HORRIFIED.
That’s how Attorney General, Adriel Brathwaite, described his reaction to surveillance video making its rounds on social media of the callous shooting of taxi driver Ricardo Bryan, who was murdered last Thursday night by four assailants.
Speaking to the media briefly at the Supreme Court yesterday, the Attorney General said it is worrisome that the video looked like a scene out of Hollywood, a reminder that some persons seemingly are not sparing a second thought about taking another person’s life.
“I am horrified. I would expect to see that on ‘Power’ or one of those pictures, but not in Barbados.
“It goes back to what I said about values. Values have disappeared. Human life doesn’t seem to mean as much as it used to,” he lamented.
The Minister of Home Affairs told the media that families have to take a hard look at what is going on in their homes to wrestle this problem to the ground.
“Lots of mothers and fathers and grandmothers need to look within themselves and try to help us with these problems. Because you see these youngsters going into Court or getting into trouble or even killed... and I am not being insensitive… you hear what a nice boy he was, and how nice he was, and when you check with the RBPF, you see that lots of these fellows were far from nice for a very long time.
“Families need to take ownership of these ‘nice boys’ and really try to bring them in line. Make them nice in the sense that you and I appreciate, not nice in the sense that providing them with money and not asking where the money came from.”
The Attorney General said it is often not a criminal issue, but one of a breakdown in values and the fact that many persons are leaving school without qualifications.
“The problem starts from the fact that for too long we have too many young people graduating from our school system without any kind of qualifications, hardly able to read and write. And then we wonder why we are having problems today. And that is where it started.”
He stressed this is why there has been a push for vocational training. “That’s why we acknowledged everybody will not be Einstein, but we need to at least give them tools that they can be good men and women.
“We know, all of us know, that as a country that we are moving away from things like Religious Studies, Religious Education in our classes. We need to find some way even if you are teaching Spanish or French or English – whatever you are teaching, to still be able to instil some values in our young people. Because that is the issue – the challenge is the values.
“There is something wrong with a value system that says that Crop Over coming up, I need to steal so I can go to all the fetes… There is something wrong with that value system,” he exhorted.
“That is why I say it is not a criminal issue; we need to go back to foundation and that is what we are trying to do in terms of looking at our education system. Looking to the Ministry of Family and Youth, look at our family structures, seeing how we can get more, the Community Development Department. We really need to address it from the foundation,” he reiterated. (JH)
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