The Tribune

PRIME Minister Perry Christie and his government should be “roundly and soundly rejected” by all Bahamians for their “faint-hearted and vacuous” response to the Fox Hill killings, FNM leader Dr Hubert Minnis said.

After an all-day cabinet meeting where the best minds of the PLP tried to craft a response to the “calamity”, the best that they could come up with is “more of the same”, Dr Minnis said.

“Their proposal to re-work the failed police 12 hour shift regime has already failed,” he said. “Urban Renewal 2.0 has already failed. They are ‘late again’ in building the new Supreme Court complex in Bank Lane, after having stopped and reviewed it for more than a year before now, rushing to try and get the job done.

“Their compendium of crime Bills failed in the Senate due to shoddy and negligent drafting of the Bills. Their only new proposal, to out-source police car repairs to the private sector, sounds like nothing more than jobs for a few roadside repairmen, one of whom was found to be smuggling guns into the country in the bodies of wrecked cars.”

Dr Minnis went on to say the only positive initiatives announced yesterday afternoon were actually FNM initiatives.

“The Bank Lane Supreme Court development is the FNM’s plan for development and enhancement of the judicial capacity to address the volume of serious crime. Further, the proposal to form a Gang Unit of the Police Force was an FNM proposal which was recently made in the House of Assembly, by myself during the debate on the recent compendium of crime Bills.

“It is a sad reflection on the mental exhaustion of the PLP government that in their statement they have failed utterly to announce any realistic initiatives. Prime Minister Christie has utterly failed to propose any solution which addresses in any meaningful way, the fear of crime, the cause of crime, or the solution to crime.”

Dr Minnis said that in the coming days, he will give a New Year’s address to the nation in which he plans to unveil several “bold proposals and initiatives” designed specifically to address the fear and underlying causes of crime, and to propose specific solutions which will “strike fear into the hearts and souls” of the criminal element.