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News : New Providence Last Updated: Feb 6, 2017 - 2:32:04 PM


COB Alumni Panel Offers Insights on Combating Crime
By Office of Communication, The College of The Bahamas
Feb 21, 2014 - 6:25:46 AM

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Elsworth Johnson, President of the Bahamas Bar Association addresses COB students and students of the National L.E.A.D Institute’s Eagles Academy at the COB Alumni Leaders Series forum.

At another time they were all cops on the beat, but as they sat before an audience filled with college students, faculty and alumni of The College of The Bahamas recently, they embraced a familiar brotherhood – one in which they remained locked in a war against a familiar foe.

What the audience saw at The College of The Bahamas Alumni Leaders Series was a police commissioner, an attorney, a senior national security official and the mastermind behind a programme for at-risk males offering insight and recommendations on the menace of crime. But their experiences and perspectives on the factors that contribute to the problem provided a panorama of its ravaging impact.

Providing context for his thought-provoking assertions, Elsworth Johnson, AA ’95, president of the Bahamas Bar Association urged an understanding of the socio-economic and political awakening of the Bahamian people and the obligations of its citizens. He believes that a thorough discussion on crime or the development of The Bahamas must examine the issue of relations between the Bahamian and Haitian communities.

“We have to consider that there is something systematically wrong that we could move throughout our community and have those communities so inter-related – and we try to deny it like the white elephant in the room – where young boys and young girls are denied to be what they are, to act in the image of He who created all of us,” Johnson said.

The solution to the crime problem does not lie in building bigger prisons, hiring more police officers or equipping those officers with better weapons, he said.

“It comes back to the root – who is your neighbour – and whether or not you are prepared to love a lady enough to understand that she should not be treated a certain way, whether or not you are prepared to love a lady enough to understand that rape is not good, whether it is in marriage or outside marriage,” Mr. Johnson added.

“We must be honest enough to understand that every child who finds himself in The Bahamas, whether black or white, should be in school and we have to recognize that if they are born here under certain circumstances like other persons they should be naturalized. We have to be bold enough to have a holistic approach to crime because we are dealing with the most sophisticated and technologically advanced piece of creation ever – the human being.”

Developing an efficient and effective system of education was also identified as one of the fundamental priorities, particularly with respect to capturing the imagination and harnessing the potential of young, black Bahamian males. According to Troy Clarke, AA ’97, the Founding President of the Bahamas L.E.A.D. Institute, the education system in The Bahamas is failing young men and consequently contributing to the crime problem. He referred to data that the institute had gathered to support his position.

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Senator Hon. Keith Bell, Minister of State for National Security; Elsworth Johnson, President of the Bahamas Bar Association and Troy Clarke, Founding President of the National L.E.A.D. Institute listen while Commissioner of Police Ellison Greenslade makes his presentation to the COB Alumni Leaders Series forum.

“When we ran our life management male empowerment programme in the public school system in 2010 and 2011 we came into contact with in excess of 200 young males between the ages of 14 and 17 and from our statistics we have discovered that 85 percent of those youngsters were reading at a grade 4 to grade 6 level,” said the former Royal Bahamas Defence Force officer and police reservist.

“We have an educational system where one cap fits all….If we [do not] revamp our educational system and fix it the way we do it in corrections – where we do a needs assessment, a treatment plan and focus the young men in five distinctive areas, their heritage, identity, potential, purpose and destiny, we will not see any success,” he added.

He also lamented the practice of social promotion in the schools where students, who are barely literate and unable to think critically, are advanced to successive grade levels.

Commissioner of Police Ellison Greenslade, AA ’94, called for engaged citizenship and leadership which inspires healthy behaviour in communities. He, like Mr. Johnson, asserted that the solution does not rest entirely in a well-staffed and adequately armed police force but in examining the factors that contribute to social and moral decay.

“You have some root causes where human beings commit crimes in our communities and they do not think like you and I; they do not attend church, they do not attend Sunday School and you would ask how can a man take a knife, stick it into another man’s stomach, turn it and cut and then do it again as the poor person who is being injured says ‘Oh my God’ and that person dies?” he questioned. “My position is the man that did that is not acting like a normally socialized human being. But you cannot bring that back to a police officer and say ‘officer what else are you going to do’?”

Although there was a shared acknowledgement of the confounding challenges associated with crime, one of the panelists pointed to a few successes in the war like the government’s Urban Renewal programme. The Minister of State for National Security Senator Hon. Keith Bell, Cert. ’00, also referred to larger investments in additional vessels for the Royal Bahamas Defence Force; legislative revisions and attention to the crime fighting infrastructure needed for the Family Islands as actions that will yield results in the crime war.

He also alluded to the impact of the correctional system itself on crime.

“We know that we have some serious and fundamental challenges,” he acknowledged. “As a matter of fact every time I visit Her Majesty’s Prison I visit the cells; you have a cell 10x10 and you have four young men per cell. They are living in there, they eat, they sleep, there is a slop and pail…and of course we unleash them back out into society so we ought not be surprised by what we see at times because sometimes we actually manufacture some of these people,” Senator Bell said.

“But the reality is, then, we must all within ourselves be held answerable to ourselves. I am not here to make an excuse for anyone because everyone ought to know that they have the God-given common sense and they should have a degree of understanding to decide what is right and what is wrong. Today we are witnessing, to some extent, the breakdown of the family,” he added.

Although he seemed in favour of a proposed National Youth Service, Minister Bell also said that any such programme should be tailored to meet the social context and climate of The Bahamas and it should be advanced through a public-private sector partnership.

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