Minister Terry Lister said on Friday that violent crime in Bermuda is down - and we've all heard the Police Commissioner say the same thing in the course of giving out his crime statistics.

But both of them are denying something that all of us can see with our own eyes and hear with our own ears - valuable young men shooting each other to death, rival gangs of young men trying to kill each other with machetes and clubs. We see fights, road rage, open selling of drugs, disrespect of all kinds, speeding and so on. People don't go out into the streets after dark much any more, unless they're travelling in a car. Seniors are afraid to be in their own yards as darkness falls.

Perhaps some of these things aren't counted as crimes, but the violence that intrudes into the lives of Bermudians has increased substantially over the last few years.

All of a sudden, violence is right in our faces, and we would be foolish to deny it.

While we have seen violence increase, we have seen the presence of the Police on the streets decrease. When was the last time you saw a policeman walking the beat in Hamilton or St. George's?

It just doesn't seem to happen any more.

Everybody's prepared to go along with change if they think it is linked with improvement. And if there were some fancy new technique that allowed the police to do the same job of policing the streets while not actually walking the streets, people would say, 'Wonderful, go for it!'

But that hasn't happened. Folks travel abroad to cities in the States, Canada and Europe where they see policemen walking the beat. If it hasn't happened there, it's safe to say it isn't going to happen here, either.

When the Police in New York under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani began their crackdown some years ago, the crackdown that pulled crime levels down to new record lows, they did it by increasing the number of policemen on the beat, not decreasing them, and by adopting a policy of zero tolerance for crime, no matter how trivial.

They reasoned that when you have no tolerance for petty crime, there will be less major crime as well, and they were proven right.

In a sense, our police have helped to prove them right, because they don't come out on the streets. They tolerate a high level of misbehaviour before they call it crime. As a result, we get incidents like a two-hour gang fight on Front Street in the early hours of New Year's morning, and a riot at a reggae concert in February.

There are CCTV cameras all over the place these days, but they don't seem to have been much help. Police said they were going to be reviewing their film to prosecute more of those involved in that New Year's incident, but nothing came of it. Do the police have the manpower to watch the cameras properly?

In the new United Bermuda Party, we believe crime, punishment and justice in Bermuda need a complete re-think.

What we are doing just doesn't seem to be working. More and more of our young people are getting involved with crime and, sadly, crime has become like a conveyor belt.

Once you're on it, you get taken for a ride, and it's the devil's own job to get off. At the end of the ride, you're a hardened criminal - a person who is going to be institutionalised for most of your life.

The Smith Government has been quick to adopt things like Alternatives to Incarceration.

We agree that there is no point in criminalising someone who has made a silly mistake he or she is unlikely to repeat, and to that extent, ATI is a good idea. But with the Smith Government, the devil in always in the details.

Their follow-up and their management of the programme has not been good. It seems to have been used, perhaps in order to keep prison population numbers down, to give more serious offenders a get-out-of-jail-free card.

We need to set the bar higher than it is currently set, so that we really do provide an alternative to jail to people who deserve a second chance.

We do believe in rehabilitation. We do believe that psychological wounds can be healed with the right treatment. And we believe in working with inmates, as long as those inmates are genuinely interested in working with us, not just taking whatever they can get.

The current government has gone too far, they've made it too easy, and they have lost sight of what the criminal justice system is all about. We believe we have to get back to first principles:

There should be no tolerance for crime of any kind.

The business of the prison system is to punish offenders for their crimes, not to cure them of their criminal tendencies. Rehabilitation is a service that should be made available for people who want to change.

There should be no discounted prison sentences. a life sentence should mean life in prison.

The criminal justice system and its procedures are designed to protect society from criminals, not the other way around.

We believe we have to give our Police Service the help they need to take the streets back from lawless individuals. If that means more police and better equipment, then we're prepared to bite that bullet.

We believe the chaos in our network of drug treatment facilities has to be sorted out in a hurry. We want people who are prepared to roll up their sleeves and get the dirty work done, not people who want to spend the rest of their lives writing reports in air-conditioned offices.

And we believe we need to look very soberly and carefully at the kind of legal reform that is going on in the United Kingdom, to see whether there are some aspects of it that ought to be applied here. Modern science and modern methods are revolutionising criminal detection. we should not try to prevent them from revolutionising our criminal justice system as well.

@EDITRULE:

Rev. Dr. Leonard Santucci is the UBP candidate in Constituency 17 - Pembroke Central.