Paramaribo, 9 November — Suriname’s top state advisor Ramon Abrahams has issued an urgent formal recommendation to President Jennifer Simons, calling for immediate, top-tier administrative intervention to curb a rapidly deteriorating public safety landscape marked by escalating violent criminal activity, which he warns is now far beyond the scope of routine, passive policy responses. The official appeal, delivered via an official letter to the head of state, comes on the heels of a fatal armed robbery that unfolded on the morning of 6 November, where an ordinary civilian lost their life amid a wave of increasingly brazen, brutal heists plaguing both urban neighborhoods and remote inland regions of the country. Abrahams emphasizes that lawlessness in the country’s hinterlands has grown so severe that it is beginning to take on traits of unregulated anarchy, eroding public confidence in the state’s fundamental mandate to protect citizens and their property. He outlines six targeted, actionable, immediately implementable measures designed to reverse the dangerous trend, all structured to operate strictly within the bounds of existing national law and constitutional protections for civil rights. First, he calls for an immediate, dramatic scaling-up of the Suriname Police Corps’ targeted patrol and surveillance operations, with concentrated focus on high-risk neighborhoods and locations that have seen repeated violent robberies, to boost visible police presence and reduce opportunities for criminal actors to strike. Second, he demands a prioritized, rigorous crackdown on armed robbery suspects and organized criminal gangs, with fast-tracked investigations, arrests, and prosecutions that fully uphold legal procedures and fundamental human rights. Third, he advises significant investment to upgrade the operational capacity of national security services, ensuring law enforcement has sufficient personnel, vehicles, communications equipment, and other critical resources to carry out their duties effectively, rather than issuing mandates without providing the tools required to execute them. Fourth, he pushes for streamlined, mandatory cross-agency collaboration between the national police, public prosecution office, National Security Directorate, and national army, to eliminate gaps in coordination that have allowed some suspects to evade prosecution due to incomplete case files or inter-departmental misalignment. Fifth, he urges the government to deliver a clear, unambiguous public statement that frames citizen safety as the administration’s non-negotiable top priority, making it explicitly clear that all legal state powers will be deployed to roll back rising criminality and reassure a frightened public that authorities recognize the severity of the crisis. Sixth, he mandates the establishment of a formal crisis-focused public safety framework, with regular, public progress reports that track completed operations, arrest figures, prosecution outcomes, and trending crime statistics, to ensure the announced measures deliver tangible, measurable results rather than remaining unfulfilled policy announcements. Beyond the six formal recommendations, Abrahams explicitly requests President Simons to convene an urgent emergency summit in the coming days, bringing together all relevant cabinet ministers and the leadership of every national security agency to finalize and sign off on the immediate rollout of these interventions. He stresses that such high-level executive action is fully justified by the unprecedented gravity of the current security crisis, noting that it is unacceptable for ordinary citizens to feel unsafe in their own homes, on public streets, or at their workplaces, or to be forced to adjust their daily lives to accommodate rising criminal brutality. Abrahams closes the letter by noting he will be out of the country on official leave from 12 to 15 November 2026.
Abrahams wil gezamenlijke veiligheidsoperatie van politie en leger tegen criminaliteit
