By David Kujabi
In June alone, Gambians woke repeatedly to police updates announcing another violent death. A stabbing in Latrikunda German. Another in Piccadilly. Another in Mandinaba. A fatal altercation in Fajara. A young man killed in Brikama. Each notification deepened the same unsettling feeling: something is changing in our communities, and many people no longer feel safe.
The police insist that crime is on the decrease. The public insists that it is not. Both may be telling a version of the truth. Official figures capture only what is reported, and many crimes never reach a police station. Meanwhile, social media now delivers every stabbing to the entire nation in real time, so insecurity is felt more widely even where incidents are local. But this argument over statistics misses the point. When a government has to reassure its citizens that they are safer than they feel, it has already lost something more important than the argument. It has lost trust.
I served in the Gambia Police Force. I have sat on both sides of this debate, and I want to offer a harder diagnosis than the one currently on offer from either the state or the street.
Crime is the symptom, not the disease
The young men committing these crimes were not born violent. They are the products of conditions we have allowed to fester.
Consider what the data tells us. The Gambia Labour Force Survey 2025 found that 41.3 percent of young Gambians aged 15 to 35 are not in employment, education or training. The figure that should alarm us more sits inside that number: of these young people, only about one in ten is looking for work. More than six in ten have stopped looking altogether. That is not unemployment statistic. It is a depressing statistic. It describes a generation that no longer believes effort will be rewarded.
Layer onto this the drugs now circulating in our communities, the cost of living, and the daily spectacle of comfortable impunity for those who misuse public resources. A young man in Tallinding watches officials implicated in corruption face no consequence, and then he is told to respect the law. The law he sees applies downward but never upward. We should not be surprised when he concludes that the rules are for the powerless.
So yes, the robberies, the stabbings and the violence in our homes are outcomes. They are the visible fever of an untreated illness: blocked opportunity, eroded faith in the system, and the normalisation of getting away with it.
But the symptom is now a disease of its own
Here is where I must complicate my own argument, because the structural explanation, left on its own, becomes an excuse.
Most poor, jobless, frustrated young Gambians harm no one. Poverty does not hold a knife. If deprivation alone caused violence, our crime rate would have exploded decades ago. Something else has changed, and we need to be honest about what.
First, violence feeds itself. One stabbing convinces ten boys to carry knives for protection. Once knives are common, ordinary quarrels that once ended in bruises now end in funerals. The violence has begun to detach from its original causes and reproduce itself through fear, retaliation and status.
Second, the drug economy generates its own violence. This is not only about intoxication. Illegal markets cannot settle disputes in court, so they settle them in the street. Where drug distribution takes root, violence follows as a business practice, not an emotional outburst.
Third, our informal defences have weakened. The compound, the elders, the neighbour who knew whose son you were: these once did more policing than the police. Rapid urbanisation along the Kombo corridor has produced dense, anonymous communities where that quiet guardianship no longer operates, and nothing has replaced it.
Fourth, failed migration compounds the strain. Immigration records show thousands of young Gambians, overwhelmingly men, returned from transit countries in recent years, many carrying debt, shame and trauma back into the very conditions they fled. The backway does not relieve pressure on our society. It recycles it.
And a caution: the violence in our homes follows its own logic.
Domestic violence is not robbery by another name. Economic stress aggravates it, but it is rooted in how we raise men, how we treat women, and what happens when humiliation absorbed outside the home is discharged inside it. Jobs alone will not fix it, and we should stop pretending otherwise.
The two impunities
Pull these threads together, and a pattern emerges. The Gambia does not have a crime problem. It has a consequences problem, and it runs in both directions.
At the top, there are no reliable consequences for corruption and abuse of office. At the bottom, there are no reliable consequences for street violence, because our criminal justice chain is slow, under-resourced and inconsistent. Cases drag for years. Investigations stall for want of forensic capacity. Suspects cycle through remand and back to the street.
These two impunities feed each other. Elite impunity destroys the moral authority of the law. Street impunity destroys its practical authority. A state that punishes neither the minister nor the mugger reliably should not wonder why both multiply.
This is also why the growing calls to bring back the death penalty, however understandable the grief behind them, aim at the wrong target. Criminologists have known for decades that the certainty of punishment deters crime far more than its severity. A young man does not calculate the difference between twenty years and the gallows. He calculates whether he will be caught at all, and today the honest answer is: probably not, and if caught, not soon, and if tried, not swiftly. Hanging a handful of convicts while the system that lets most offenders walk stays broken would be theatre, not policy.
What would seriousness look like?
If the state wishes to be taken seriously on crime, four things would show it.
Publish the data. The police release case updates but not systematic, disaggregated crime statistics. We cannot debate whether crime is rising or falling because the state controls the evidence. A government confident in its record publishes it. One that does not, manages perceptions instead. This is the same accountability gap we see elsewhere: the state releases what flatters and withholds what would allow scrutiny.
Fix the certainty of consequence. Invest in investigation, forensics, and case management so that an arrest leads to trial, and a trial leads to judgment within months, not years. This is less dramatic and far more effective than all these patrols.
Prosecute upward. Nothing would restore the moral authority of the law faster than visible, fair consequences for corruption in high places. Every anti-crime speech delivered while audit findings gather dust teaches young people exactly what the state values.
Rebuild community policing, not as public relations, but as neighbourhood partnerships where citizens know their officers, share information, and intervene before disputes become crimes.
Treat the causes as a security policy. The 41.3 percent NEET (Not in Employment, Education or Training) figure is a national security indicator. So is the drug supply chain. So are the returnees arriving home with nothing. A serious crime strategy would bring the Ministry of Interior together with the ministries responsible for youth, trade and education, because no number of arrests can fix a problem whose roots are joblessness, hopelessness and lost trust in the system.
Under the former regime, order rested on fear. We dismantled that, and rightly so. But fear was never replaced with the thing that keeps free societies safe: institutions that people trust and consequences that people believe in. That is the unfinished business of our transition, and the young men bleeding in our streets are its cost.
The crime wave is not an interruption of our national story. It is a chapter of it. And it will not end until the law in The Gambia means the same thing on Bijilo and Brufut heights as it does in Latrikunda German or Brikama Duruma Kolong.
