Premier Alex Scott?s televised speech last week ended up being more about crime than the ?state of the nation?.

That?s was not surprising, given the hike in violent crime and most notably the murders of the Cooper twins.

But it was strange to hear him say that events like the murders conspired to ?shock us from the perch of complacency and smugness we?ve occupied for much too long?. That begged the question of just who Mr. Scott was referring to ? the public or the Government ? because it surely did not take the deaths of the Cooper twins, as brutal and senseless as they were, for the public to start worrying about violent crime.

By contrast, the Government has been sending out mixed messages on crime since it first came to power.

An editorial in this newspaper pointed up the problem last year when it noted that Home Affairs Minister Randy Horton had called Bermuda?s crime rate unacceptably high at the same time that then-Tourism Minister Renee Webb said violent crime was decreasing and that heightened concern over it was due to the media.

Ms Webb was wrong at the time ? violent crime had started to rise again after reaching a nine-year low in 2002 and it has not stopped since.

But the disconnect remains. The Government has made a commitment to rehabilitation and has also attempted to decriminalise possession of drugs through the Alternatives to Incarceration programme. It is right to do so. Any Government that fails to at least try to reduce recidivism would itself be criminally neglectful.

But there is a disconnect between that and deterring crime. Punishment for crimes acts as a deterrent, and if the punishment is taken away, then so is the deterrent. That seems to be where Bermuda is today.

To some degree, that was the motivation behind the announcement last week by Mr. Scott and Attorney General Sen. Larry Mussenden that penalties for drug traffickers will be hiked, along with a renewal of the promise to protect witnesses and punish those people who intimidate them.

Those are good ideas as well, although it was odd that punishments for violent crimes will not be increased. To be sure, drugs tend to be behind most other crimes, but that does not make violence any less serious.

Sen. Mussenden also wants to extend the lengths of prison terms before inmates are eligible for probation, although the main reason for that is not punishment, but to give inmates time to get on rehabilitation programmes, which are currently in short supply.

The better and cheaper solution, it would seem, would be to provide more rehabilitation courses. That?s because it is almost certain that in about a year there will be howls of protests from inmates and prison officers about overcrowding in the already chock-a-block prisons.

Mr. Scott was right last week to call for the public to pull together to fight crime, just as he was right to say that some of the root causes of crime lie in the social issues the Island faces.

But calling for the public to pull together is inadequate if no lead is given by Government, while the social agenda is a long term solution and the problem is immediate. And the Government seemed to be bereft of other ideas to deal with the immediate crisis.

One would be to adopt the ?broken window? approach to policing, akin to the one used in New York City to such effect by former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.

As former United Bermuda Party Senator Leonard Santucci said in 2003, New York did it ?by increasing the number of policemen on the beat, not decreasing them, and by adopting a policy of zero tolerance for crimeno matter how trivial. They reasoned that when you have no tolerance for petty crime there will be less major crime as well, and they were proven right.?

And, he said, Bermuda has proven the opposite is true, as well. Fewer police on the beat means more crime. It?s that simple.