It was in 2006, shortly before that year’s general elections, that a rightly concerned Kenny Anthony government staged a crime commission it hoped might resurrect public confidence in the police force then headed by Ausbert Regis, now the prime minister’s special advisor on national security.
Presumably, the former police chief in whom the public appeared seven years ago to have no faith whatsoever, now advises the prime minister how best to thwart other possible threats to our peace of mind, doubtless al-Qaeda terrorism among them, while Vernon Francois tackles the problems his predecessor evidently could not.
I say presumably since it has never been made public precisely how our reformed security czar will now do for the prime minister and the nation what for him had evidently been a mission impossible as police commissioner. Then again, that certainly is not the government’s only closely guarded secret. Suffice it to say that at the earlier cited crime commission, after Mr. Regis had updated his audience on the obvious state of crime in the country and was taking questions from his audience (it included the prime minister and the minister directly responsible for the police), I took the opportunity to ask about the number of criminal Saint Lucians that the American authorities had returned to their original home.
Earlier the then commissioner had underscored what he solemnly described as the greatest threat to the public peace, to our tourism-based economy especially: criminal deportees from the United States. By all he said I had formed the impression that Mr. Regis entertained scant hope for a reduction in local crime, violent crime in particular, when America continued to dump its worst criminals at our door, simply because they were born here.
The commissioner also took time to highlight a particularly worrying aspect of his nightmare: the deportees were far more crime savvy and sophisticated than were our cops—and better armed.
Doubtless inspired by the desperation in the commissioner’s tone, a leading businessman in his audience had suggested it might be a good idea to implant chips in the deportees on arrival that would keep our cops always informed of their whereabouts—in much the same way canine owners in the U.S. keep track of their pooches.
I agreed. It was a splendid idea, after all. So splendid I thought it should be taken several steps further: why not require all citizens eight to ninety to be implanted with the wonder chip. Also worthy of consideration, I said, was a chip for babies, to be surgically implanted at birth. For some reason that robbed me of much sleep in the months following the crime commission, my suggestion had not inspired anything like the applause accorded the businessman. Perhaps something in my tone had bothered the attendant suits in their white collars!
In any event, this was my question to the commissioner: How many criminal deportees were at the time in Saint Lucia and making life difficult for its citizens while the police remained helpless? Mr. Regis replied quite straight-faced that he had not the slightest idea. Evidently, the deportees arrived here and then disappeared—without police interference, without a trace. (I had earlier imagined they came under escort and then were delivered to the authorities!)
There was no registration requirement, nothing in place that might’ve permitted the police to keep track of the miscreants Mr. Regis had blamed for the then unprecedented murder rate.
During the break I asked the prime minister to clarify what his police commissioner had said in answer to my deportee question. He told me outright that Regis knew quite well the number of deportees living among us—even though the prime minister himself did not!
He laughed his famous Santa laugh: “Regis must have his own reasons for not releasing it to you!” he said. Which to my mind made the commissioner, for whatever excellent reasons including police strategy, appear either uninformed or a barefaced incompetent liar.
Reliable sources have in the meantime assured me that whatever the number of criminal deportees from the U.S. there may have been in 2006, there has since been a drastic increase. Moreover, the deportees have free rein, can come and go as they please, at home and throughout the region. Additionally, not a few had made their way to Canada and could well have been the chief reason for that country’s recent immigration policy change.
Doubtless, we’ll learn more about that following the prime minister’s imminent visit with various Saint Lucian associations in Ottawa, Toronto and Montreal. Not that the Canadian government had acted without due notice. The indisputable truth is that for several years they had complained about Saint Lucian behavior to their local counterparts, to no avail.
And now the official word is that Britain’s Home Secretary Theresa May is currently seeking to tighten her country’s immigration laws so that repeat criminals may be more swiftly deported back to their native addresses, without human rights issues being involved. It suddenly occurs to me that since the Canadian horses have already bolted, it might make more sense for our prime minister to take a trip to the UK and have a word or two in Ms May’s ear? He might even take the opportunity, bearing in mind his well-chronicled miraculous powers of persuasion, to seduce the British government into revisiting its tax decision regarding travelers to the Rock of Sages. Ah, but even as I write the news coming out of Haiti is that our prime minister has been issuing unkind words at the Caricom Summit about our relationship with Europe!
Comments are closed.