When United States Virgin Islander Roberto “Robbie” Smalls was drafted by the Chicago Cubs in 1988, he thought he had a promising future.
“No. Wrong,” he told hundreds of high school students on Friday during the final day of the government’s Anti-crime Summit at the Multi-purpose Sports Complex in Road Town.
His life, he said, was divided between baseball and the streets.
“I was introduced to the worst thing known to society — the streets and all the elements that lies within, meaning the drugs, the hustling, the violence, the fast money, the cars — at a tender age of 16, 17,” he said.
That excitement, he added, proved too great. After adopting a life of crime, he was eventually convicted of first-degree murder in St. Thomas in 1994 when he was 23 years old.
“Everything that I went through — all these gunshot and stab wounds — I can now turn around and tell you kids,” he said. “I know you all may or may not be at the crossroad right now, but I’m the poster child of who not to be when you find yourself at that crossroad.”
Mr. Smalls — who now spends his time mentoring youths — was a keynote speaker at the three-day summit, sharing his story with primary school students last Thursday and secondary school students on Friday.
The summit also included more student sessions, wide-ranging panel discussions, and remarks from politicians, police, students and others.
Taken together, the activities were designed to start a conversation about crime and ultimately inform a planned National Crime Reduction Strategy, organisers said.
Multi-purpose Sports Complex in Road Town. (Photo: ALLISON VAUGHN)
Opening ceremony
The summit opened on the evening of Sept. 24, when panellists and other speakers called for a comprehensive approach to addressing crime in the VI.
“This crime summit is about everyone in this society who recognises that crime is a problem that we have to solve coming together to discuss, [to have a] dialogue, to strategise, to come up with ideas, so that we can collectively decide that we will go out into the community empowered, energised, equipped to be able to go into our communities and to make a difference and to make a change,” Premier Natalio “Sowande” Wheatley said during the opening ceremony.
Governor Daniel Pruce, Opposition Leader Myron Walwyn and acting Police Commissioner Jaqueline Vanterpool spoke as well.
First panel
The opening evening also included a panel discussion with Prison Officer Walter Barrett, acting Deputy Police Commissioner Kenrick Davis, Pastor Gregory George, clinical psychologist Dr. Michael Turnbull and others.
“There’s this equation, and every time I speak about crime, I always talk about this simple equation,” Mr. Barrett said. “It says that opportunity plus threat equals crime. … The fact is that once there is a threat, the opportunity arises for you to take care of that threat. Then the possibility exists for a crime to take place.”
The panel’s moderator, Attorney General Dawn Smith, asked Mr. Barrett to speak about successful crime-prevention initiatives.
Mr. Barrett, the restorative justice officer at His Majesty’s Prison, described “victim-offender remediation practices” that he said are “very effective.”
“You’re putting a victim and an offender together in the same space, and you’re facilitating a conversation,” he said, adding, “Instead of just perhaps penalising somebody who has committed a crime, you’re actually getting them to understand how what they did has affected other persons.”
Mr. Barrett also emphasised the need for a juvenile detention facility in the territory.
At the end of the session, Ms. Smith asked panellists a final question: “What gives you hope?”
Mr. Davis had an answer.
“What gives me hope is this very conversation — the fact that we’re having this summit,” he said, adding, “For too long, I think we’ve been treating crime, particularly youth crime, as a law-enforcement problem only. In other words, we’re trying to arrest and charge our way out of it. And that clearly is not working.”
Second and third day
The conversation continued last Thursday and Friday under the themes “Pillars of the Village” and “Saving the Village,” respectively.
On the second day, panellists including prison counsellor Paul Ricketts and Director of Public Prosecutions Tiffany Scatliffe echoed Mr. Barrett’s call for a juvenile detention facility and added a call for better inpatient mental health facilities.
Mr. Ricketts said the prison is understaffed and overcapacity and lacks the resources to adequately handle prisoners with mental health challenges.
“We train our officers to deal with criminals, not to deal with mentally challenged persons,” he said. “We can lose almost 10 percent of the prison population today if we find a place to put the mentally challenged. We do not know how to deal with them. We are not equipped.”
The second day of the summit also featured “working sessions,” where members from Officium Training Limited — a Trinidad-based company that recently trained VI police officers in community policing — facilitated conversations on specific topics including “NGO strategy to save the community from crime” and “Impact of crime on businesses and the community.”
