By Raffique Shah
March 08, 2026

Since everybody who is anybody who has worn a uniform—matters not what arm of the protective services he or she attempted to serve in—has offered advice to every new administration, I felt it incumbent on me to throw in my ten cents’ worth of advice to the beleaguered anti-crime Government that seems to be spinning top in mud, going nowhere, faster or slower.

I can boast that my qualifications for ­offering advice on matters of security date back to when the top cop of the day wore short pants, carried club-like batons, and looked every inch the fearsome badjohn. He had sobriquets, such as the infamous Bag-ah-Lion.

His presence in any district suggested all was not well in the urban or remote community he served. I’m sure if I drew on records—fat ledgers—on which “The Fox”, aka Randy Burroughs, would have scribbled a murder charge or two, I would see many policemen who, in the latter parts of their careers, became household names.

Crime and crime-fighting seemed so much easier back then. Not that the criminal acts of that time were palatable: crime in any country, in any language, coming from any ethnicity is almost always ghastly.

But understandably with smaller populations, the number of criminals were noticeably fewer, but equally fearsome.

Lest you think I am about to dive into some lengthy diatribe, I shall disabuse your mind of this one time. I, having lived through eras of crime with names such as Boysie Singh, Mano Benjamin, the Poolool Brothers, Abdul Malik and many others. I see today’s faceless and certainly not popular criminals as equally obscure as are their public profile.

Today as I cross my 80th year on this earth, I wanna have some fun, and if it’s at the expense of my friends in the Police Service, then so be it. It is my considered opinion (I am currently peeping over the shoulder of an old police friend reading names and ­remembering images of both “police and thief” of yesteryear) that except for today’s access to social media, there are the same criminals; different faces, maybe, but same motive: to kill.

The criminal will always be here to kill, rape, steal, assault. The police, however, are readily prepared to pursue the criminals of opportunity as much as they seek to eliminate down the road most young people who are falling in line with the aspirations of all young—get rich quick or die trying.

Few readers will disagree with me on this. When the police, in hot pursuit of the gunmen, end up killing what the news will report as “the criminal element”, we breathe sighs of relief and, in some cases, depending on the activity the perpetrator was in the process of committing—robbing, raping, hijacking, etc.—we rejoice. Th comments on social media are ablaze with venom for the recently deceased.

Above all these dastardly activities that are inflicted on the population by police and thieves alike are puzzling, undefined “crime plans” that every police commissioner over the past 50 years, at least, has formulated.

Whenever crime spikes, the media and politicians, the police and those in power target the commissioner and all his officers and ­associates.

Citizens who ordinarily will back law and order are loudest to complain about how the police are not doing their job. On all such ­occasions, loud cries go up from communities that are most affected, but blame is cast on one man: the police commissioner and, by extension, the entire service.

Few are the citizens who look inward at the districts that will have harboured the lawless, moulded them to have no respect for life other that their own. Everybody calls for a crime plan. The commissioner knows that crime plans seldom work, but he goes along, like the politicians.

He has to pacify the mob and when he and his officers are targeted by the wider population, to cast blame he turns to the politicians, who in turn hold some top-secret meeting and then tell the country they have a plan, but they cannot reveal it.

In the meantime, though, hold another state of emergency or some such nonsense.

What crime plan are they talking about? The same one recycled season after season, year after year for the last 50 to 60 years? Nothing has changed except the faces of the officers and the poor sod who is appointed commissioner. Police officers have been force-trained into public relations, community work, welfare of their fellow officers and a hundred other duties that should ideally be handled by the Government through the public service.

What we need now is for some bold and brave person to stand up to these lazy and dim-witted politicians and tell them what they can do with their crime plans. Someone with the cojones to call them out for what they really are: “a Government by the unfit”.