FREQUENTLY, AS happened at last Wednesday evening's national crime forum in Jamaica , the matter of social intervention in improving communities which are breeding grounds for the worst incidents of crime is placed on the table for discussion. But something else which is equally necessary and urgent is dealing with the support given to criminals in communities and by households.
The recent arrest by the police of the mother of a wanted man on gun charges, after she was allegedly found with her son's weapon in the family home, has again thrown into sharp focus this kind of linkage that remains to be broken if the crime monster is to be defeated.
We note that the son is himself in police custody facing a battery of serious charges, and that a grandchild was also taken into protective custody on suspicion of being used as a gunrunner in the family's alleged criminal activities. The courts will, of course, determine guilt or innocence by due process in due course.
Legislators have long understood that crime cannot flourish and take the kind of deep root it has in this country without support and protection from those who are not themselves active perpetrators. Guilt goes well beyond pulling the trigger.
As violent crime escalates, women and children are more and more being sucked into being victims of the wanton bloodshed. The guns are being turned by criminals against the most vulnerable who may have only the most tenuous link to their criminal enemies. A great many of the 'inexplicable' atrocities against 'innocents' that we are witnessing have their genesis in attachments to other criminal elements by family, by association, or by community. No one is safe as the destroyers pursue and act upon these linkages.
The law must also act upon these very same linkages and deal with crime with zero tolerance at the level of support for it. Women and children are key players in the entrenched criminal enterprise which is killing this nation. Some are coerced; some are willing accomplices and beneficiaries. The police must take an active interest in all of them and with careful intelligence work, execute many more arrests across the country for aiding and abetting.
Zero tolerance, more talked about than carried out, must mean several necessary things: It must mean enforcement of all the laws, including 'minor' quality-of-life laws - which also can be a basis for putting major criminals away if serious charges cannot be made to stick. It must mean arresting, by the hundreds if necessary, more grandmothers, mothers and 'baby mothers' who aid and abet the perpetrators of the criminal violence engulfing us. Find them and lock them up, and break the back of support for crime.
THE OPINIONS ON THIS PAGE, EXCEPT FOR THE ABOVE, DO NOT NECESSARILY REFLECT THE VIEWS OF THE GLEANER.
