By KHRISNA VIRGIL

Tribune Staff Reporter

kvirgil@tribunemedia.net

NATIONAL Security Minister Dr Bernard Nottage yesterday skirted around questions regarding the government’s failure to control the scourge of crime in the country as it had heavily campaigned to do during the 2012 general election.

More than two years since taking office, Dr Nottage told Parliamentarians – moments before they adjourned until the New Year – that the crime situation was the result of a flawed judicial system.

He said the government would direct its focus on tackling those challenges with the system in order to bring crime to a reasonable level.

Later, during an interview with reporters when the House session ended, Dr Nottage insisted that he would never be satisfied until the government successfully obliterated the scourge of criminal activity.

He said: “Governments don’t fail on promises to control crime. Crime is ever with us, but you know various strategies, sometimes they produce the results that you anticipate (and) sometimes they don’t.

“The nature of crime changes. I don’t know any country where there is no crime or any country where everything goes perfectly.

“For all of the crime that is going on in the Bahamas there are men and women who know who are doing it and men and women who are providing protection for people who are doing it and hiding those who are in fact the culprits. 

“We have problems with the justice system that we will have to work through to bring crime to a reasonable level. What I am saying is we can stop it tomorrow if all of us in our respective places co-operate with law intelligence,” Dr Nottage said during the House session.

He urged people who know of criminal activity and where criminals might be hiding to assist police.

This comes following the murder of two brothers and the attempted murder of their teenage brother, which is the result of an ongoing feud stemming from their father’s murder in 2010, revealed Chief Superintendent Paul Rolle on Tuesday.

Chief Supt Rolle said the murders of Jaquan Anthony Rolle, 18, Jermaine Rolle Jr, 31, and the attempted murder of Anthon Rolle, 14, were not random shootings, but “targeted hits” as a result of an “ongoing feud” from Jermaine Rolle Sr’s death in 2010.

The country’s murder count for the year is 116, according to The Tribune’s records, three short of 2013’s total.