A Who A De Criminal?

Obama with the biggest Jamaican don at during a session with African Outreach Leaders during the 2010 G8 Summit at the Deerhurst Resort at Muskoka in Huntsville, Canada, June 25, 2010.

PM urges G8 to treat crime as a development issue

Tuesday, June 29, 2010

PRIME Minister Bruce Golding has appealed to G8 countries for greater assistance to countries like Jamaica in the fight against organised crime.

According to Golding, this assistance must be broad-based and must recognise that rooting out crime is not just a law enforcement exercise but a major development issue.

Golding was speaking in Muskoka, Canada at a special outreach session of the G8 Summit last Friday.

He called attention to the penetrative and corrosive effect of crime in struggling developing countries with weak institutional capacity and a scarcity of resources. He also outlined the measures being carried out by his administration in its renewed campaign to combat crime and declared that it was determined to use every tool in its toolbox in an all-out effort that must be sustained until the job is completed.

However, he said that countries like Jamaica cannot do it alone, given their lack of resources and the transnational nature of organised crime.

While acknowledging the assistance being provided by the US, UK, Canada and EU, he said that a more comprehensive strategy must be developed as a matter of urgency. This must include greater effort to disrupt the flow of drugs with equal emphasis being placed on both the supply and demand side of the drug trade.

He also called for more effective measures to stem the flow of illegal guns which were not only the symbol and tool of organised crime but filtered into the hands of itinerant criminals.

Golding also appealed for more technical assistance in criminal investigation, intelligence management and law enforcement techniques and cautioned that crime does not exist in a vacuum but thrives in an environment where poverty is prevalent and hope and opportunity are depressed.

Countries like Jamaica, he said, which have been battered by the global recession have had to contain expenditure on critical social programmes and find themselves fighting crime at a time when the material conditions are more favourable for crime to flourish.

He welcomed the additional resources provided by G20 countries through the International Monetary Fund and other multilateral agencies but pointed out that the conditions for accessing these funds require deflationary fiscal and monetary policies that left beneficiary countries with no room to effectively address the development dimension of the fight against crime.

He urged the international community to help countries like Jamaica to find more creative ways to deal with these challenges, even while undertaking the adjustments necessary to put their economies in good health.

"When we go into communities and dismantle the criminal organisations that are embedded there, we leave a huge space which, if not quickly filled by meaningful programmes that empower people, provide training and jobs, create opportunities and offer hope, will shortly thereafter be filled by a new, smarter generation of criminals," said Golding. "The kind of social intervention that is needed requires resources that we don't have. We need your help... lots of help", Golding said.