Be your neighbour’s keeper

WHEN IT COMES to crime, it is hard to glean any kind of positive development. Amid the wave of home invasions – newly resurgent at a moment when more of us are at home than ever before – there is little to inspire hope.

But that is precisely what the residents of one neighbourhood in Aranguez have this week supplied.

They maintained a WhatsApp group chat that played a role on Sunday when their neighbours, the Ghany family of Ramlal Street, came under attack by bandits.

“I just sent a voice note in the group calling for help,” said a shaken Fazeela Ghany on Tuesday. “About six minutes after I sent that out, a police inspector who is in the same group told me he was on the way.”

It was a modern reinterpretation of the age-old adage, “Be your neighbour’s keeper.”

Police are now commending the work of the neighbourhood watch and describing such groups as a step in the right direction. We concur and support such calls to action because in a way these efforts take us back to the core of deterrence: community values.

The absence of such values, including from the side of the police who have been criticised for jettisoning “community policing” for far too long, undoubtedly plays a deleterious role in crime fighting. Information flows have dried up. Witnesses are unwilling to come forward. Sometimes, neighbours no longer speak even among themselves.

Information communications technology (ICT) tools are a simple way to overcome some of the walls that have gone up over the last few months, years and decades since we have been dealing with the trauma of crime.

At the same time, it is all too easy for authorities simply to tell people to use WhatsApp groups more without attending to the complexities of such tools.

Misinformation, disinformation and “fake news” have frequently been circulated on these platforms to do precisely the opposite of what occurred here: to tear apart communities and seed chaos. On the one hand, police are happy to encourage such tools, on the other hand, the same officers have warned members of the public to be vigilant against their abuse.

Home invasions are also throwing up unique challenges that require more than just watch groups.

They pose a unique challenge in terms of how they are defined under the law. The phrases “robbery,” “burglary” and “assault” do not seem to capture the true nature of this profoundly traumatic offence which upends the notion of the home as a sanctuary.

We must all be our neighbour’s keeper, yes, but not everyone will be lucky enough to have an inspector in their neighbourhood chat. Our legislators need to rise to the occasion, too, and address this increasingly disturbing challenge.