Bahamians Must Look to Themselves to Fight Crime in The Bahamas

by Sir Arthur Foulkes

The new commandant of the Royal Bahamas Defence Force, Commodore Clifford Scavella, sent shivers down the nation’s spine last week when he declared that some 250 members of the Force are corrupt and needed to be removed while another 250 “can go either way depending on which way the pressure comes from”.

As if to underline the Commodore’s comments, there were reports in the media about an ugly incident which inflamed passions at Mathew Town, Inagua. It is alleged that some members of the Force stationed at that island brutally assaulted a resident and threatened others who tried to intervene.

Notwithstanding the Commodore’s confidence that the other half of the Force is a dedicated and committed lot, we need to be seriously concerned. We are already aware that there is an unacceptably high level of corruption in the Royal Bahamas Police Force and in at Her Majesty’s Prison Service.

As Mr. Scavella intimated, these bad apples are a product of our society. That same society must now give Mr. Scavella and the other leaders of our law enforcement agencies all the help they need in terms of resources and moral and practical support in their efforts to stamp out corruption in the ranks.

There is, however, a bigger task facing the nation that requires dedicated, competent and imaginative leadership at all other levels because the fabric that holds Bahamian society together is badly torn and tattered and in need of extensive repair.

To be sure, the great majority of Bahamians are good people -- law-abiding, hard-working and decent -- and it is also true that every society has its share of criminals and anti-social delinquents.

But when criminality and bad behaviour go beyond a certain point and threaten to define how a society sees itself, then that society is in trouble. We may not be at that point but it seems we are dangerously close.

The causes are many and complex and they include strong negative external influences. But many are of the home-grown variety which have been allowed to grow like weeds and get out of hand.

There are obvious structural weaknesses in Bahamian society going back to slavery. But much of our culture has also been rooted in the rich soil of civility, friendliness, respect and good manners.

This has been the case not only with the upper crust of our society but at every social and economic level from Over the Hill to the humblest Family Island settlement where strangers were graciously greeted, sometimes with rhetorical flourishes such as, “I’m pleased to meet you and I hope we will no more be strangers,” or a vernacular rendition thereof.

Panelists on a radio show recently recalled how Over the Hill society prior to the abolition of racial discrimination in the City was not just civil but cultured and even elegant.

A lady from the humblest household had at least one Sunday-go-to-meeting dress and gentlemen were suitably attired for evening visits to their clubs and lodges. More importantly, good manners were indispensable. Perhaps all that was destined to change in a modern world, but change need not involve the abandonment of fundamental values.

The most intense and devastating assault on our values took place in the 1970s and 1980s when the drug traffickers descended on us with a vengeance and nearly destroyed the country with the complicity of many then in authority.

In addition to losing our good name in the world, we suffered severe and in some cases irreparable damage to our values. Some of our young people, with pockets and bags full of drug money, were conditioned to scoff at the idea of honest work.

We lost much of our sense of shame; ill-gotten wealth became acceptable; some of the worst criminals became respectable and even sought after as they changed expensive automobiles like they changed their clothes.

No sector of our society and hardly a family went unscathed. Some of our religious leaders were sucked into the vortex and compromised. One of them explained his pitch for drug dollars this way: “Bring the money here; the devil had it too long!”

The Bahamas became a different place as the so-called drug barons strutted the scene and school children identified them as their role models. Mafia-style killings became the order of the day and the funerals of some executed gangsters were occasions of vulgar extravagance.

Some of the effects of that nightmarish era remain with us today and perhaps we will never fully recover from the effects of it. But we have to continue the fight to salvage as much of the real Bahamas as we can for the peace, security and prosperity of future generations.

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It has long been a Bahamian weakness almost automatically to look outside ourselves whenever we are challenged by problems, so it is not surprising that some of us advocate the recruitment of police officers from outside to deal with our crime problem.

We are indeed a small country with limited human resources in many areas so it is sometimes necessary to seek expert help from abroad. But we ought to look first to ourselves for the leadership, the will and the ingenuity to solve our problems.

A paper by Maurice Punch of the London School of Economics summarized online refers to a consensus on effective measures to tackle persistent police corruption and misconduct:

“Ingredients are strong leadership, a multi-faceted organizational strategy, a well-resourced internal affairs unit, proactive techniques of investigation, and persistent efforts to promote professional standards.”

It is generally accepted that while there are problems with community policing, law-enforcement is something like democratic government inasmuch as the nearer it is to the people the better. That is why developed countries with large racial and ethnic minorities seek to recruit police officers from within those communities.

The wholesale recruitment of rank-and-file expatriate personnel is likely to create more problems than it will solve in a society that is already conflicted in its attitudes towards foreigners.

Furthermore, those countries from which we would recruit police officers are also struggling with corruption and criminality in their own law enforcement agencies. The London Metropolitan Police Force – Scotland Yard – is one of the most respected police organizations in the world but it too is plagued with corruption.

The 1993 murder of a young black man, Stephen Lawrence, by a group of white thugs became a celebrated case in Britain as Scotland Yard was accused of racial bias and corruption in bungling the case. An inquiry confirmed that there was indeed institutionalized racism in the Force.

Another investigation into one police station in east London found a web of organized corruption in the local drug squad in the 1980s and 1990s and described the unit as “a force out of control, racist and in denial”.

The British prison service is also facing serious corruption challenges. The Times of London in September referred to a survey that revealed sizeable corruption problems in at least seven English jails and said that wrong-doing by staff was endemic and may well be growing.

Nevertheless, a highly respected officer from Scotland Yard was recently engaged by the Government of South Africa to help set up an anti-corruption unit in that country’s police force. Perhaps we can use that kind of help, but not rank-and-file foreign police officers.