The murder of Sakina Chinedu and others and the armed robbery of Access Bank and El-Hella shop in Banjul and recent armed robbery in Balanghar are tending to show a trend towards armed robbery by Non-Gambian nationals.
Such developments need to be handled with immediacy in two ways to prevent any stereotyping regarding the commission of crimes.
First and foremost, the Gambian people must not take the killing of the two policemen at Sukuta and the armed robberies that have been mentioned very lightly, but they must not be hardened to a point of promoting mob justice. Instead, the spirit of community policing should be intensified to ensure that no one who commits such heinous crime would go scotch free.
The Gambian people must see crime to have no nationality or ethnolinguistic origin. It is the conduct of a person irrespective of his or her origin. Hence all eyes should be centred on the criminal and not on his or her origin. In this way we do not give criminals more power than they really have. Armed robbers are always a few among us and if the rest of society is uniting against them, they will be weakened and defeated.
Secondly, the Interpol unit of the police force should be strengthened to ensure close collaboration against cross-border crime in our subregion. In the same vein, cross border collaboration of communities should be intensified to prevent cross-border crime.
The time to act is now.
