The murder of 25-year-old Nadia Simms has been the latest in a long string of brutal attacks against women which have shocked the country. Against the backdrop of rising murders and violence against females, it is perhaps the natural progression to a situation in which the low police detection rate has emboldened criminals to the point where they are fearless in carrying out their acts of lawlessness.
At this point, we take time again to offer condolences to the families of the female victims whose lives have been snuffed out in such crimes. We will not name these victims again so as to spare their still grieving families another bad memory of these incidents.
But herein lies the problem for our society. Some and indeed the majority of the perpetrators of these acts are still roaming the land with an opportunity to continue these attacks. National Security Minister Edmund Dillon, and his predecessors before him, have continually tried to convince citizens that these acts are being committed by only a small minority of the population.
Well, today, we can well and truly say that the minority seems to have a strong upper hand, since the latest landscape suggests that law-abiding citizens are now running scared and now desperately seeking to fight fire with fire.
Which brings us to a case highlighted this week. At a police town meeting in Mon Repos on Monday, school teacher Frances Sampson made an appeal to DCP Operations Deodat Dulalchan for increased police patrols in the community surrounding her school, after a recent robbery at the nearby Lai Kin Restaurant and subsequent killing of a man outside the same establishment last month. But she also appealed for the arrest of a pervert who was terrorising her young female students by exposing himself, even while he was out on bail for a similar offence. Her complaint came even as a similar case at another school in the San Fernando community recently prompted parents to stage a protest.
With the police service under pressure for the current spiralling murder rate, Dulalchan immediately instructed his men to take action. Sure enough, the officers tracked down and arrested the perpetrator while the meeting was still in progress. However, when the perpetrator got to court, on charges of theft and exposing himself, the penalty handed down by the magistrate was perplexing.
For his crimes, the perpetrator received 60 days for the theft of a table and 40 days for exposing himself. Naturally, the seemingly ridiculous sentence for the act against the young school girls stunned many, some of whom took to social media yesterday to discuss the issue. Some people questioned how the theft of a table could be weighed higher than a sexual misconduct act against school girls. That argument, no doubt, would have its genesis in the fact that such perpetrators, given enough leeway, can graduate to become paedophiles and sexual predators of the kind who lured and killed Simms on the weekend.
We thus congratulate the work of the officers who swiftly caught the culprit in this particular case. But given that the maximum penalty for the act is two months, it may not be possible to point fingers at the magistrate for the sentence handed down since this was the accused’s first actual conviction.
In order to fix this country’s current crime problem, minor crimes, white collar crimes and major crimes must be dealt with alike and the perpetrators must be made to face the full brunt of the law. Statistics of rising crimes against children recently given by the Child Protection Unit of the Police Service tell us we have a major problem facing us. But to get to a better place, the lawmakers need to adjust such legislation to deal with the deviant-minded among us and this is not the only area where such archaic laws need amendment.
In order to fix this country’s current crime problem, minor crimes, white collar crimes and major crimes must be dealt with alike and the perpetrators must be made to face the full brunt of the law.
