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Barbados’ Prime Minister Mia Mottley has made a case for a regional slant in some critical areas, to arrest the Caribbean’s growing crime and violence situation.

She suggests that the exchange and rotation of judges across jurisdictions, the creation of a CARICOM arrest warrant, the deconstruction of archaic laws governing the police, and the cooperation of forensics departments are some of the mechanisms necessary to get a handle on the growing problem.

Mottley insists that it is critical to address jurisprudential developments which are allowing persons on multiple murder charges to get bail, saying that across the Caribbean, these individuals are shown to be the ones “causing the greatest problems”.

“I asked myself two basic questions. One, how are we going to deconstruct and reconstruct, to meet the reality of this jurisprudential development that is undermining the rule of law in our countries? We’re going to have to find ways of cooperating from the level of the police, to the level of the courts, but in particular forensics.

“If you can get people to court within nine to 12 months, you have a good chance of a person not being given bail. Beyond 12 months any number can start to play. So why are we all putting in money separately and individually in forensic labs? Why are we not doing and pooling training because most police services in this region do not have enough forensic people to satisfy their own conditions and we need to be able to pull it together. Why are we not having proactive prosecutions rather than reactive prosecutions?

“Ninety percent of the prosecutions in the region are as a result of a crime perceived to have been committed, as opposed to people systematically going after people in a structured way,” she said.

Mottley told those gathered at Monday’s Regional Symposium on Crime and Violence as a Public Health Issue at the Hyatt Regency, Trinidad and Tobago, that while security was the only pillar to come to the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas over the last 20 years, there had been no follow through on the functional day-to-day cooperation that “could make the difference”.

“On the matter of law and order, we need to start rotating the use of judges and magistrates in the region to ensure that there is not the familiarity with counsel and other circumstances and the things that people take for granted. CARICOM arrest warrant – we talked about it 20 years ago. We haven’t done it. Bottomline is, if we have a CARICOM arrest warrant, we can bypass the length of time on extradition, and all of these other things that are holding us up. We do not have the level of deep cooperation that, as I said, we need which the Regional Intelligence Centre was intended to bring about,” she stated.

Mottley insisted that upon leaving the symposium solid decisions should be made.

“We need the CARICOM arrest warrant. We need to have the exchange and rotation of judges and magistrates.We need to have an enlargement of the jurisdiction of magistrates. We need cooperation on forensics and we need finally to deconstruct all the rules in our police service and reconstruct them.

“In Barbados’ case, I would have just insisted that we start it. Our service was established in 1835. Most of its rules were done in the early 20th century. You cannot preserve law and order and fight crime with rules that were made for an analog environment when you’re in a full digital, almost stateless environment with respect to crime,” she added.

During her short presentation, Mottley briefly turned her attention to Caribbean music “denigrating women and promoting guns”, stressing this should not be happening.

“This has nothing to do with curtailing anybody’s freedom of speech. It has to do with the mirror image; as Errol Barrow would say, ‘what do you look into the mirror and see?”. And at the end of the day, if we’re looking into the mirror and only seeing women as objects, then that is how people are going to treat them in our societies.”