Barbados’ main opposition Democratic Labour Party (DLP) is pushing for key revisions to the government’s tabled Criminal Gangs (Prevention and Control) Bill, urging lawmakers to strengthen provisions targeting transnational criminal networks, illicit gang financing and the widespread recruitment of vulnerable young people into organized crime.
While the legislation has not yet moved to a parliamentary debate, shadow attorney general and shadow criminal justice minister Corey Greenidge says the DLP broadly backs the government’s goal of curbing rising gang-related violence, and has already identified several notable strengths in the current draft that address longstanding gaps in the country’s criminal justice framework.
In a press briefing, Greenidge highlighted that one of the bill’s most significant improvements over previous legislation is its formal recognition of gangs as coordinated organized criminal enterprises, rather than framing criminal activity solely as the action of individual offenders. This structural framing allows prosecutors to target not just low-level street actors, but also the full ecosystem of gang participation: from senior leaders and recruiters to backroom financiers, safe house operators, facilitators that enable gang activity, and individuals who intentionally conceal gang operations.
Greenidge also praised the bill’s strict provisions aimed at blocking the recruitment of minors, a trend that has driven a sharp rise in youth-related crime across Barbados in recent years. “We are seeing more and more perpetrators of violent crime between the ages of 14 and 16 now,” he noted. “The bill takes a firm, targeted stand against drawing children, adolescents and young men into gang activity, and that is an initiative we fully support.”
Additional strengths the DLP highlighted include robust witness anonymity and protection frameworks, which complement existing criminal procedure laws to address a major barrier to successful gang prosecutions: community fear of retaliation. “In neighborhood after neighborhood, people hold back information from police because they are scared of violence against themselves or their families,” Greenidge explained. “This bill directly confrontes that fear with strong protections for witnesses.”
The bill’s modernized approach to evidence was another point of praise. Unlike older laws that require proof of formal gang identifiers such as official names, specific colors or insignia to secure a conviction, the current draft defines a gang by the coordinated nature of criminal activity, rather than formal structure. “Prosecutors don’t need to prove affiliation through signs or hierarchies anymore,” Greenidge said. “If a group of people collaborates to carry out criminal activity, that is enough to classify it as a gang for prosecution. That is a very welcome update for modern law enforcement.”
Despite these wins, Greenidge argued that the draft legislation is unbalanced, placing too much focus on enforcement and punishment while neglecting the prevention, rehabilitation and systemic changes needed to dismantle gang networks long-term. While the bill includes strong provisions for arrest, detention and lengthy prison sentences, it lacks meaningful focus on proactive prevention, offender rehabilitation, cross-agency intelligence coordination, targeted youth intervention and end-to-end network dismantling. To truly break gang power in Barbados, Greenidge said, the legislation needs to expand into a broader strategic framework that dismantles organizations from top leadership all the way down to local street cells.
The DLP has outlined three core amendments to address these gaps. First, the party is calling for a reduction in the threshold required to classify a group as a criminal gang. Current draft language requires a minimum of five people to meet the legal definition of a gang, but Greenidge noted that comparable legislation across the Caribbean uses far lower thresholds: Jamaica sets the bar at two people, while Trinidad and Tobago uses three. The DLP is urging the government to lower Barbados’ threshold to three people, to account for the small, tightly coordinated criminal cells that operate widely across the country.
Second, the DLP is demanding far stronger provisions to target the financial foundations of gang activity. Greenidge pointed out that most young street offenders lack the capital to purchase illegal weapons or bulk drug supplies independently, meaning unseen financiers and organizers pull the strings behind most gang crime. The current bill does not integrate enforcement action with financial disruption in a direct, operational way, he argued, noting that modern organized crime is fundamentally driven by profit. Leading international anti-gang frameworks prioritize economic dismantling as much as imprisonment, and Barbados’ legislation should follow that model.
Greenidge called for explicit provisions allowing authorities to freeze suspicious bank accounts, trace and confiscate gang assets including vehicles and property, disrupt illicit financial flows, shut down criminal front businesses, and collapse the economic infrastructure that allows gangs to operate. He also proposed mandatory financial investigations for all gang probes, stronger provisions targeting unexplained wealth linked to gang activity, a dedicated national system for tracing gang assets, and mandatory formal coordination between local law enforcement and the national Financial Intelligence Unit to target illicit financial activity.
Third, the DLP is pushing to require that prevention and rehabilitation programs are formally embedded into the legislation, including structured gang exit programs, youth diversion initiatives and expanded community support systems for at-risk young people. “If a young person ends up recruited into gang violence, that means the state has already failed somewhere upstream – whether in our education system, our social interventions, our community and faith groups, or in creating accessible opportunities for young people to engage positively,” Greenidge said. “A sustainable anti-gang strategy can’t just rely on punishment. It has to include prevention and support to reintegrate young people back into society when they want to leave gang life.”
Greenidge also added a fourth proposal: a mandatory statutory review mechanism that requires the government to release a public report on the legislation’s impact after three years, including measurable data on conviction rates, acquittal rates, asset seizure totals and overall changes in gang-related crime rates. He noted that many previous crime reduction programs and pieces of legislation have been implemented in recent years without formal public reporting on their effectiveness, and this review mechanism would help address that lack of accountability.
The push for amendments comes as the bill awaits its first parliamentary debate, with the government yet to announce a timeline for moving the legislation to a vote.