 1997 Kenny Anthony campaigned on the promise he would deal with crime more effectively than had John Compton and his successor for one year, Vaughan Lewis.

In their time there were several unresolved bank robberies, murders involving tourist victims, daylight hold-ups in Castries and elsewhere. I remember well the occasion when barrels of confiscated contraband were removed by individuals from a customs shed under guard. Certain prominent names were whispered in relation to the break-in but no one was ever arrested. Word was that at least one police officer was implicated. Busloads of tourists were often ambushed robbed at gunpoint.

The Saint Lucia that Kenny Anthony inherited in 1997 was so over-run by criminals that just one year after taking office the new prime minister endorsed the police initiative known as Operation Restore Peace. It was in that period that notorious Michael Gaboo Alexander was shot dead at lunchtime as he rode his exercise bike in Balata. A drug dealer nicknamed Bonny was dispatched in similar fashion. Under Prime Minister Stephenson King the unforgettable and still problematic Operation Restore Confidence was undertaken in another desperate effort “to take back our country from the criminals.” But according to follow-up prime minister Kenny Anthony the real criminals were in police uniforms, members of an untouchable gang that rubbed out the competition while pretending to be regular crime fighters.

The consequences continue to multiply, even as new criminals replace the departed. By Kenny Anthony’s telling, violent crime in Saint Lucia was, in the time of King, committed or facilitated by cops that planted weapons at the scenes of their own criminality, by crooked politicians and businessmen. To date no names have been revealed, and despite continuing pressure from the EU and the U.S. State Department there have been no prosecutions related to Operation Restore Confidence. Meanwhile, the fall-outs continue to befuddle cops, the DPP’s office and the Allen Chastanet administration.

Recently, a Dennery man was discovered fatally shot and stabbed. A note reportedly was found near his corpse: “When you owe you must pay”—or something to that effect, reminiscent of 16-year-old Giselle Georges, whose lifeless body was discovered in her parents’ home early one afternoon in 1998, gagged with her hands tied behind her. She had also been savagely raped. Her killer left on her chest a note that reportedly said: “You have too much style.” 

Over the mounting dead bodies opposition supporters mock the current prime minister, now in the third year of his term: “You said Kenny couldn’t do it but you will.” The sick irony is inescapable: every campaigning political group in Saint Lucia has blamed the sitting government for the crime rate. In 1997 Kenny Anthony pledged to bring crime under control. Among the tools he promised to use against the perpetrators was “an overwhelming police presence.” At the time “overwhelming” translated into “forty-something imported police officers to assist our regular force.” Alas, under pressure from a particular section of the media, Anthony chickened out. He recruited instead from the UK an underwhelming eight deadbeat retired cops to do, as he put it, “administrative work.”

Conflict soon followed, with resident officers often challenging their authority for one reason or another including race-related. The unwelcome visiting policemen had absolutely no useful impact on local crime. A related joke concerns the theft of a TV set and valuables from the rented beachside quarters of one of the imported cops while he sipped whiskey with local friends on his lawn. At least one of the UK cops wrote disparagingly of Kenny Anthony’s attitude to crimefighting after he returned home. So did U.S. Ambassador Kramer!

Our prime ministers, from Compton to the present, have demonstrated similar traits. At campaign time they have eyes that can see clearly into the future. At any rate better than they can what’s immediately in front of them. As for crime, you can always bet on their laying the blame at the feet of the sitting prime minister while at the same time advertising their own untried panaceas. Once they are at the levers of power, however, they seem to transmogrify into paranoid idiots with one thought only on their minds: reelection. And for that they will desert whatever ideals they may earlier have entertained.    

From Compton to Chastanet, all recognized at one time or another the obvious need island-wide for round the clock policing. Allen Chastanet will point out at every opportunity that since taking office, and despite the seemingly insurmountable consequences of Kenny Anthony’s IMPACS fiasco, he has strengthened the DPP’s office, set up several CCTVs at key locations, and recruited approximately a hundred new recruits. By “new recruits” he means kids recently out of school and facing long-term unemployment. Predictably, within a few months these recruits discover they were never cut out for a police uniform and leave in pursuit of fantasies of one variety or another. In consequence one police officer has responsibility for the safety of some 200 cop-despising citizens.  

I dare to say this prime minister who is under constant attack either on account of his skin tone, the way he puts across his ideas or his determination to explore previously overlooked possibilities, how he pronounces words in kwéyòl, must discover the courage to give Saint Lucians—including his knee-jerk detractors—this choice: either learn to live with more crime or give him the green light to invest in a police force reinforced by 400 or so imported no-nonsense crime fighters, fully equipped to effectively carry out their assignments. With IMPACS still unresolved, will the EU be willing to assist? Will the United States? 

The investment must also include a functioning crime lab, a special court open for day and night business, judges and so on. I go further to suggest well-policed curfews and unannounced police raids on homes and on vehicles, as well as booze parlors that entertain drunks with vehicles waiting to be turned into weapons of mass destruction. Our laws must be enforced that proscribe selling alcohol to underage wannabe patrons.

Finally this: During the 2016 election campaigns open threats were made against particular individuals. Only last week one opposition hotshot was on TV not so subtly suggesting the possibility of an Arab Spring in Saint Lucia. Meanwhile, the usual suspects have been citing “the courage of the Dominican people” and agitating via Facebook for the removal of the Saint Lucian prime minister ahead of elections. It would be foolhardy of this government to take these mindless manifestations lightly. More reason to declare all-out war on crime and on those who for their own selfish interests would repeat past disasters. Now’s the time for our ostensible protectors, elected and otherwise, to act together in our common interest. To further procrastinate would be to declare yourselves accomplices. And already we’ve had too many, at any rate by Kenny Anthony’s telling!