Brushing aside the criticism from the opposition, Prime Minister Perry has declared that not only will the school policing system be maintained, but it will be expanded.
Currently, a cadre of police officers is assigned to various junior and senior high schools in the country as a means of tackling the acts of violence that involve students and sometimes intruders.
The school policing initiative is an element of the Urban Renewal Programme that the prime minister started to address the social vices that contribute to crime.
“No, Mr. Ingraham, we will not be pulling our police from the school grounds!” he said in his keynote address at his party’s convention on Friday night. “On the contrary, we will be increasing their presence!”
When he addressed the Free National Movement’s convention soon after being re-elected as party leader, former Prime Minister Hubert Ingraham suggested that police officers assigned to the school policing programme would be withdrawn and put back on the beat where they belong.
But Prime Minister Christie on Friday renewed his resolve for them to remained stationed at various schools in New Providence, Grand Bahama and Abaco.
He referred to an incident where a boy as young as eight years old stabbed another student of the same age.
Prime Minister Christie classified crime and illegal immigration as two issues that the country must get its arms around and “tackle to the ground.”
In recent weeks, there have been acts of violence at the C. C. Sweeting Junior High and R. M. Bailey High Schools.
“This combination of school policing and community policing enable the police to keep track of young kids, especially the trouble makers from the time they leave home for school in the morning, while they are at school, when they leave school, until they go to bed at night,” Mr. Christie explained.
The Urban Renewal Programme was portrayed, at the PLP’s national convention, as one of the jewels in the government’s crown of achievements since it took the reins of governance in May 2002.
The school policing initiative was started in September when the academic year began.
Backing the system, Mr. Christie said: “It also positions the police to exercise a greater degree of protective vigilance over those students and teachers who might be vulnerable to harmful interference from trouble makers.
“It’s an innovative approach to policing which already is producing positive results.”
In the last two weeks of political party conventions, the debate about the Urban Renewal Programme grew with members of the ruling party and the opposition leading the way.
But despite the furor about it, the prime minister called the initiative absolutely imperative.
“No war against crime, no campaign against violence can ultimately succeed if we fail to attack the underlying causes of crime,” he said.
The root factors are economic deprivation, social degradation, psychological despair, anger and hopelessness, which “possess many of our communities like demons,” Mr. Christie said.
The community policing aspect of the Urban Renewal Programme has won international acclaim and according to the Royal Bahamas Police Force is the reason why crime has significantly declined in various black belt communities.
By: Tameka Lundy, The Bahama Journal
