By John Burchall Community driven and directed projects, relevant workplace retraining and family re-education are necessary, if Bermuda is going to get on top of its spiralling crime problems, a visiting speaker said on Saturday.

Imam Faheem Shuaibe, a Muslim author, teacher and community activist from Oakland California, spoke to a packed auditorium at the Bermuda Industrial Union headquarters.

With the calculated precision of an elementary school teacher, Imam Shuaibe made liberal use of the chalkboard and rhetorical questions during his one hour, 40 minute speech.

He praised Government's recently announced five-year retraining plan that is intended to assist Bermudians left behind by global changes.

And he said moves to address workplace racism were necessary in order to take intermediate steps toward greater equality for all Bermudians and should be supported, expanded and strengthened.

But he criticised those who solely blamed external or internal factors for criminal activity.

Both schools of thought, he said, were only half right.

Imam Shuaibe immediately jettisoned the proposition that there were people in certain ethnic groups with a "genetic proclivity to crime''.

He said any diagnosis of crime would have to examine a criminal's motives.

"Motives are psychological and they are subjective,'' he said. "They relate to something within the person and they are acquired.

"You cannot talk about crime without addressing the issue of motives.'' Imam Shuaibe said to fully understand a person's motives for any act, the circumstances surrounding the individual must also be looked at.

While the circumstances that give rise to much behaviour is outside the individual's control, he continued, actions are intended to bring about changes that are favourable.

In the process, a person who is faced with negative circumstances will deliberate, chose, resolve and then act.

However, like the circumstances, the consequences of that act are often beyond the individual's control.

"The only things he has control over are how he thinks, what he chooses to do about his reflection, his resolution to act in a certain way and then his action. After that the consequences are out of his control.

"This has to be considered by those who say the problem is within the person...a part of the problem is within the person as relates to crime.

Sometimes the individual makes the wrong choices about how to deal with their circumstances.

"But if they haven't been given the proper education or if they have not been given several acceptable alternatives to chose from, can you blame that individual for choosing.. .the option available to (him)?'' Imam Shuaibe said calling a person in those circumstances, a criminal, is wrong. A more just society, he said, would present more choices then the ones currently available.

Accordingly, any workable solutions to Bermuda's crime wave must incorporate elements of personal responsibility on the part of individuals, within a supportive, political and economic framework.

Among his short term solutions, Imam Shuaibe, suggested subsidised retraining which would be tied to economic support from Government coupled with an equal commitment to improvement on the part of the individual.

Longer term solutions included family and community based re-education schemes that have Government, corporate and media support.

Moreover, Imam Shuaibe warned: "Just like in America the racism issue hasn't been resolved and I don't think in Bermuda the class issue has been resolved, so we shouldn't let ourselves down by thinking everything is all right because you've got an extra cracker on the plate.''