The Tribune

By Tyler McKenzie

IT seems to me that the Davis administration has entered its “blame dem” phase of government.

Something wrong? Blame dem. Getting some bad press? Blame dem. Don’t have a solution? Blame dem instead.

The thing with “blame dem” moments is that once you start noticing them, suddenly you see them everywhere.

The first one to catch my eye this week was Prime Minister Philip “Brave” Davis criticising Bahamians over jury duty – and saying that avoidance of jury duty is causing challenges for swift justice.

“Many Bahamians don’t want to serve,” he said. “We talk about swift justice, but we need to encourage people that when they’re called upon to provide service, to do so as part of their civil duty. But then anytime they see their name, they go try to make excuses to be excused.”

Typically, Mr Davis did not bring any statistics or details to back up his claim, but rather went on about how murder trials didn’t take so long back in his day.

He said: “I would finish a murder trial with the judges within a week. The longest trial I had back in the day in a murder was two weeks. That’s a long time. But today, a murder trial taking two, three months. So, something is happening. I’ve raised this matter as well, that we need to see why trials are taking so long.”

After a couple of years in office now, and a lengthy career as a lawyer, it is somewhat concerning that Mr Davis is only just beginning to look to see why trials are taking so long – but from this very same week, there are a couple of examples of impediments to swift justice that have absolutely nothing to do with his petty sniping at people over jury duty.

Bahamas Crisis Centre director Dr Sandra Dean-Patterson, for example, highlighted the lack of capacity in the country to analyse the evidence in rape kits. Not just now, but for the past 30 years.

She said: “When a person is raped and they go to the hospital, the evidence is taken. But unfortunately, up to now, we haven’t been able to analyse it locally. And so, a lot of times, the cases depend on the stories of the victim. So victims are put through a whole lot of horrendous things during the courts because we don’t have access to that kind of information. So, hopefully, the minister is saying that we’re moving on that at last, 30 years later. So we’re looking forward to seeing it.”

Interesting that the government has been talking up introducing DNA testing for citizenship, but women who are victims of rape have been left behind for so long.

Then there is the coroner, who during an inquest into the police-involved killing of three men in Blair Estates, criticised the police, saying it was “unacceptable” that only eight out of the 15 weapons used by officers in the shooting were submitted as evidence.

The coroner asked about the delay – note the word delay – in retrieving the remaining weapons, and was told the remaining weapons are in active circulation, mainly in Abaco.

The case goes on – but it is an example of delays that have nothing to do with jurors, but rather the processes behind the scenes.

How many times do we see cases delayed because lawyers don’t show up, or witnesses don’t show up, or documentation is not present, and so on.

National Security Minister Wayne Munroe got in on the blame game too, grumbling about the fact that judges have holidays.

He said: “We now have 12 judges who all have five weeks vacation, which is 60 weeks a year, which is over a year of trial time.”

Hands up anyone out there who has ever worked in any kind of environment where people have holiday time – yep, that’s everyone. Dealing with the fact that people are entitled to holidays is a simple fact of life – you plan around it. If those working hours have to be filled and can’t be done by the staff you have, you hire more staff. Need another year of trial time to catch up? Hire another judge. They will have holiday time too, though, so don’t be surprised, Mr Munroe.

Mr Munroe also complained about people who “are into” murder statistics. He said: “I’m not one for counting murders because one is too much, 70 too, but at the end of the day, the people who are into statistics trouble me because every murder isn’t really a statistic. It’s a person, and it doesn’t matter whether or not you say this person is somebody who’s in the game and so makes themselves a target.”

First, I hope he reserves some of that “trouble” for his own Prime Minister, who famously defended the murder billboards put up by the PLP listing the number of killings under the FNM administration. And secondly, people have tended to keep a count of the murders because they were not certain of the official numbers any more and started to keep track independently.

As an aside, he also said “when we came out of our lockdown, it wasn’t surprising you have a spurt of murders”. Back when Police Commissioner Paul Rolle was asked if lockdowns had an effect in reducing murders, he called it “nonsense” and said it was down to “the work that officers did… y’all have to give us the credit because we have done a whole lot and when crime goes up, we take responsibility”.

The PM himself, of course, has reacted to the rise in the murder count this year by suggesting that the press could play down its coverage of murders. Rather than dealing with the murders, once again it’s blame dem.

Also last week, the mid-year Budget revealed the government is overshooting its deficit projections significantly. The full-year projection is $127m. Where are we at now? $258m, nearly double.

How does the government address that? Well, it spent some time blaming alcohol and tobacco smuggling, saying the country loses nearly $100m each year that way. I’m not quite sure how they come to such a number that they have missed – because it strikes me that this is something that if you’re not aware of, how can you count it? Perhaps it’s like with my fishermen friends - the one that got away is always bigger. But blame they did. It may be true, and good luck to them in clamping down on it if so, but while they tutted about that, they tossed another chunk of money onto the PM’s travel budget, now $2.1m, up from $569,721.

So, court delays? Blame dem. Murder count bringing bad publicity to the country? Blame dem. Counting the murders themselves? Blame dem. Problems with government revenue? Blame dem.

Like I say, once you start seeing them do it, it’s hard to stop noticing. Let’s see what the coming weeks bring. Blame? Or taking responsibility.