Despite the spate of deadly shootings within recent weeks and based on the motive, the public have nothing to be worried about.
Enville Williams, Commissioner of Police (Ag), said at Monday’s press briefing that he was giving the public the assurance that the police were doing all in its power to ensure the safety of all in society.
“Until we can establish a particular motive for a crime, then we have to say that people do not know how to settle their differences without resorting to violence,” the CoP (Ag) said.
According to Williams, people did not know how to come to the police or access somebody who can mediate on their behalf in order to sit down together and trash out issues without resorting to violence.
“And what we are saying is that we need to come from a societal standpoint where we know how to settle interpersonal differences,” the CoP (Ag) said.
Without that, he continued, then there was the likelihood to resort to everything else to settle disputes.
Assistant Commissioner of Police in charge if crime, Trevor ‘Buju’ Bailey added that the citizens of St Vincent and the Grenadines should feel safe going about the country because about 95 percent of the victims of deadly shootings were persons known criminally to the police.
“They were persons known criminally to us [and] that should indicate something to us,” he said.
People walking along the streets have nothing to worry about, according to ACP Bailey.
There has never been an incident where a mass shooting has occurred at a supermarket or at a church.
“So, people can feel safe to walk the street,” ACP Bailey reasoned.
He continued saying that people can feel relatively safe, once they have secured their cash and go from store to store and know that at the end of the day, they would have purchased goods and returned home with the remaining money in their pockets.
Up to the time this article was written, the homicide rate stood at 53, two short of the record 55 committed in 2023.
And the country had recorded a second deadly shooting within a 24-hour period.
Following on the shooting death of 23-year-old Redemption Sharpes resident Isaiah Antrobus who was shot and killed in Glen on December 15 was a shooting which occurred shortly after 8 pm which occurred in Roseau, Sion Hill.
These shootings occurred after Jarvis ‘Smaddi Dan’ Horne was gunned down in Rose Place on December 9 which was followed by the shooting of Enrico Johnny – a 35-year-old resident of Ottley Hall who was shot and wounded as he and some other men were sitting by the side of the road in the vicinity of the Rubis Gas Station located by the Milton Cato Memorial Hospital which occurred during daylight hours.