THE POWER of the mobile phone and Internet media like Facebook was demonstrated recently when text messages, emails, wall postings, MSN and BB Messenger alerts flooded the cyberspace across Barbados warning about men driving about in a certain brand white car.
Maybe I am wrong, but to my knowledge the news was never broadcast on CBC-TV or any of our radio stations, printed in either of the two daily newspapers or published online. Yet, in less time than it takes to say “men driving ’bout”, the word was all over Barbados.
The reason why this alert attracted so much immediate nationwide attention was because of the serious activity in which the men in the white car were said to be engaged. They were not on a motoring safari around the island nor were they practising for any of the motor rallies that were just around the corner.
These men, according to alerts flashed from St Lucy in the north to Christ Church in the south, from St Philip in the east to St James in the west, were reportedly driving around committing criminal acts again unsuspecting victims, including armed robbery.
Well you know us Bajans. You only have to say “gun” and everyone looking for cover. We are not like some Jamaicans I saw in BBC news reports from Tivoli Gardens who, in the midst of gunfire exchanges between soldiers and police and Coke’s own “soldiers”, were walking about easy like Sunday morning or standing around chatting like it was just another day in paradise.
Bajans reacted to the alerts about the men driving around in the white car faster that many of them would had the Met Office announced that a category five hurricane was on our doorstep.
Windows and doors were bolted tight, tight, tight at night, driving alone after a certain hour became a no-no especially for women and for many people, once they reached home after work only an emergency could get them to leave again before the next morning.
That state of high alert continued for a few weeks then ended as suddenly as it had begun. Life on the rock returned to normal. I am not sure what happened but reports about the criminal activity by the men in the white car disappeared from the mobile and Internet sources and people went back about their business as normal and stopped losing sleep over the possibility of what could happen if they dozed off.
By the way, did you read the report from the courts in the newspaper last week about four men, including three illegal Jamaicans, who complained to a magistrate that the police had brutalised them after arresting them? They claimed they got so many licks while being questioned that they could finish it after defecating on themselves.
By coincidence or otherwise, they were arrested and charged in connection with committing a number of crimes, including robberies and possession of a firearm. Also by coincidence, they allegedly committed these crimes while driving about in a white car too.
l Al Gilkes heads a public relations firm.
