It was revealed at a public meeting last week in West Bay that police officers from the Royal Cayman Islands Police Service are being called out to deal with persons who are in real mental distress and others who are dealing with unprecedented levels of social deprivation.

Many persons are without water and electricity and many of the perpetrators of crimes are in dire circumstances say the police.

Many genuine mental health issues are increasing and young men are frustrated at not being able to find employment.

When the police are being called out to deal with more social issues than crime something must be and can be done.

It should not be the police having to deal with this problem.

And it is not only in West Bay that has to deal with the problem. It is Island wide.

Chief Inspector Harlan Powery, the senior officer in charge of the West Bay Police Station said, “We are going to have to deal with this as these are our people.”

Illegitimate babies, absent fathers taking no responsibility, family breakdowns, community disconnects and a disregard for Christian values were all mentioned at the meeting attended by only a few persons.

Isn’t it amazing? We have a serious problem and the large majority of persons cannot get out of their armchairs, pull themselves away from the television sets or computers, switch off their smartphones, and stop their social media antics, to come together to listen to something important and air some views that really matter.

It is only when a community can come together as a whole with the police all working as one unit will there be any hope of solving this huge problem we have.

The Chamber of Commerce is going to canvass its members on how crime is affecting the economy early NEXT YEAR!!

Next year? Next week is almost too late.

And what is the solution?

We have children committing crime now with an arrest just recently of an 11 year old.

We cannot keep blaming the police and the politicians we elect. Yes we need their help to coordinate the few resources we do have and try to find more, but we must do the lion’s share and our business people must be a big part of it, too.

There is an excellent article on the Poverteis.org website – “Poverty and Crime:

Breaking the Vicious Cycle”.

From the article:

“Poverty and crime have a very “intimate” relationship that has been described by experts from all fields, from sociologists to economists. The UN and the World Bank both rank crime high on the list of obstacles to a country’s development. This means that governments trying to deal with poverty often also have to face the issue of crime as they try to develop their country’s economy and society.

“Crime prevents businesses from thriving by generating instability and uncertainty (at micro and macroeconomic levels). This is true in markets of all sizes, national, regional, municipal and even neighborhood-al (okay the word doesn’t exist).

“Another study across 20 cities in the US analyses how local inequalities and heterogeneous populations can influence crime rates. As ever more countries face problems related to immigration, policymakers should be aware that inequality, even within one ethnic group, is a major cause of crime.

“It’s also crucial to take into account how many ethnic groups live within a single neighborhood to understand local dynamics. Some are more likely to clash against others, depending on where they live. When inequalities are great, crime goes over the roof both within and between different ethnic populations. The more heterogeneous, the more jealousy, the more misunderstandings and the more crime there can be in a given place.

“Because of heterogeneity, there’s a lot less communication (if any) between the residents which means that public policy should focus on structures of social integration and facilitating communication in order to help build a new social fabric, or at least a sense of neighborhood.

“In this case more than ever, the local (neighborhoods) and the global (immigrants) both matter just as much and need to be integrated. Income inequalities generate pockets of poverty and crime concentrated in the same ghettos, not only between but also within ethnic groups.

“It’s only when people witness the starkest wealth differences that they can start complaining about injustice. In fact, often times crime is even worse within communities. Perhaps because it’s easier, but maybe also because inequalities are felt all the more intensely when it happens between people living in the same group.

“In a broader, social sense, inequalities generate more aggressive behaviour as a reaction to social bias and discrimination, which results in an increase in violent crimes. And while it’s been well established that where poverty and police activity are strongly connected to property crime, they hardly have any impact on violence.

“This is one (very) important lesson for governments: property crimes are correlated to hard times (i.e. poverty) but violent crimes are tied to the lack of social cohesion or harmony and can lead to riots and social unrest.

“Public policies that aim to restructure the labor market in order to tackle structural unemployment have a clear-cut (positive) effect on income levels and economic growth. Decreasing unemployment remains central to breaking the cycle of poverty and crime and restoring some social harmony.

“Other strategies such as education in prison, or even college-in-prison providing with real diplomas, have been extremely efficient at helping integrate ex-convicts in society and reducing recidivism. The biggest barrier to this type of initiative remains the dilemma of offering free education to criminals while many law-abiding citizens have a hard time paying for one. At least, providing education – or treatment for drug addicts – proves insanely cheaper than pure and simple long-term incarceration.

“Other policies should focus on low-income housing as an opportunity to raise households’ income and sense of social fairness. That is as long as the government doesn’t create entire ghettos out of such social housing in a bid to separate the poor from the rest of the population. Maintaining quality social services and a well-functioning social ladder is key to building a just society in which every citizen is offered a chance to develop his own potential.

“Finally, higher levels of welfare assistance are strongly associated with crime reduction. Now that may seem controversial to some, but… it’s not. Simply put, countries that integrate social welfare like the US in their “war on poverty” and claim that it’s been useless disregard the fact that the war was never properly fought.

“Consequence, the results are biased and policies highly inefficient because of lack of monitoring and improvement of the different strategies experimented. A failure doesn’t always mean the idea was bad, but sometimes that you should just better the system step-by-step. That’s how we, humans, learn.

“Fighting poverty should be more a long term social justice plan, but welfare assistance has been disproportionately lower in the US than in other Western countries where welfare works much better. In many cases, poorly designed welfare policies has done damage to the very idea of welfare and led many countries to abandon welfare strategies to reduce poverty and crime.

“And yet, studies have shown that the connection between welfare and poverty reduction is indisputable in many cases… But it often seems as though no one in our governments likes using all this research. So what’s the point of even having universities like Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Cambridge and whatnot?

“Given the outright correlation between poverty and crime, any policy serious about tackling crime has to take poverty reduction policies into account.

To read the whole repot it can be found at: http://www.poverties.org/poverty-and-crime.html#sthash.dlEIDbSX.dpuf

Not all is applicable here but the majority is.

We cannot wait. We must wake up now. When the police have to deal with mental issues and social needs we have a major problem.