Crime increase official
(CNS): The increase in criminality of all kinds has been confirmed by the release of the RCIPS crime statistics on Thursday. The figures for 2009 show an increase in nearly all categories of crime over the 2008 figures, and then the first quarter of 2010 shows a further increase of 10% in crime statistics compared with 2009. Of most concern, the police management said on announcing the figures, was the increase in the most serious and violent crimes. With five murders in the first quarter of 2010 the homicide rate was up by more than 66 percent and attempted murder was up by 150 percent. (Photo Dennie Warren Jr)
Firearms offences and robberies have also increased during the first quarter as well as assaults. In the first quarter of 2009 police recorded 123 cases of theft, in 2010 there have already been well over 200.
Comparing 2008 with 2009 is not an exact science as the police have changed the way crime statistics are calculated however there was an overall increase in all crime of over 11% . The 2009 figure also show a significant increase in the cases of domestic violence from 141 in 08 to 229 in 09 but this could show a trend of improved reporting of such incidents rather than an increases in assaults.
Commissioner David Baines said the increase in crime was disappointing and he was particularly concerned that the trend in the increase in violent and gun related crime, illustrated by the five murders in the first quarter of 2010 which were all cases of shootings. Baines noted that while this was a common theme across the region the RCIPS did not take comfort from that fact.
Although the RCIPS has brought charges in four out of the five shootings in 2010, charges have only been brought in two of the shootings from 2009 and many shootings from 2008 and beyond remain unsolved.
Baines stated that detectives were constantly revisiting the murders and looking for new evidence or lines of enquiry and were committed to taking these serious offenders off the streets.
When it came to the increases in thefts and break-ins, the commissioner said that he often heard people lamenting the past when crime was almost unheard of but he said he remembers his own father saying the same thing about the UK and the days of leaving one’s doors open were over everywhere. “I’m sorry to say, those days are gone,” he observed. “This is a more complex world where the haves and the have nots are vastly different.”
He added that the RCIPS was working hard to tackle crime but he asked the community to take more care and be more aware of how easy it is for criminals commit crime.
He listed what he said were proactive measures being taken by the service including high profile policing, targeting the signals of organized crime such as car window tints, the use of electronic tagging, raising public awareness and an intense focus on known offenders.
The commissioner said he believed that there was a disproportionately small number of individuals responsible for a very large percentage of the crime and the police were faced with the constant challenges of repeat offenders who sometimes literally within hours of being released from Northward would be straight back to their criminal habits.
Category: Headline News
So the Commissioner has finally realised that crime has increased…well I have this to say…NO XXXX SHERLOCK!! I’m glad that the Commissioner took time out of his busy schedule to inform me of that fact…because I would have never figured it out on my own…The question isn’t wether crime had increased…the question is…WHAT are you going to do about getting it back down???
Perhaps we should revisit the appointment of the Police Commissioner!
It is nice to know that we need an official to tell us what we already know. What they need to do is get off their duffs and solve these crimes. I understand this solving crime is a new concept to the RICPS but I am sure after a fer successful attempts then you will get the hang of it.
Mr. Baines seems to be an academic who has found himself in the middle of a streefight. He makes all the right noises about statistics and childood illiteracy etc.while blood is dripping from his broken nose. I would be very embarassed if I were failing as badly as he is.
The pattern he cannot identify is "no one is minding the store" and the criminals know it. They aren’t stupid just uneducated.The criminals are certainly in the process of taking the police to school.
Perhaps we should focus on educating our current generation of children instead of putting them in jail in the near future.Our percentage of GDP spent on education is paultry and we spend money on grand edifices(east end school) instead of the things that work.
I am curious about how the Governor view’s the leadership of the RCIP, and their failure to catch these criminals! that are in the polices’ face with crime, they’re on a robbing campaign! Will the Governor wait until these criminals hold him up or the L.A before waking up to the reality that this RCIP regime is much TOO SOFT for these HARD NOSED CRIMINALS ! The governor need to let some of those marines off the ship to hunt down these varmints and put them away. The Muscles are here, anchored out in George Town Harbor. So why not utilize their help ashsore?!
