public safety

2008 crime rate conflicts with new security reforms

Despite changes, the country’s crime rate keeps rising.

la prensa

on guard: The hiring of more officers and changes to the country’s security agencies have done little to stem the rising rate of violent crimes. 1146138

Year-end crime reports for 2008 seemed to conclude that the beefed up public security reforms pushed through by the Torrijos administration has not yielded the expected results. Moreover, civic groups such as the Civic Alliance for Justice and the Panamanian Pro Life Foundation warned that the new policies, one of which included allowing a uniformed officer to head the police department, was outdated and “out of focus.”

Critics of the security program cited last year’s record number of homicides (593), the highest rate in the last 15 years, while firearms accounted for the country’s leading cause of “traumatic” deaths (42.5 percent), according to the Institute of Legal Medicine. Statistics from the Public Ministry revealed that youths between the ages of 15 and 24 made up the majority of homicide victims.

Those reports corresponded to hot spots of criminal activity on new maps that follow gangs operating in the capital (listed at 74) and novel trends in assaults and robberies within the country. Police highlighted the alleged gang-planned hijacking of an armored truck with AK-47 submachine guns on a road in broad daylight last month.

Faced with these facts, civil groups have proposed various plans for state security aimed at reducing crime to a more manageable rate by 2010. Panamanian Pro Life Foundation, for instance, suggested the creation of a National Narcotics Directorate, an anti-drug czar and an academy to train anti-narcotics agents to combat the increasing flow of drugs entering the country.

Joaquin Arias, president of that group, said that presidential candidates should also be obligated to address the drug issue in their campaign platforms, because, in his view, “drug trafficking is directly related to the domestic crime rate.”

Another group, Citizens Alliance for Justice, developed the idea of establishing a “violence observatory” where community members and civil organizations could meet to coordinate crime prevention activities as well as evaluate the effectiveness of the government’s security policies. These and other proposals were submitted to the Agenda 2009-2014 and delivered to the presidential candidates as suggestions for future reforms.

Magaly Castillo, executive director of the Civic Alliance, a coalition composed of 21 non-governmental organizations, said the government must retool its strategy in terms of crime fighting and claimed that its favored policy of lengthening prison sentences wasn’t cutting it.

“We’ve forgotten the policy of prevention,” he said, adding that there are more coordinated and effective methods for carrying out the new security plan. Castillo also recommended that the government needs to enhance its system of self-evaluation to determine whether or not it is moving in the right direction. Because there’s still have time to make the necessary corrections, he said.

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