CRIME is on the rise. On Monday morning, a 24-year-old Lithuanian was critically injured at the Strovolos garage he worked, after being shot by a man believed to be of the same nationality. On Saturday, a Cypriot man aged 22 was shot dead in a village a few miles outside Nicosia. On the same day, a hand grenade was thrown at the Limassol house of the former police spokesman Michalis Katsounotos.
We will not mention the house burglaries or the robberies of bakeries and kiosks which have become so common they are no longer deemed that newsworthy. People just shrug when they hear about these crimes, having accepted them as part of daily life. While this blase attitude is understandable, to an extent, the public should be putting a lot more pressure on the authorities to act. In many countries elections are won or lost over how candidates propose to deal with crime.
Our authorities do occasionally announce initiatives against crime, but the truth is that these have very little effect. On Monday, justice minister Loucas Louca announced the implementation of a six-year, national action plan against crime which follows a five-year plan that achieved very little if crime statistics were anything to go by. The latest plan consists of a lot of nebulous ideas – what we would expect from a Left-wing government – very similar to the British Labour Party’s rhetoric about being “tough on the causes of crime”.
The government’s aim, according to Louca, would be to help mould young people’s characters so they could “face today’s problems that plague society in a more effective way”. This was one of the three main sections of the plan, which includes 221 specific actions, and was titled ‘Prevention and Reduction of Factors causing Crime’. The second section was geared at preventing a return to crime by people with a criminal record, while the third focused on conventional crime prevention and would be the exclusive concern of the police. The two other sections of the plan would be the responsibility of a variety of government departments.
As regards the first section, it would be very interesting to know how the government proposed to mould the character of young people to resist the temptation of crime. If our education system does not encourage youth to be law-abiding citizens, what has it been doing? Or would there be additional lessons discouraging the option of crime?
This National Action Plan seems little more than a publicity exercise, an attempt by the government to be seen to be doing something about crime. After all, Louca warned against us expecting any immediate results. He said this was “a long-term, six-year plan which will bear fruit over the next 20 years”. This is the ultimate cop-out.
We need an action plan that will tackle crime today, not in 10 or 15 years.
