PSV culture ‘damaging’ children, warns acting DPP  

Acting Director of Public Prosecutions Alliston Seale has warned that the prevailing culture in the public service vehicle (PSV) industry is eroding values and harming schoolchildren, as he urged decisive action to curb violence, vulgarity and poor conduct on minibuses and ZRs.  

He said: “I constantly stand here on my soapbox begging for the souls of Barbados because when you look around at the end of the day, you cannot have a good week before you have some violent incident.” 

“They get on the public service vehicle, and people flood their heads with violence and wuflessness. We all know that when you get up in the morning, the first song you hear reverberates throughout the day, and you cannot get it out of your head, and we are putting our children on these things all the time, and nobody seems to want to do anything about it. When they skin over, and they are injured, we talk about it, but that is nine days talk and then it done.”

He argued that the values in the PSV industry were absent, insisting that the negative examples set in dress, speech, and the music played on these vehicles, were having a detrimental effect on the minds of children who encounter them every day.  

He continued: “We cannot trust our children to the PSV sector. The values are none. You can’t get them to wear no uniform, so how are the children to dress properly and come to school properly? Their pants are down by their knees. How are the children to keep the pants by their waists? There is nobody to emulate in that sphere. So when children come to school, they are already stressed out with all the ignorance that they hear.” 

“They cannot listen to maths; they cannot understand Pythagoras’ theorem. They cannot listen to know examples of good speech because all they have heard is abusive, insulting, vulgar language both from the driver and conductor and the music they are playing, and then we ask how we get so?”

He pointed out that the situation was worrying, noting many children who behaved badly and were uncontrollable at school often ended up in crime later in life.  

“Teachers can’t tell them nothing and nobody cannot control them, and in this era of a frown on corporal punishment, where they tell me about black people being beaten during slavery and that we have gone past that. Call me old-fashioned or silly, but I haven’t seen the solution for this new era that we are supposed to live in, where we have copied all of the North American style and still they are coming into class and shooting down everybody.”  

“I am not talking about the class clown. I am talking about those bullies, those violent children, who the teachers couldn’t tell anything to. I would hope that we could get into some of these schools and let them understand that there is no future for this type of behaviour.”

At the time, he was delivering sentencing submissions in the trial of convicted murderer Shakira Blackman in the No. 4 Supreme Court, and suggested a 40-year starting sentence.  

Last August, an 11-member jury unanimously found Blackman, of Park Road, Bush Hall, St Michael, guilty of murdering 27-year-old Shanice Miller, formerly of Kensington New Road, on November 28, 2021.  

Reiterating that in the absence of sentencing guidelines for murder, a serious message must be sent that persons cannot commit such offences, plead guilty and receive a one-third discount and be back out in society relatively quickly, he insisted that hefty penalties must be meted out.  

The prosecutor said: “[Blackman] jumped out of the vehicle, knife in hand – the video showed it – and went straight to the lady and stabbed her til she fell to the ground. Even when she suggested that the lady was fighting with her, the lady was fighting for her life, and although the lady managed to regain her foothold and ran away, she pursued the woman until she couldn’t catch her, and the woman ran to the Central [Police] Station and collapsed at the main gate.”

Seale suggested that these aggravating circumstances and the premeditation of the offence should lead to an upward adjustment of the starting point by two years.

Citing the pre-sentence report, which, he said, outlined that Blackman accepted responsibility, explaining that her actions were driven by a desire to defend a friend, Seale said, “Even now you are trying to flip it on somebody else. Who was she defending, and when and where? There was nobody else.”  

“We have to take responsibility for our actions.”  

Blackman is represented by King’s Counsel Andrew Pilgrim.  

Justice Laurie-Ann Smith-Bovell set sentencing for March 20.