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NATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON CRIME - COMMONWEALTH OF DOMINICA

"Working in Partnership for Crime Prevention and Control"
(September 17, 2003)

Present:
Head Table:
Mr. Rayburn Blackmore, Chairman
Hon. Pierre Charles, Prime Minister of Dominica
Hon. Henry Dyer, Attorney General
Mr. Matthias Lestrade, Chief of Police
Mr. Lance Selman, Chairman of CARICOM Task Force on Crime
Dr. Peter K.B. St. Jean, Sociologist & Criminologist		 Distinguished Invitees:
Director, Women's Bureau
Superintendent of Prison
Members of the Dominica Police Force
Dr. Clayton Shillingford
Students

The Symposium commenced at 9:00 a.m. with a Prayer by Monsignor Jno Lewis.

Welcome Remarks by Chairman
Mr. Blackmore welcomed everyone present and said that the hosting of the Symposium was a clear manifestation of the Government's commitment to develop a national plan that supports a holistic and multi-sectoral approach to the management of crime in the country.

Addresses
Addresses were given by Members of the Head Table.

At the conclusion of his address, Hon. Pierre Charles, declared the Symposium open.

Presentation of Papers

Criminology: By Dr. Peter St. Jean
Dr. St. Jean said that there were five key considerations:

  1. Patterns of crime
  2. Trends in crime
  3. Causes of crime
  4. Consequences of crime
  5. Solutions to crime problems and their pre-cursors

He explained that patterns of crime dealt with the formation and distribution of crime in reference to offenders, victims and location. There were different kinds of patterns of crime such as -

With regard to the causes of crime, Dr. St. Jean said that it involved the factors which contributed directly or indirectly to criminal activities, and those factors were very multiple and intertwined. There were three major players in the area of causes of crime, i.e., the offender(s); the victim(s); and the location.

He pointed out that with regard to the offenders there was need to know about their background, their family, the community, their thought processes, norms, values, and the experience which they had because often times the offenders were partial victims of other causes.

With regard to the victims, there was need to look at the vulnerability of the victim, the person's age, size, relationship and the caliber of persons that the offender targeted; the victim's role in his/her own victimization and the experiences that the victims had with recovery. He said that sometimes the victims played active roles in their own demise.

Another important area was the location, where the crimes happened, the type of layouts because, he explained, crimes function by certain structures of motivation and there were advantages that certain places gave to criminal activities. He mentioned that there were three major kinds of issues, preconditions, which needed to be understood:

Criminal motivation he said involved the presence of a person who was motivated to participate in committing a crime. Whereas, with suitable opportunity it would be very difficult to commit a crime if there were no opportunity to do so. In that regard, he said that the ability of the neighbourhood to be able to organise to help reduce suitable opportunities for crime was important. Suitable targets - he said that if an offender wanted to commit a crime there had to be someone to make a victim of depending on the crime.

On the question of consequences of crime, Dr. St. Jean explained that that area dealt with events or reactions as a result of direct or indirect knowledge or experiences with criminal events. He said that consequences of crime needed to be understood both in terms of functions and dysfunctions - what happened because of crime.

He said that consideration should be given to the cost of crime not only materially but non-materially, i.e., strain on financial systems, quality of life, social solidarity, etc. He pointed out that sometimes people in the community did not come together until something would have happened so that sometimes crime would bring about solidarity but sometimes solidarity may not be what was needed.

One of the issues he believed that some time should be spent on was the solution to crime, dealing specifically with the events and actions that would clearly lead to short-term, midrange, long-term significant reduction or elimination of a crime problem. He pointed out that solutions to crime must be considered along four dimensions:

The levels of solution would involve the problems in the family, with the individual, community, state, region and beyond. The scope of the crime would determine whether the solution was short-term, midrange or long-term and the size of the solution would determine how much of a difference was being made and how the difference was being measured. He said that the negative consequences of crime was not about reducing crime but negative consequences of a particular approach to the reduction of crime.

Dr. St. Jean stated that the problems of crime had three major elements:

He explained that if the problem was not persistent, it was not a problem and if nobody cared about it, it was not a problem and would, therefore, disappear on its own.

Dr. St. Jean proceeded to give some statistics on the yearly occurrence of crime in Dominica. He said that statistics had shown that in 2002 there was a murder problem in Dominica; it was above what it should have been. The highest percentage of rape was recorded in 1998 and whereas in 2002 the rate should have been between 15 and 35, data showed that it was not beyond the trend of the last twenty years. He pointed out that if the trend were to continue the rape cases for 2003 might be higher than that of 2002 based on the pattern over the years.

He stated that although all crimes should be of concern, the biggest crime of concern in Dominica should be burglary because 72% of the crimes committed in Dominica were burglaries. He said that there was an increase of about 265 burglaries in 2001/2002.

It was noted that grievous bodily harm was unusually high in 2002 and that robbery was much too high, 103 in 2003 and 105 in 2002. However, he pointed out that the total crime rate had stabilized and that it was important to understand that different crimes functioned in different ways with the economy.

Discussion
In response to a question raised as to the difference between crimes, Dr. St. Jean explained that crime was an act against the criminal statute committed by anyone.

Another question raised was what caused persons to commit burglary and robbery and Dr. St. Jean responded that he had done an interview at the State Prison and about 90% of the inmates interviewed were recidivists who had crack problems which started with the practice of the use of marijuana and alcohol. He said that the persons who burglarized once or twice would be a problem but the ones who did it over and over would be a different issue. He pointed out that there were different reasons why people burglarised, why people raped or robbed but a lot of their motivation was to be able to get a minimum amount of money for some habit.

It was pointed out that there were two kinds of hypotheses regarding the question of robbery and burglary, one, people were unemployed and had no skills and the other was they were just plain lazy. In that regard, the question was asked as to how did the two worked out, i.e., economic declaration on one side and the attitude to work. In response, Dr. St. Jean stated that people robbed and burglarised because they wanted to; because they made those rational choices or unless there were other conditions. He explained that the people who burglarised, about 85% of them, had a good skill - they were masons, carpenters and odd jobs; they made money but said the drug had control over their money.

In response to a concern raised as to whether a direct correlation had been established between the rate of growth and the movement to the rate of crime, Dr. St. Jean said very important for looking at trend analysis was the impact of large effects. First of all, he said there were direct and indirect effects between the economy and the crime rate. For example, there might have been a bigger GDP in construction but that did not mean more people worked in construction. He stressed that the economy alone was not a reliable predictor for crime at all because sometimes the economy would go up and crimes would go down and different crimes functioned in different ways. He pointed out that there were, in fact, intervening variables that explained the relationship between the economy and crime.

Dr. St. Jean mentioned that in dealing with crimes there were two main issues to consider, the quantity and the quality of the crime. He said that what was being experienced in Dominica was not so much a rise in the quantity of crimes but a rise in the seriousness of the quality of the crimes; the types of ways that those crimes were being committed. He said that the real issue was, if people were going to be involved in criminal activities, how were they going to do it and that, he said, changed over time in terms of how the police would respond, what the community would do and the lessons learnt.

He mentioned the important issue of deportation; people who were deported back into the country and into other areas with more sophisticated crime techniques than the police were not prepared to respond to. In that regard, he said the important questions to be asked were:

  1. How are we going to develop a society with people that were going to be less motivated offenders?
  2. How are we going to create a society with less criminal opportunities for motivated offenders?
  3. How are we going to develop a society with people that when criminal opportunities occur and they are motivated offenders that they are going to act in ways that reflect the norms we set among ourselves?
  4. What is an appropriate standard of acceptable behavior, and how shall we work towards producing that?

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