When I walk through Roseau these days the mood is different. People used to say crime in Dominica was a “big island problem,” not ours. But one only needs to listen to conversations at a rum shop, between staff at work or on a bus ride, and you hear the change in tone. Dominicans are uneasy. The fights are no longer just over a woman, a stolen item or a drunken insult. There’s talk about drugs, about young men carving out corners as if they own them, about guns showing up in hands too eager.
When I was younger, police carried a weight. Six of them in one van were enough to cool down a whole community, they pased through Tarish Pit, Silver Lake or Goodwill, people behaved themselves. Today, people laugh when they hear about an arrest one week and a release the next. Trust in the system is thin. And the worst part? Many believe politics has dirtied the service. If officers answer more to party than to law, how can the rest of us believe in fairness?
What hurts is knowing how our leaders live so differently from the rest of us. While most families are hustling to pay for current or stretch a paycheck for groceries, those at the top are buffered from these daily humiliations. You can’t govern a country you don’t touch. You can’t talk about national development if you’ve stopped sitting at domino tables, if you never walk the villages after dark, if you only hear from people through reports.
Yet I don’t think Dominica is lost. Not yet. Violence hasn’t reached the level of islands around us. It’s a shadow that could still be pushed back if we give young people something real: work they can be proud of, training that leads to jobs, and a system of justice that doesn’t bend with politics. Communities have to be partners in this, too. When riverbanks are cleaned, when farmers are supported, when youth clubs are active, you cut down the reasons to drift into crime.
The danger is pretending. Pretending that nothing is wrong. Pretending that crime is just gossip. Pretending that the economy is fine because projects are announced on DBS Radio. Geothermal Energy and that international Airport Project will not save our citizens. But we keep pretending, so we will be planning funerals instead of futures.
Please, no more glossy speeches. We need truth, presence, and action. Dominica is still a small enough place to turn things around, but only if those with power admit that the shadows are real. Otherwise, the island we call the Nature Isle of the Caribbean will be remembered for problems we could have fixed but chose to ignore.
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