Day 235 - Crime in Barbados

Image of Barbados policeman
by garda, via Flickr.com

Most of us had at least one experience with crime on Barbados. The most extreme case was the political officer's family's encounter with the escaped murderer. In fact most of our experiences didn't rise to the level of contacting the police. In our case, for example, we heard the squeak of the gate leading up to the second floor of our house while we were watching TV. Alex walked to the short set of stairs leading up to the landing where the stairs leading upstairs were right near the entrance from the carport. We had left the door to the carport open for the breeze. Alex arrived at the landing just in time to see an intruder run out. The next morning we discovered he had grabbed the book bag of one of our son's friends which had been on the kitchen counter. We found it outside the next morning, tossed into the plants that lined the wall of our house. Cash was missing, but everything else was there.

We also think we may have encountered one of the escaped murderers, though briefly and without any way to confirm it. We were driving downtown Bridgetown with the windows open. We saw police on horseback, a useful way for them to get around in the maze of one-way streets downtown, so we didn't think much about it until a man grabbed the post between the windows on the passenger side of our car and hung on after shouting that we should keep driving, fast. He put down his feet to slide as we drove. Once we got around the corner, he dropped off and ran between buildings where the gap was too narrow for the horses to follow.

Our son and his friend Jonathan had a closer encounter. They were at Jonathan's house when they heard something outside near a storage building in the corner of the property. They saw that the door had been opened and one of the family's bikes was on the ground outside the building. And they saw someone making his way over the hedge at the edge of the property. Jonathan's parents were away, so the boys called the police, and then they called us.

Image of bicycle by Hello, I Am Bruce, via Flickr.com

When the police arrived, they had lots of questions, but they were much more focused than I had expected. Instead of asking the boys for a description, they asked for confirmation of details, such as did the guy they saw hopping over the hedge have dreadlocks or short hair? Was he short and stocky or tall and thin? It was like they had a short list of suspects they were filtering to identify the likely suspect.

Headlines announcing a death by suspicious circumstances, while it may have been shocking, rarely developed into a mystery. The police almost always had a very good idea who had been involved. That was one of the reasons the series of strangulations of taxi drivers and their passengers, including the choreographer for the Miss Barbados pageant, in the late evening hours was so mysterious. There seemed to be a strangulation under similar circumstances every weekend for a few months. And then there were none. Neither was there an announcement of an arrest or trial.

We heard about thefts from tourists from their hotel rooms on the beach. And we heard about praedial larceny, the theft of crops from the fields.  Both types seemed to target groups of people - tourists and plantation owners - who were believed to be much better off financially than the majority of Bajans. But in a small country like Barbados, the pool of those likely to fall into the pattern of theft, or as the Bajans called it, tiefing, was small, giving the police an advantage when investigating the crimes.