Crime stats in Barbados worrying

(Barbados Nation) Break-ins have reached “worrying” proportions, with a burglary committed every four and a half hours, according to Commissioner of Police Darwin Dottin.

And most of the perpetrators are getting away.

This situation compares with a rate of one burglary every 14.6 seconds in the United States and one every 37 seconds in Britain.

Those statistics were released by Dottin Wednesday night at The NATION’s town hall meeting on crime at the Lester Vaughan School, St Thomas, where a United Nations official advised Barbados to keep an eye on property crime and a local criminologist stressed the need for preventative strategies.

Dottin insisted the levels of crime were “relatively low” and there had been no major increases over the last decade, despite the occasional spurts.