AG: Too many gangs

UPDATED:

Members of the Organised Crime Intelligence Unit are keeping close tabs on approximately 2,459 suspected gang members nationwide whose names, whereabouts and alleged activities are known to authorities.

This, according to Attorney General Faris Al-Rawi addressing concerns of intelligence-gathering from the Opposition during a press conference yesterday.

Al-Rawi said members of the OCIU have been hard at work gathering intelligence across the nine police divisions. He said the information would be used to root out criminal elements if Government’s amended anti-gang legislation was passed. He said the original legislation, which expired August last year, had been updated in some areas to treat with increasing gang activity. He said the presentation of such statistics on gang activity should be enough to gain Opposition’s support of the new law saying that enough consultation on the reintroduction of legislation had been held.

Al-Rawi said, “What we added to the expired anti-gang law was a provision which allowed for the following of money or property where we suggested that gang members be subjected to the court and if they could not explain their wealth, let the court decide whether they should keep it or not.”

He said the two bills that had been proposed by Government included the special zones law which allowed for limited states of emergency in specific areas, where police and other emergency authorities would be allowed to enter certain areas to carry out anti-crime exercises. He said the amended legislation was currently in circulation and had not received any feedback from the Law Association.

Citing the recent trend of gang members taking to social media and brandishing weapons and issuing threats in videos, Al-Rawi said the State could no longer allow such acts to go unsupervised and the reintroduction of laws to specifically treat with gangs was needed to quell rising violence.

“We cannot allow our country to be held hostage by criminals who routinely take to social media and advertise their gangs. What is Rasta City? What is Unruly ISIS? Each time they take to social media to express their gang affiliation is a confession of gang activity.”

Al-Rawi said he would lay the bill before Parliament tomorrow and continue discussions next week.