The recent increase of indiscriminate killings, thefts and arm robbery in the Gambia is a concern for many Gambians particularly women and business personnel. The possible causes of the high crime rates in the Gambia include:

High unemployment among the Youths: According to the Gambia Bureau of Statistics, the youthful population of the Gambia is over 60%, good number of whom live in the urban areas with no stable source(s) of income. These youngsters would undoubtedly have commitments that require money thus are either engaged in selling illicit drugs or in theft cases. 

Besides, the Unregulated Tenant System is worrisome and a threat to internal security. The recent democratic dispensation attracts many foreigners to the Gambia; among whom, some are heavily investing in the economy while others are engaged in dubious activities. Landlords in most cases do not do any background checks on the persons occupying their premises. They are usually interested in the monetary values received in exchange for their properties. We have recently noticed that the occupants of the most expensive buildings/houses in the Greater Banjul Areas are foreigners who in fact pay in hard currencies. It is also evident that most of those people do not provide their landlords with the necessary information about their workplaces or sources of income. The million-dollar question is how those tenants generate income to pay for such luxurious apartments?

Furthermore, the Poorly Equipped Prison Services encourages more socialization among inmates than reformation. The inmates should learn different technical and vocational skills that earn them a living after their imprisonment terms. In the absence of such, the prison becomes a socialization center wherein minor offenders live with highly sophisticated ones thus ending up learning different burglary and more advanced skills from them. We have witnessed many ex-convicts committing different major crimes in the Gambia after serving their jail terms.

Policy Recommendations to Curb the High Crime Rate in the Gambia

In order to minimize the high crime rates, the government apparatus and general public must inclusively work together. 

In addressing the high unemployment rate among youths, the government and private sectors have roles to play. Skill acquisition is significant, rewarding, and advancing. Skill training is a significant method of putting resources into the young people. The skills they get will assist them with being both employable and furthermore self-employable. 

Both government and non-governmental organizations are expected to contribute their part in assisting the youths with getting skills. One way they can do this is the provision of grants to youngsters. Practicing this will assist the youths with bringing in cash for their everyday costs and furthermore assist them with preparing others. Following this pattern will help diminish the level of the country’s jobless youthful people.

No measure of skills gained by youngsters is too much, as there are hoards that do multiple things to make their living. Some work at professions, as writers, as developers while others can be in the technical and vocational sectors. They bring in cash through the skills they acquired over time, exploring them in a bunch of various ways. At the point when young people get various skills and those skills become sources of cash for them, they get more cash-flow and carry on with more agreeable lives wherein they are in more monetarily secure positions and can help other people achieve relatively better living conditions.

The weakness of numerous learning institutions is one of the contributors of overall youth joblessness. Many joined learning institutions to acquire knowledge and secure work after graduation, but they end up acquiring nothing toward the finish of their journeys in the colleges and other tertiary institutions. The inappropriate subsidizing of different learning institutions has reared enough sacks and lots of jobless young people. One of the genuine answers for youth joblessness is establishing institutions of learning across the country with sufficient financing and making those establishments effectively open to youngsters countrywide without any form of discrimination.

Equipping institutions with the necessary equipment, staffing, and resources and removing economic barriers to enrollment for low-income students will help provide young people with the opportunities to acquire the knowledge and skills that they need to be exceptionally versatile people capable of reliably finding work or even becoming self-employed should they not be able to find a company capable of employing them.

Meanwhile, looking at the general increase in crime rate, the government should regard the prevention of crime as a national priority. This applies not only to the cabinet, and the departments concerned with security and justice, but also to all other national departments that can contribute to a reduction in crime levels. The government should setup National Crime Prevention Strategies (NCPS) and work with the local government authorities in its implementation.

Some of the causes of crime are deep-rooted and related to the socioeconomic realities of our society. For this reason, a comprehensive strategy must go beyond providing only effective policing. It must also provide for mobilization and participation of civil society in assisting to address crime. The institution of proper tenant system is necessary in ascertaining the type of people living in different apartments across the country. There should be proper records in which all detailed information of all tenants will be taken and use by the Immigration Department.

To effectively reduce crime, it is necessary to transform and reorganize government and facilitate real community participation. We need to weave a new social fabric, robust enough to withstand the stresses of rapid change in a new-born society. To expect this to happen too quickly is to ensure proper planning and solid construction of a new criminal justice machinery. Most fundamentally this strategy requires that government moves beyond a mode of crisis management and reaction. Government must ensure that effective planning and sustainable success in reducing crime will reach well into the next century.

Moreover, the introduction of technical and vocational education and training (TVET) programs as part of prisoner rehabilitation will offer opportunities for offenders to reduce recidivism, thereby increasing the likelihood of successful re-integration into the community and reducing the risk of reoffending. The programs will target the provision of pre-release/transition and employment opportunities, the opportunity to be involved in meaningful prison work, the expansion of vocational training, and more access to advice about health services, education, training and housing prior to release. The aim of establishing prison institutions all over the world should be to provide rehabilitation and prison for the convict thereby providing an effective environment that reduces the risk of reoffending. According to Boduszek D, and Hyland P. (2011), inmates who enrolled in educational and training programs while incarcerated had lower recidivism rates than those who did not attend the programs. Inmates need education and training programs that not only teach them to read and write but also provide them with the necessary skills that promote a positive transition to society when they are released. Efforts in this direction would help promote better participation of inmates in all prison education programs and will go along way to help the prisoner rehabilitation processes.

Finally, the police need to be undoubtedly equipped with the necessary apparatus and knowledge to face the realities of the recent drastic increase of crime rates in the Gambia.

While expanding the scope and size of police forces per se has only a minimal impact on crime prevention, proactive and selective police operations can yield substantial results. Innovative approaches need to be developed for the prevention of theft, mischief, armed violence, drunk driving, among others. The recent “Operation Zero Crime” is essential but needs to be supported by joint action and problem resolution. These innovations will contribute to improving services to the public, creating synergy and reducing crime.

Local partnerships enable police officers to gain a better understanding of promising and appropriate practices. They make for a broader scope of police action in social prevention, in which the police thus cooperate in creating solutions that can often result in lasting change.

Police-community partnerships can bring about better responses to the real demands of citizens by focusing on solving real problems. This approach, derived from a rigorous problem resolution process (identification, strategic analysis, response, and assessment) must be applied to a variety of situations. Working in partnership with the citizens is important to identify various crime problems and with government agencies, urban managers and municipal representatives, the police can better adapt and maintain the quality of services to improve security in local and regional communities. This trend in police activity to a more targeted approach better focused on community needs fosters the development of a climate of confidence between police and citizens.

 

Ousman Gaku
Public Policy Expert and Activist