Dear Editor,

The prime minister’s reaction to the murder rate, which has been festering and aiding the novel coronavirus in taking lives, has been the method used every time a crime wave starts up – states of emergency (SOEs).

In my view, this measure serves to redistribute rather than eliminate crime. Criminals won’t just allow themselves to be caught in an SOE trap as they have ample time to move to another area, and by the time the police establish cordons, only those criminals who are brave, or stupid, will remain, if any. The experienced killers would most likely be elsewhere lying low or terrorising another area.

The SOEs seem like a Band-Aid solution to a problem that needs surgery.

Regardless of the fact that SOEs are being used in an effort to catch criminals, if the Government doesn’t use proactive measures to stop the black market gun trade and keep inner-city youth from committing crimes, there will always be another “Dog Paw” to receive the baton.

The Government needs to implement extensive and sustained social intervention programmes in the ghettos.

Sociologists may come up with different theories, but I don’t think academics from the universities and bureaucrats in offices know and understand the situation on the ground in the ghettos, where impressionable young men with dim economic and social opportunities, as well as little training in life skills, get misled by the perceived glamour of a life of crime.

You can’t have families built with struggling babymothers and absent or uncaring fathers and an education system describe by some as “feminised”, that sees young men from ghettos as possible liabilities instead of potential assets requiring investment, and lacking in know-how and effective methodlogies to teach boys who are unclear of what it means to be a good citizen, a man, and an individual and expect them not to take direction from the streets. The streets will define what it is to be a young man from the ghetto for them.

Also, you can’t expect murder to go down when the tools to commit murder are easily distributed to impressionable young men, thereby creating a new generation of criminals.

If the Government doesn’t become proactive and develop an effective crime plan, they’ll always be reacting with SOEs, while ignoring the fact that the people who are the intended targets of SOEs, the criminals, are getting younger and younger, recruited from a large base of impoverished teenagers who were intended to be the future of the nation but end up being the future of criminality.

Marcus White

whitemarc918@gmail.com