Since the early 1990s, with apparently every resident of Liberia considering the massive looting carried out on homes, institutions and personal property as benefit from the war, continuing attacks on specific homes by disgruntled elements as targets remain unending, as though seeking a treasure island that cannot be found in the country.
Extremely difficult as life has proven all over the years, with occupants of Unit T-28 of the Barnersville Housing Estate endlessly striving to cope in various painful ways to rebuild their shattered lives, seeming-thugs and nonentities have come to be employed by invincible hands in continuously frustrating them by waging attacks on the unit and making away with valuable items, including cash, countless number of cell phones, jewelries, computers and important documents.
Begun with the constant and clandestine tearing down of windows to the Unit, with residents constantly incurring huge costs for repairs out of meager salaries earned, the robbers have not had the least remorse of abandoning their attacks, even with the presence of a Police depot in the estate which personnel appear inadequate to rigidly cope with crimes in the community by regularly conducting night and morning patrols.
Indeed posing grave and continuing insecurity to many residents of the Estate, though having reported in the media every attack carried out especially on T-28 over the many years, a home that is not an armory but simply a housing unit occupied by low-income earners who remain law-abiding, hardworking and decent, the Christmas season saw another attack again on the Unit, with personnel at the Police Depot not only informed but visiting the scene of the house-break through the kitchen which window bars along with blocks were uprooted.
Succeeding during the early morning hours of December 28, 2012 to have entered the living room, the criminals made away with a medium-size flash screen that had just been purchased some three weeks ago, fearing to take along other available items such as the stabilizer, generator, refrigerator, etc., since they could not easily pass through the uprooted-window bars.
Making its residents to have felt quite miserable during the season, justice demands that attention of Police Director Chris Massaquoi be drawn to the very unhealthy event at the Barnersville Estate since, in the reports of personnel assigned at the Depot, several criminals had descended upon the community during that very morning but with the Police been quite impotent to handle the situation out of thelack of deterrence mechanisms.
Whilst commendable of strides by the Liberia National Police (LNP) to have seriously clamped downon hardened criminalsin many communities over the months, residents of Barnersville Estate, many years known for been law-abiding, cannot however continue to be rendered vulnerable, particularly with Unit T-28 continuously coming under attack, unarmed as they remainwith total reliance upon the local security sector and the United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL)to provide full protection.
Should this continuously fall on deaf ears again in 2013, especially with Liberiansgradually trying to cope with existing conditions that are improving, residents are likely to be left with no option but to resort to jungle justice against criminals caught red-handed, without reference to the pronounced due but often delayed process, since there are thousands of hectares in and around Monrovia where the thieves could cultivate, earn living and gradually be transformedinto productive citizens.
Appreciative of initial efforts by the President of Liberia, Madam Ellen Johnson Sirleaf to have partially fulfilled her promise to the people of Barnersville Township during the last campaign period, by instructing the Liberia Electricity Corporation (LEC) to install street lights that are yet to be completed in and around the Estate, perhaps such completion would help in securing more lives and property of residents as preventive rather than curing measure.
For now, it is totally inconceivable why T-28 that is situated just 10 meters from the King’s Drive should continuously come under attack by death-driven misfits whose livelihoods depend on the suffering of other citizens.
To this end, Colonel Massaquoi, your continuing call for increase in manpower becomes justifiable as a result of the new criminal pockets now being created by criminals perhaps not only in Barnersville but all housing estates and if not immediately nipped in the bud could one day become explosive with bodies of criminals littering everywhere, and those will be the little things to matter in the justice system when residents are unnecessarily questioned.
