COMMENTARY: A coffin in every ward – The reconstruction we owe the dead

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the views of Duravision Inc., Dominica News Online, or any of its subsidiary brands.

Editor’s note: The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) reports Dominica’s homicide rate as of 2023, at 27 per 100, 000. Antigua & Barbuda stands at 10 per 100,000; Grenada at 13 per 100,000.

The state must lead. But no government, alone, can rebuild what families, communities, markets and politics have allowed to crumble.

On the night of 14 April, in a quiet gap off Spruce Street in Bridgetown, a family was singing happy birthday. Daquan Robert’s grandmother had just turned sixty-three.

Daquan was twenty-six, a final-year UWI Cave Hill law student bound for Hugh Wooding. A white van slowed. Several shots were fired. Daquan ran with his father down the gap before he fell. His grandmother watched him die on her birthday.

By the time you finish reading this column, somewhere else in the Caribbean, another family begins the same ritual. This is the everyday arithmetic of a region, paradise, one of the deadliest stretches of inhabited earth.

A moving front

For generations, we treated this as Jamaica’s problem. Trinidad and Tobago followed its own grim arc, from 97 murders in 1998 to 625 in 2024. Today, the killing is everywhere. Saint Vincent closed 2024 at 53.7 per 100,000. Barbados, long seen as the regional exemplar of order, jumped 138 percent in a single year, from 21 murders to 50. The Turks and Caicos Islands reached 103 per 100,000, the highest in Latin America and the Caribbean. Regional homicide rates sit at multiples of the global average of roughly 6 per 100,000. Antigua and Grenada are exceptions with consistently low murder rates.

Firearms account for the dominant share, and tracing points overwhelmingly to illicit flows out of the United States. Daquan died inside a regional system armed from outside, enabled from within, and excused by those who call each death a tragedy without naming the pattern as collapse.

Every homicide is an assault on the state

The modern state makes a single, brutal promise. It has a monopoly on the use of violence. It says, surrender your weapons, obey the law, pay your taxes, trust the courts, and it will protect you. Across our region, that promise lies bleeding alongside the boys it failed to save. Every homicide is a wound to sovereignty itself. When a gunman fires from a moving van into a grandmother’s birthday party, he is declaring that
the state’s authority does not run there. He is establishing a parallel order. He is ruling!

He has his own justice system where death is the only sentence. He can’t give life, but he takes it so easily. He does not seem to give a damn about his or yours.

The cost is not only moral. The IDB and World Bank estimate violent crime costs the region three to four percent of GDP every year. A state that cannot deliver law and order forfeits the standing to demand almost anything else. By what authority does it tax the shopkeeper, the teacher, and the hotel worker while men with no visible income build houses, import vehicles, and finance terror in plain sight? Law and order is the foundation on which every other claim of the state rests.

But the state did not fail alone

The killers are not invaders. They are our own sons, formed in homes, schools, and communities where authority, supervision, opportunity, and consequence failed at once.

They became men in neighbourhoods where the most visible adult male was armed, feared, cash-rich and untouchable. The crisis of the Caribbean family, the exclusion of young men, and the homicide crisis are not three problems. They are one problem with three faces.

This is not about blaming exhausted mothers or romanticizing absent fathers. The home is the first crime prevention institution. Parenting, supervision, discipline, affection, and consequence are not private luxuries but matters of national security. And communities must stop pretending they do not know. The same neighbourhood cannot shelter the shooter on Monday, attend the funeral on Friday, and then ask why the state has failed.

Silence is not neutrality when everyone knows who has the gun and who is being protected because he sometimes pays a light bill. The old social agenda is necessary, but no longer sufficient. Caribbean nations have a strong social democratic tradition. But those programmes
were designed for poverty, exclusion, illiteracy. They were not built to interrupt retaliatory gun violence, track boys drifting into armed networks, protect witnesses, disrupt illicit cash, or rebuild male authority. The social agenda is not obsolete, it is incomplete. The
welfare state must become a violence-prevention state: school meals, free education that flags a missing boy before he becomes a statistic, trauma treatment for the wounded, and for children who learn fear before algebra.

The state must lead

Gangs did not seize power in a vacuum. Decades of neglect, denial, and active collusion abandoned space. Reclaiming the monopoly on legitimate force is a reconstruction, not just a war. Militarization, curfews, and states of emergency have a limited role. On their own, they produce bodies, not legitimacy.

What works is harder, slower, and more accountable: intelligence-led policing by small, trusted units; forensic capacity that raises homicide clearance rates; witness protection that does not leave citizens to choose between silence and death; and reclaiming abandoned territory with streetlights, youth workers, beat officers, sports, counselling, and jobs.

It also requires criminalizing the political gang nexus. No government can credibly fight gangs while its political culture rewards those who can “control” communities through fear. CARICOM must treat the gun pipeline as a sovereignty issue. We did not manufacture these weapons, but we are burying our children because of them.

Follow the money

Violence has a balance sheet. Guns are purchased, drugs moved, lawyers retained, witnesses paid, politicians courted, property bought. A homicide strategy that does not follow the money just chases the trigger. Every Caribbean state now needs a violence finance strategy where tax authorities, customs, police, financial intelligence units, registries, and prosecutors work from the same map. Unexplained wealth, beneficial ownership, suspicious property transactions must all become part of the homicide file. Al Capone was not finally brought down for the violence he commanded, but for the money trail. If the gunman is the hand, money is the bloodstream.

An allofsociety compact

The state holds the monopoly on legitimate force, but not on the causes of violence. The causes live in places no police force can permanently occupy: bedrooms, classrooms, and family silences.

Families must raise boys who do not believe manhood requires domination, money without work, or a weapon. Faith communities must refuse to bless politicians, donors, or local strongmen who consort with gunmen. Schools must stop processing boys out of the building and into the morgue. The private sector must move beyond private security to scaled apprenticeships and stop laundering criminal respectability through contracts.

Media must abandon bodycount voyeurism for reporting that follows the gun, the money, and the court file. The diaspora must be invited not as a wallet but as a partner.

Accountability, or it is a sermon

All of this is rhetorical decoration unless every Caribbean state publishes a quarterly homicide reduction dashboard. A minister who cannot speak fluently about those numbers should not be a minister. A prime minister who cannot deliver them should not be returned. This is the consent of the governed in its most demanding form.

Some will call this approach soft. They will demand more helicopters, more soldiers, more curfews, more televised toughness. But soft is the state that cannot protect a law student at his grandmother’s birthday party. Soft is the politician who calls the gunman before the family of the dead. Soft is the church that accepts the donation and forgets the blood. Soft is the government that taxes the honest but fears the violent rich.
True strength rebuilds what is broken: courts that work, police who are accountable, schools that do not eject, families that do not flinch, churches that do not bless gunmen, and a region that speaks with one voice to those who arm us. When we provide safety, healing, opportunity, and due process better than any gang ever could, the monopoly on legitimate force returns not by conquest, but by consent. Anything less is just another gang with better branding.

Daquan Roberts should have walked across a stage this year. Instead, his classmates walked to a peace pole. We owe his grandmother, and the next, more than condolences. We owe them a country whose families, communities, churches, businesses, and state all understand that a coffin in every ward is not fate. It is failure.