Five years ago, the Progressive Labour Party spent a good deal of effort dismissing the United Bermuda Party’s warnings that crime was getting worse.The PLP’s spin doctors trawled through the records in search of a year under a UBP government when crime was worse than it was in 2006 and finally found one.Then they drew a line between 1996 and 2006 to show that crime had fallen. Never mind that a line drawn between 2000 and 2006 would have shown crime rising.At the same time, UBP proposals for cracking down on crime and mandatory prison sentences were dismissed as draconian.But now it seems the PLP might have believed its own propaganda.National Security Minister Wayne Perinchief, who is probably the best “crime Minister” the PLP has had, and, sadly, unlikely to be back in the House of Assembly after being forced out of his seat in a primary, admitted this week that the unprecedented surge in gang violence, and the shocking spate of murders that have rocked the community from 2008 onwards, were a surprise.“We have been caught flat-footed,” he said. “I would not even try to say that we anticipated anything like this.“They are all looking in the rear view mirror now but with all due respect to people’s opinions, we have never been faced with anything like this.”With all due respect to Mr Perinchief, he is wrong. It was predicted, just as the economic storms now engulfing the Island were predicted.And in both cases, the predictions were denied and ridiculed. Those making the predictions were scaremongering. On crime, they were racists who wanted to lock up young black men for no reason other than that they were young black men.But it was Gina Spence Farmer, then a UBP candidate, and now a parent who has lost a son-in-law to gun crime, who said: “I have been canvassing on the doorsteps of Warwick for more than two years, and I’ve heard some heartbreaking stories about how people’s lives are being ruined by crime.“The latest Police statistics show break-ins on the rise Island-wide and more than two times higher than just a few years ago. I can say that the frequency of break-ins in this parish is a major concern and fear.”And then UBP leader Michael Dunkley, now an OBA candidate, said: “Drug trafficking, the growth of gangs and unsolved murders are features of our life in 2007.”So what was coming was seen, and the Opposition of the time wanted to deal with it. The pre-emptive steps, which included rehabilitation programmes, were not taken.When the surge in gang violence came, the Government did very little, wasting months in fights with Government House over control of the police while young black men died.When the PLP did act, it was primarily to introduce mandatory sentences for gun crimes, similar to what it had ridiculed just a short time before.No one should claim to have all the answers to gang violence. Once Mr Perinchief became Minister, and once Commissioner Michael DeSilva and his command team took charge at Police headquarters, progress began to be made in response to a unified effort. But too many lives had already been lost by then.And the preventive side of fighting crime, which lies with the Government and the broader community, is lagging.Today we learn that one of the centrepieces of that strategy, Street Safe, is stalled because private funding and a non-profit organisation to run it cannot be found.This is one area where taxpayers’ money should be used if private donations cannot be found, and where a Government agency should be used if a private non-profit cannot take up the mantle. That’s because security is crucial to any society, and should be one of Government’s top priority.That the PLP cannot recognise this in 2012 shows that it is as myopic as it was in 2007 when it denied crime was getting worse, just before the greatest upsurge of violent crime Bermuda has ever seen erupted.