Commissioner of Police Enville Williams says that while there are a few things that give him a headache, chief among them is the situation concerning youth violence in St. Vincent and the Grenadines.
“There are a few things that give me headache, and chief amongst them is youth violence. And the minister alluded to using soft force to address the rising youth engagement as it relates to anti-social and violent behaviours,” the police said at a joint press conference with Minister of National Security, St. Clair Leacock.
He noted that the police force and the ministry recently held a consultation to devise strategies, apart from arresting and charging.
Williams said that, like Leacock, the constabulary believes “that if we engage young people from a community standpoint before they commit a crime, that the outcome is far greater for us as a country as a whole, as opposed to sending a young person to prison”.
The police chief and Leacock addressed the media on their return from St. Lucia, where Leacock took over the one-year rotating chair of the Regional Security System (RSS), which comprises eight member countries.
He said that the four-day RSS meeting in Castries discussed how to address youth violence and how the various police forces tailor their responses to the circumstances in their respective jurisdictions.
“…, to give greater presence for police personnel not just to arrest and charge, but to use other means to reach young persons,” Williams said.
“How do we engage the churches and work along with churches and youth groups …” he said.
Williams said police forces across the region, “have gone back to the drawing board to come up with ways of having their officers, both from a military standpoint and a police standpoint, reaching in the communities, be it engaging in youth groups and playing sports, or sending the police band or the military bands in community just play music for an hour and just leave”.
He said the police force did not want their interactions with young people to be merely about arresting them for breaking the law.
“… but to engage them and to make them … feel that they belong to the society, because, more often than not, persons who engage in his anti-social behaviour, sometimes because they don’t feel a part of the society,” Williams said.
He suggested mentorship programmes for youth, noting the one operated by the Stubbs Police Youth Club, adding that such initiatives can be expanded to include more mentors and mentees who are not club members.
“Because some people just need guidance. Some people just need somebody to talk to them,” Williams said.
He said that since becoming police chief in 2023, he has been trying to engage the media, especially morning radio talk show hosts, “about working with us to reach young people”.
Williams said radio programmes and the music they play “more often than not, they have an effect on what is going on.
“Because if you keep playing violent songs and graphic lyrics for young persons who are going on a bus to and from school, that is what they’re hearing, and that is what subconsciously they’re repeating over and over again.”
He noted RSS member states have been focused heavily recently on the Sixx and 7even gangs.
“And what my colleagues in the region and I …have discovered is that the lyrics coming out of the glorifying gang lifestyle, and Sixx and 7even is what the young people are playing, the graphic images from the music videos are what they are gravitating towards,” Williams said.
“And so, if we can have the media houses work with us to try and abandon the sort of music that they’re playing on their radio station, then we can get back to the young people. We can reach them.”
Williams said that the situation can be reversed but stakeholders must act now.
“I don’t think we have gone too far, but I think we need to step in now. Now is the appropriate time for us to rub shoulders together as a nation and do something for our young people,” he said.
“I don’t think we can afford as a small country to lose a generation, and if we continue the way we are headed, we lose a generation.”
