By SANCHESKA BROWN

Tribune Staff Reporter

sbrown@tribunemedia.net

PRIME Minister Perry Christie said yesterday the government will hold several “special meetings” this week with the Police Commissioner and National Security Minister to decide what can be done “immediately” to stop the escalating crime in New Providence.

His comments came hours after his “friend” Latore Mackey, who was his press secretary and deputy director of Bahamas Information Services, was shot and killed while driving through Market Street around 4:30am Monday.

Mr Mackey was one of five men killed in less than 36 hours after a weekend of violence in the capital.

His killing brought the country’s murder count to 83 for the year.

Mr Christie said the government is “challenged” to find a solution to the recent spate of murders, however, he said, his administration will be “relentless in (its) effort” to decrease crime and the fear of crime before it becomes “uncontrollable.”

“We are going to meet and have special meetings as soon as we are finished with the House,” he told reporters after the House of Assembly broke for its luncheon recess. “We are going to have several meetings this week, specifically with respect to crime and the economy because they are the two major issues. Unless we are able to cause both of them to improve significantly, the country will have a challenge.”

Mr Christie also questioned how illegal firearms were so easily obtained by young men.

“There is something else going on to do with the importation of these weapons. I spoke with Hilary Clinton when she was (US) secretary of state and she obliged the country by sending out high-powered persons to discuss new levels of operations between the Americans and ourselves about how these weapons are coming in,” he added. “When you find young men on the streets can go and find a .45 or a .38 or whatever else and now AK 47s, you know we have a challenge and a problem. We have to be relentless in our effort to find out and dedicate more resources to doing so. It is something that I will have more to say about after I have had in-depth consultations with the commissioner and minister of national security, but from where I sit we have to find a way to do more and do better.”

The Prime Minister said the government’s priority is and always has been developing short-term and long-term policies that will aid in its effort to fight and eliminate crime.

He said: “We have to be able to come up with strategies and provide a greater degree of safety for our people and to try and reach these young men who do the killing and are killed themselves and become victims. There is something going on out there and we have to have a much better understanding of it.

“I am just committed to that and this is something that is both long-term and short-term, but we have to be able to protect our young men from each other. These are the matters that concern us because they are engaged in the kinds of attacks that are beyond reason and we need to find them and address these issues because otherwise we will go down a road that is uncontrollable and that is what we must avoid. When you have spates of killing over a weekend to that extent, we have to be frank in our admission. This is not what we want, this is not what we like and therefore we have to do something about it. As to what we are going to do about it, again it is a technical question in terms of resources and manpower and these are matters we have to deal with.”

Last December, the government held a special Cabinet meeting on crime after a “heinous” drive-by shooting at a park in Fox Hill that killed four people and injured seven others.

The government held a press conference after that special meeting and outlined more than 20 plans that were part of the its efforts to accelerate the war on crime.

Among the plans were increased police saturation patrols in crime hot spots, promises to introduce legislation that will give career criminals stiffer penalties for gun crimes and consideration of legislation to restrict the granting of bail for those charged with violent crimes.