Crime Stoppers Dominica holds workshop to improve community safety in Dominica

Crime Stoppers Dominica (CSD), in furtherance of its crime reporting and prevention role, has hosted a workshop aimed at developing a culturally-appropriatecommunity safety strategy in Dominica that requires crime to be addressed as a fundamental development issue.

The training, under the theme, “Improved Citizen Security project in the Eastern Caribbean”, was held as part of the Caribbean, Bermuda and Latin America Crime Stoppers Inc.(CBLACS) project to address crime and violence. Participants included community leaders and other key stakeholders working with vulnerable groups such as children, as well as gender based violence advocacy agencies.

The session focused on the community’s role in crime reduction measures and explored avenues for reporting crime, to include anonymous information sharing through the Crime Stoppers medium.

The objectives of the training were:

1. To utilize Knowledge Management techniques to enhance community activities aimed at achieving a Community Safety Strategy to assist in building trust to enable community interventions in incidents of intimate partner violence as well as community crime and violence. 

2. To improve the skills of community representatives in capturing and synthesizing knowledge as it relates to their communities.   

3. To share examples of successful evidence-based interventions being applied by communities and Crime Stoppers in achieving a community safety strategy and contributing to its measurement, evaluation and sustainability.    

4. To foster exchange of experiences, collaboration and learning by strengthening relationships between community, police, government and NGOs and how these interventions can be more widely used across communities

The training was facilitated by a team of consultants with expertise in relevant areas and included Mr. David Cording of Crime Stoppers International who dealt with community safety, Dr. Allyson Leacock whose area of expertise was gender equality and child abuse and               Dr. Lennise Baptiste who shared her knowledge on monitoring and evaluation.

The Caribbean Development Bank funded workshop was implemented following the findings from consultations held in the selected communities of Sineku, Tarrish Pit/Yampiece and Silver Lake in April 2016. Throughout the workshop, these communities demonstrated a commitment and creativity in the design of their own Community Safety Strategy which shows promise for sustainability with regard to implementation of the strategy in the future.