Truth be told the disruption of the Sunday morning mass at St Philips Parish Church by three gun-toting young men who proceeded to rob what must have been a bemused and terrified congregation, ought not to come as a surprise to anyone. Indeed, there is an undeniable poignancy and truth to the assertion by the Reverend Oswald Barnes – having proceeded with the service in the wake of the robbery – that “we have descended so low that we can just expect anything now.”
Shocking and irrefutable truth though that is, there are those of us who would still recoil in horror at the thought that what we ought to expect to be an uplifting Sunday morning church service can be interrupted by gunmen with robbery and, if need be, worse on their minds. What happened at St Philips church last Sunday morning could have been far worse though even in the extent of the occurrence it degraded the entire nation.
This is of course not the first time that a church has been targeted by bandits and the fact that St Philips is situated in an otherwise deserted corner of Werk-en-Rust must have figured in the minds of the bandits during what would appear to have been a well-planned operation.
And if it might seem overly repetitive to raise again the issue of our policing challenges in the face of this disturbing episode it simply must be said that the St Philips incident points to a continually worsening condition of impunity associated with the commission of serious crimes and, simultaneously, the complete and utter contempt in which law enforcement is held by the perpetrators of banditry.
While one is loathe to make a case for early morning religious services proceeding under the watchful eye of armed guards, perhaps – given the vulnerability of unsuspecting and unexpecting congregations to robbers who are altogether unmindful of the sanctity of the church, – there may well be something to be said for an interlude of early Sunday morning police mobile patrols particularly in those areas that are known to have large numbers of worshippers. During those early hours of Sunday persons on their way to all houses of worship as well as congregations engaged in worship are uniquely vulnerable to bandits.
What is of at least equally serious concern is the evidence from the St Philips robbery that the perpetrators who appear to be no more than run-of-the-mill villains are able to get their hands on firearms seemingly with relative ease, to use them and afterwards to make them disappear until they are ready to use them again. We are usually not told nearly enough to get a complete picture of the extent of the success realized by the police in the seizure of illegally held firearms or legally held ones used in the perpetration of crimes. One must hope that the fact that the three St Philips robbers were all armed provides the Crime Chief with a particular incentive to apprehend them since their being apprehended would enable the police to interrogate them on the matter of the source of their weapons.
Here, it is worth repeating that in circumstances where local law enforcement still takes little if any account of the need to put mechanisms in place to try to monitor the illegal movement of guns into the country (some of which, this newspaper understands, goes into gun pools and are ‘hired out’ for the commission of crimes), we will – whatever other law enforcement measures we might undertake – always be on a hiding to nowhere as far as curbing gun crime is concerned.
Again, at least according to reports, the St Philips robbers were young men, perhaps teenagers. If this is true it points unerringly at the ongoing failure of our institutions, including homes in some instances, to provide our young people with the kind of guidance that takes them in the direction of other options. Poverty and high unemployment may not be justifiable reasons for crime but it cannot be denied that if the energies of officialdom were to yield more worthwhile employment opportunities there would be more options than crime for young people. This is where government, including the school system comes in. From what we are told no study has ever been undertaken to determine the number of young people who end their formal schooling without either the academic or vocational qualifications to further their studies or to secure decent jobs, though we are told that those numbers are considerable. Indeed even those who manage to qualify themselves struggle to find jobs since the state has no track record on job creation to write home about. Eventually, idleness coupled with poverty, lack of opportunity and loss of hope opens up unpalatable pathways.
The St Philips robbery will pass into history quickly. This country has arrived at a place where those kinds of outrages no longer shock us. It is an unmistakable sign of retrogression. That provides a decidedly credible challenge to the vehement claims we continually make to be going places.
Frankly, occurrences like the St Philips robbery are symptomatic of a descent into darkness.
