15th February 2013
To the Editor:
Suggestions To End Crime In Anguilla
I attended the Forum on the crime problem at the Rodney MacArthur Rey Auditorium, Tuesday, 12th February, with my wife. Owning a home in Anguilla for 21 years said we should go. We’re not belongers, but we live here two to three months a year. Our grandchildren who grew up here consider our modest place an emotional inch from their primary home in Connecticut. Call us Anguilla Believers.
We had to leave the Forum before the audience had a chance to weigh in with specific suggestions for ending the crimes Anguilla is suddenly confronting. So I would like to submit my thoughts before the 22 February deadline for reviewing the ideas that were voiced after we left. I have two suggestions.
One, the Tourist Board, media and the police should establish a fast-response team to the blogs and websites that are spreading Anguilla’s recent problems across the worldwide web. People who haven’t been here will doubt their safety and turn their research to other islands. If they go elsewhere, Anguilla has lost a customer, maybe forever. Now, crime, occasional crime, is not unknown to mankind. People accept it as part of the world we live in; but what they won’t accept is anything less than a strong and immediate response to it. In Anguilla’s case, the tourist’s mind says, “Wait a minute, there are only 13,000 residents on Anguilla and they don’t know who the crooks are?” If the same mind realizes that the crime population is primarily males 18 to 24, the 13,000 shrinks to perhaps a little as 2,000, making a lack of results even scarier.
The Constitution requires proof for conviction (thank goodness), but what about hitting back on the blogs quickly and often with postings like…
“Suspects of an attempted restaurant robbery in Anguilla have been detained by the police.”(So what if it was for only a few days.)
“Determined to remain the safest destination in the Caribbean, Anguilla has doubled its police force (or is doubling it).
“Anguilla government training more police officers to end recent robberies; UK sends assistance.”
“Anguilla loses patience; cracks down hard on teenage gangs.”
The objective is to let the cyber-tourist know the crime problem is recent and unusual, and Anguilla is doing something specific about it. I can’t overemphasize the word specific. The problem doesn’t need more talking. It needs easily understood, specific solutions.
Another thought, perhaps as only a belonger I have no right to comment on it, but what the heck. I am in pretty deep already. Rightly or wrongly, being a British Overseas Territory comforts the mind of the tourist. Some of you reading this will get angry at that observation, but for over twenty years I have been praising Anguilla to Americans, Canadians and Brits. First, I have to explain I don’t mean Antigua (pop. about 90,000), then I mesmerize them with descriptions of the beaches, restaurants and people. They listen attentively. Then I say “It’s a British territory” and the sale is made.
Suggestion number two. I heard from a Forum speaker that 65% of the labor force on Anguilla is directly tied to the tourist trade. That leaves only a third for boat-building, construction, government, fishing, finance, plumbing, carpentering, etc., etc. This is dangerous. If Anguilla were a company and one product was two-thirds of its sales, investors would shun it as being too reliant on one thing and too vulnerable to competition. In Anguilla’s case – right now –add crime to “vulnerable to competition.” What about adding a product? What about light manufacturing? Plants of this kind are scattered all across the Caribbean, assembling bicycles, solar panels, pharmaceuticals, small engines, cricket equipment, hairdryers…all kinds of things. Look across the vast openness of the East End, but don’t picture another golf course. Picture a clean, new assembly plant powered mostly by wind and sun, employing four or five hundred people with a career ladder. Then picture another one. Need ideas for those plants? Get six bright people in a room, shut the door, give them a bowl of chocolates and tell them you want twenty viable ideas in sixty minutes. Chop, chop. Get to it. Then select the most realistic of the ideas and research them for a logical company. Give it no-corporate-tax status. I got the feeling at the Forum that all Anguilla’s economy needed was more tourism and more tourism training. Maybe so, but the speaker also said only 7% of high school seniors were interested in a tourism career. What about the other 93%? What do they want? Is there training available for them to achieve it?
Letters like this are often signed “Concerned Citizen” or “Anonymous.” I rejected that as a dilution of my sincerity.
Charlie Horn