I pity the poor Caymanian People who obviously need to walk "strapped" to defend themselves. The criminals are, so why not the people.
In response to your comment, whilst you are clearly an educated person I feel you have failed to direct your frustrations and dissapointment with regard to the policing strategies Mr Baines is implementing in the right direction. I feel that your comments regarding the current most senior officer are incorrect, based on professional first hand knowledge in addition to my colleagues experience when he was in the UK as a senior officer. Your leader has in fact worked his way up from the bottom, worked hard, and was clearly brought up to know what acceptable behaviour is. I am confident that he is determined to ensure that whilst he is in Cayman he will make a positive impact on crime reduction just as he did for the families and people of Manchester and Cheshire. Our loss is the Cayman gain, you won’t get a better copper.! It could be worse you could have ended up with the other candidate Richard Brunstrum (then you would really be in the ****) Honest and incorruptable and fair, be grateful! Take care 😉
CNS: "Crime Increase Official"
Zzzzz… cough cough…zzzzz…
ESPN: "and South Africa shoots at Mexico, almost passing the goal keeper, it looks like it could be…it could be… it could just be…" [suspense]
cough… cough…. eye wide open
Did the RCIPS produce that chart?
It would explain why they cannot see any pattern to the crimes and why so many criminals avoid prison.
Send someone on a data analysis and presentation course, please!
Lets start with you… lend you expertise in crime/data analysis to the police instead of criticizing. step forward and show how its done.
I am sure Mr Baines would welcome you helping the RCIPS finds trend… Dont you think. So lets see the better you can do! this is my Challenge to all of you who criticize with no solutions.
It would be my pleasure!
As usual… all the experts are on CNS… contact you on CNS … whatever.. hide behind CNS… I am sure you know my senior officers in the RCIPS how about reaching out and contacting them…. if they refuse to accept your help then… you will actually have something to lament about… I will end right here as i know all you will do is continue to talk and no action… I did learn interpriting graphs and do understand the graph and could produce a report from the graph presented… so contact me I would love to know if i am reading the information wrong…. contact me at khonjis@hotmail.com . I am waiting to hear from you.
What is wrong is the joining of the points on that chart. This is meaningless. The access contains categories that have no intrinsic order. A re-sequence could make a line going up, or another trending down i.e. misleading. What time a scale there is covers three periods which is not enough to derive any meaningful conclusions.
My apologies… its khojiis@hotmail.com.
And the nobel goes too………….. Commissioner David Baines!
The police need to stop the driving by. They roll up windows and just drive by, dont even turn their heads. Never stoping at night clubs, bars, public beaches and especially gas stations. People without work usually hang out at Gas stations and the public beaches. The police need to drive up at these places, park and spend sometime observing the people there. Anyone looking nervous and suspicious, and is seen slowly moving away needs to be stoped, questioned and searched. The police is not doing this, these police are only wanting to look big driving around, and not doing a dam thing but wasting gassoline.
Baines must go!!!
CNS: "Baines statedthat detectives were constantly revisiting the murders and looking for new evidence or lines of enquiry and were committed to taking these serious offenders off the streets."
But Baines… who are these detectives and who do have patroling the streets. Come on now, you are an experienced officer from the UK. The UK has crime worse than us! How is it these criminals under your watch get to commit crime over and over again?
I guess more officers from overseas will solve the problem….
Your statement is completely untrue, the crime rate per capita in the UK or the US is much much much much lower in almost every one of these categories than Cayman. Comparing like for like based on number of crimes is ridiculous as there is probably 1 thousand times as many people living in the UK.
For example, per capita the murder rate in the Uk is a fraction of that in the UK. In the last couple of months every gas station except maybe 1 or 2 has been robbed in Cayman. I would say 2% of gas stations in developed countries have been robbed, thats an estimate and could be much lower. 50% of the franchised restaurants have been done over in the past couple of months (KFC, Burger king, Dominos), if there were simiolar stats in the Uk or USA they would be out of business by now.
