IT is hoped that the CariSECURE Sensitisation Workshop for the Caribbean Citizen Security Toolkit in Barbados, under the theme “Reducing Crime and Violence in Our Communities”, would prove to be beneficial in terms of getting the various stakeholder agencies involved in tackling crime and violence to develop mechanisms which would allow them to engage in a system of information sharing.
This is coming from Attorney General and Minister of Home Affairs, Adriel Brathwaite, who delivered the feature address at the workshop to introduce new tools to enhance crime reduction and prevention in Barbados yesterday at UN House.
He stated that when this project was presented to him, he was enthusiastic about Barbados being a part of it because he believed that it would be advantageous towards assisting these stakeholder organisations in being able to solicit information from one another more efficiently.
“When this project was presented to me, I automatically said to Ambassador and the team that without a doubt that Barbados would be quite willing to participate because I found that the overall objectives of the project, which indeed is to transform not just data collection in terms of crime in the region, in particular Barbados and the OECS, but in fact to see how we could transform the lives of more of our young people who get involved in criminal activity and data collection is essential in that regard.”
This was especially important given the fact that such information is not readily available to begin with.
“When I attend RSS [Regional Security System] Ministerial meetings; CONSLE, which is the Council of National Security Ministers; or IMPACS, which is the Implementation Agency for Crime and Security meetings, one of the things that comes across quite clearly is the lack of data. In many, many presentations from all of those agencies, there are gaps,” said Brathwaite.
“RSS, as you know, has responsibility for Barbados and the OECS, and more often than not when they present crime statistics, there are significant gaps and it varies across the countries. It is our hope that via this project, that that would become a thing of the past because I think we all accept that you cannot create successful policy without the relevant data, which is what we are trying to do.” (PJT)