Commissioner: Confluence of factors diminished gang crime

The dip in gang violence over the last five years can be attributed to beefed up enforcement, community engagement and long prison sentences, among other factors, according to Police Commissioner Michael DeSilva.

Violent crime riddled both 2009 and 2010 in Bermuda. In 2009, for instance there were 925 “crimes against the person”. That figured dropped to 615 last year. The gun violence, meanwhile, appeared to peak in the third quarter of 2010. During that time frame a dozen people were either killed or injured by gunfire on the island. In that same quarter, there were more than 20 firearm “incidents” reported in Bermuda.

But now, Bermuda’s crime rate is the lowest since 2000.

How did that happen?

Mr DeSilva points a number of factors.

Five years ago, there were no community action groups; there are now 10. During that same time frame, the number of neighborhood watch groups expanded from about a dozen to around 110. Since 2009, more officers have been committed to foot patrol and the number of officers who are designated as community engagement liasons in neighborhoods that are seeing anti-social behavior has also increased.

“I don’t think it’s one particular thing, it’s four years of the community galvanizing to take a real stance against crime.”

Later, he added, “We have put a lot of energy into law enforcement these last five years, but I’ve also said since the beginning, Bermuda can’t arrest it’s way of a gang problem. There was never an expectation on our part that we would be a panacea to everything.”

He did say there was a direct connection between prosecutions and long prison terms for gun crimes and the downturn in gang violence. Longer sentences helps deter such crime, he said.

“The drop in firearm offenses, and shooting murders and shooting injuries, they correlate to the same time we had successful prosecutions with lengthy firearms sentences,” he said. “But you can’t pin this down on one thing.”

Drug seizures, meanwhile, were down significantly in 2013 when compared with the previous year.

Last year 35 kilograms of drugs were seized. Cannabis accounted for two thirds of that amount. All told drug seizures in 2013 were valued at $2.9 million. Those numbers are a fraction of the 2012 figures. That year more than 247 kilograms of drugs were seized, with a value of $14.6 million.

 “There was a time when we would flood the borders with police and customs officers and check every bag coming in,” he said. “That’s difficult to do. Bermuda is an island with porous borders. We need to put our limited resources where the intelligence tells us to go.”

He added, “Sometimes, you just don’t have the same results.”

He also said he wouldn’t draw any conclusions about the economy from the decrease in crime. Some crime experts tether crime activity to the health of the economy – the worse the economy, the higher the crime, thinking goes.

“This is one of those statistical nightmares that you can’t actually make the connection that the theory tells you to make: if the economy is running poorly, then we should see an increase in crime,” he said. “We haven’t seen that.”