Some of you idiots need to get rid of the XXXX small town mentality and star owning up to your crimes. Your families are out robbing and murdering and you still blame everybody else without looking at the root of the problem. One glance in the mirror and you see the root of all the problems. that is you. the greed, corruption and bad parenting that has created a generation of thugs and imbeciles.
We need to focus on educating our youth, of all ages. I used to roll my eyes at statements like that, becauase it’s high-minded and seems like it will takes too long, and it won’t take the guns out of the hands of the bad guys. But I’ve seen how this can work, and an army of good teachers in good buildings with good after-school programs could turn the tide of crime in these islands in months due to the trickle-up effect.
Do you know how I know what’s going on in this community? Ask your kids, they are like the voice on the streets. They hear all the juicey rumors and the tell you if you care to listen. They have influence over grownups that cuts both ways.
You need teachers who are passionate about the community and you need to incentivise them to give back and stay long term..
I propose IMMEDIATE Permanent Residency for all teachers, allowing them to stop worrying about their permits and focus on teaching; a national drive to recruit good teachers and a push (at all costs) to finish and fund our schools.
I would pay for this by slashing the beureaucracy of Government. I would close the NRA completely and outsource maintenance to the paving co’, Sell the water and sewrs dept cheap with a threat to take it back from it’s low-dollar buyer if it’s not run to specific targets.
Wwwwoooooooo. Horsey.
Are you kidding me. You think it’s that simple? Really??
It has to do with a lot of different crap and education while part of the picture is only one part of thsi problem.
Let me tell you what is happening if you don’t see it.
We have a widening gap between the haves and have nots. The status fiasco by McKeeva did nothing to help this but actually introduced more people into our society some of which also were in the have nots section.
This is problem was created by a mix of several things:
1) Both parents working long hard hours creating an environment where some kids have too much time on their hands and get mixed up in bad company.
2) The have nots have much more stresses than the haves and tend to either turn to things to soften their pain or fight back harder. The ones who turn to things such as liquor or other drugs sometimes leads to abused homes or broken homes. Kids in these families tend to mimic their parents. Boys can take to drinking like fathers and go mess around and get young girls pregnant. Girls tend to do the same on their side. This can lead to girls leaving school early. Boy can turn to bad company and into drug gangs.
Parents are part of the problem but the real root of most of the evil is that our cost of living for some who live here is simply too high. The recession is not helping and is probably tied to the crime wave if you look back at when things started picking up. There are some additionals in there that are gang tit for tat but all the burglaries.
What we need is to get the out of work working. We need to focus on kids 12-20. We need to know who they are and what they are doing. Are the ones who are not in school working? If yes great. If not how are they getting their money to survive? Let’s work to get them working in a permanent way. Ones that don’t want to are problems and should be watched carefully. Ones that want to work then put them to work.
This is why I get very upset when people call for taxes in Cayman because many of those people are insensitive. They have their wonderful house so why should they care if people are balancing should I pay the rent or take my child to the doctor. They believe everyone who’s suffering is by choice. So they don’t care about anyone but themselves.
We have real problems here in Cayman and it won’t be fixed by just getting teachers and giving them residency. It takes a more comprehenseive approach that our government is not looking at simply because our MLAs have money and as you can see they love that money. Until they are suffering the way the poor man is we will always have these problems.
We need jobs in Cayman. We need our unemployed working again and anything that will employ people now I am for.
Unless our pastors can find a way to help people make money they need to get out of the way. If we don’t start moving forward to get our unemployed working we will disintegrate into a crime riddled country. We are well underway right now.
We need to be dealing with this problem from two side. 1) Be proactive against crime. Most crime in Cayman has gang ties at one stage or another. 2) Attack the need to do crime by getting people working. People who are working have a lesser desire to do crime. No it worn’t stop crime but it will change some minds about committing crime.
I believe the Premier needs to bring in a gang specialist out of the USA for option 1. Option two is a more long distance approach but will have some affects to short term but we need to start now. Projects such as the Hospital need to go ahead. Things such as gambling needs to get the green light (with special exceptions). We need alternate revenue sources. We need more jobs into the market place.
We need to start moving forward and stop living in the Old Cayman when things were falling into our laps. Now we need to take the bull by the horns and make our future.