We appear once again in one of those familiar and deeply discomfitting periods in which armed bandits demonstrate their ability to strike anywhere and at will. These are usually periods of heightened public unease; people become more alert than usual to the danger of becoming the next victim. Some of us muster a heightened level of self-protection; we avoid being in those places where we feel the bandits may strike; we venture out less at night and we go to great lengths to avoid the appearance of affluence. Others, by the very nature of their day-to-day pursuits, cannot avoid being targeted. If, for example, you are a downtown trader, a payroll escort or a travelling salesman for a company there is little that you can do to avoid being a possible target. You know that on any given day you run the risk of being attacked and robbed, seriously injured or even killed. You know that such a moment might come any time.
The feeling of vulnerability is accentuated by the evidence that has gone before that the police have not been able either to restrict the freedom with which the bandits operate or to improve the rate at which they are apprehended. If the contrary were the case you might at least feel that the odds were more in your favour.
We are now in the the first month of 2011 and up the time that this editorial was written, there have been 16 armed robberies reported in the media. Four of the victims have been murdered. The statistics are not reassuring.
The name of Sanjay Persaud stands out for a particular reason. After a virtual lifetime of vending on the city streets Sanjay was gunned down a week ago yesterday in the vicinity of Regent and Bourda Streets. The bandits then stripped the fallen vendor of a few pieces of jewellery. He died the next day.
The attack on Sanjay appears to be telling us a few significant things. First, that his cold-blooded gunning down may signal a less discriminating disposition on the part of the bandits. Rich business people, payrolls and wealthy homes remain prime targets but vendors, not usually known to be carrying significant sums of money on them and even persons making their way home from work, perhaps with little more than their bus fares, are not exempt from these attacks.
Sanjay’s shooting also raises the question as to whether we may not be witnessing a greater proclivity for opportunistic robberies that select soft targets. Is it too the case that access to guns has now become so easy that even petty criminals are pressing them into service in relatively petty crimes? If it is that young and daring criminals are simply arming themselves and taking to the streets, day or night, without any real plan except perhaps a kind of lottery approach to whom their victim might be, then the number of potential victims increases significantly. It is a deeply worrying thought.
Everywhere, we take our chances. Robberies are an occupational hazard of living in societies where unemployment is high, poverty is rife and where there is a sufficiently large pool of people who are either desperate or simply bent on a life of crime. That is a chance that millions of people take every day. Here, you often feel that the odds are further stacked against you because the police are unable to provide an effective deterrent. Not that you expect that the police can or will prevent every robbery or apprehend every perpetrator. On the other hand you wish for a presence that at least reduces the level of impunity with which the bandits operate.
What evokes a heightened level of anxiety is the belief that too often we cannot factor in the police on our side, that when it comes to protecting our property and our lives from bandits we are pretty much on our own. This has led to a culture of self-defence, an equation that works at two extremes and one that does not take account of the police. At the one extreme there are those who take defensive measures like avoiding potentially dangerous places, being out at night only when it becomes necessary and stripping themselves of any outward manifestation of affluence. Others, in the exercise of self-defence, assume a more offensive posture. They fight back, sometimes applying methods which are, in themselves unlawful. It is in these periods, when bandits can act without legal restraint, that lawless responses are sometimes applauded by a usually law-abiding society.
The police have come under more than their fair share of public ‘fire’ and in the process brave and hardy men and women are unjustifiably maligned. In the final analysis we cannot afford to accept without murmur a society in which the scales are decidedly tilted in favour of the bandits, where normalcy is compromised by a widespread public fear of becoming the next victim. We can look nowhere else but to the police to offer somewhat more reassuring odds.
