Many years ago there was a gang in Central Village that numbered about 16 or 17. They had a penchant for shooting at the police. There were many gun battles. One of the members was remanded for about eight years. He always wore a mask like Batman, but became famous for a large silver desert eagle pistol he used to carry.

The Windsor Heights section of Central Village, as you likely know, is on a large hillside. It’s also very rocky. So they would see us before we could see them and make good their escape. On several occasions, we would hike through the bushes from the academy and surprise them, and the shooting would start as they fired in order to escape. Well, this particularly agile and athletic wannabe Batman found himself remanded for eight years for a murder case that eventually went nowhere. This is not uncommon, as witnesses tend to lose interest when it is not their family who has been killed.

So one day I saw this young man, no longer quite that young, selling goods on the road at a traffic light. I inquired as to when he was released and he told me, “a month ago”, and he was now hustling at the light.

I remember thinking to myself, “Let’s see how long that lasts.”

Well, weeks became months, and months became years. I said to myself, “Rehabilitation seems to work on this one.” So I tried to support his venture by buying some cold drinks from him. I was never one to hold a grudge. However, he wanted to give me for free. That wasn’t gonna happen. So I started to buy his products a little more regularly, and he started to accept payment. As the years passed, he grew into middle age and subsequently grew out of the typical age of a gang member.

One day while conducting some research, I inquired of him what became of the other 15 members of his gang. I named them all out and he replied, “They are all dead, Nico,” using a name that I was known by.

Those words resonated in my head and have presented several issues for us to discuss. Fifteen young men, all dead. That’s a 100 per cent casualty rate, not counting him. I have read about units that stormed Omaha Beach in World War II that had better survival statistics. Fifteen healthy, agile, athletic young men who outran me on several occasions, all dead.

You would have thought an example like this would cause others to learn by what gang mortality is really about. If he had not been remanded for almost a decade he would’ve been dead too. Yet there still is no shortage of gang members to fill the available slots in street gangs.

Apart from them wasting their lives, they wasted our money. Their births did not cost their family a penny. Their education was free of cost. Not one of them ever held a job. They never paid a dollar in taxes. And they, in fact, cost the Government because of those they wounded. Few of us truly consider the cost of caring for individuals wounded by gunfire.

Then there is the cost to feed them, hydrate them, and guard them on the many occasions they were remanded. Not to mention the salaries of police officers that have to be paid because of an expanded police force to fight gangs.

Despite this, gangs still enjoy some level of support in political circles, and absolute support from the human rights community. If we are to consider what is the true cost attached to fighting this war we would be adding all day.

Gangs as an existing entity, deprive the labour force of about 14,000 males. Yes! That includes those imprisoned and remanded and those who are unemployable because of their activities. Bear in mind we have a labour crisis.

In China, the family of these men would get a bill from the Government. Going forward, we can no longer afford the hospital bills caused by these gangs. We can no longer afford to care for them in prison. We can no longer afford to waste education on them. And we can no longer afford the cost of burying the people they kill. If you think that we bear none of that cost then you obviously have never been in politics.

Very importantly, we cannot afford to pay for their births and their education, and not get the benefit of their labour in the form of employment. It is creating an imbalance in our economy. It is slowing down our growth. We need to ask ourselves what would China or Singapore do if they were in our position? Then we need to consider if we could live with employing the measures that those two countries would utilise. Even more extreme, what would North Korea do? You see where I’m going with this?

Our constitution, our culture, our sense of decency stops us from using the tactics of the above countries. That doesn’t make us right and them wrong, nor does it make them wrong and us right. North Korea would just execute them! China would do it slower, or perhaps send them to work on a construction site in Jamaica.

I am not a believer in capital punishment, but I am honest enough to agree that a China or North Korean solution to gangs would literally wipe out the problem. What then could we achieve?

They are the reason why our tourist industry is not five times larger. They are why our hospitals are pretty horrible. They are we hardly have any money. Yet we would never adopt a North Korean or Chinese solution to our gang problems. Is it because we value human life more than them? Is it because we are cowards? Or is it because the human rights backlash would bankrupt us?

The answer is that only some type of totalitarian Government could adopt a policy of execution for everyone proven to be a member of a gang, and survive the international backlash, or the Opposition using it as a weapon against its Government.

Totalitarian governments don’t really tolerate political opposition, they don’t really care what the international community says and, in the case of China, their economy is strong enough for all those little execution issues not to matter. We are not in that position. The gangs, therefore, are the price we pay for our democracy. And, therefore, the gangs are here to stay.

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