Analysis · Promise Tracker
Godwin Friday Set the Standard Himself. Eight Months In, His Government Is Failing It.
The homicide count reached 28 on Friday morning in Lowmans Leeward. That is more killing than St. Vincent and the Grenadines had recorded by early September last year, and the NDP’s own crime plan promised a national security minister with nothing else to do.
Amir Roberts, a 30 year old labourer, was walking along the Lowmans Leeward public road at about 6:40 on Friday morning when he was approached and shot several times. A district medical officer pronounced him dead at the scene. He was the 28th person killed in St. Vincent and the Grenadines this year, and the eighth this month.
Seven days earlier, at about a quarter to midnight on Friday 17 July, two masked gunmen came up from the seaside behind the public washroom in the Chinatown area of Kingstown and killed three men where they stood. Claude John, 50, a cart operator. Karon Bowens, 34, a labourer of Ottley Hall. Giovannie Grant, 23, also a labourer of Ottley Hall. The spot is a few hundred metres from the Central Police Station.
Years ago, sitting in opposition, Godwin Friday described almost exactly this rhythm and said it was intolerable. He was right then. The question this newspaper puts now is not whether he meant it. It is what has changed since he acquired the power to act on it.
This is becoming a regular weekend activity. It is unacceptable.
Godwin Friday, as Leader of the Opposition
In that address, Friday listed a shooting death in Redemption Sharpes, another on the Friday, two the weekend before. He said people could not be left waiting each weekend to hear where the next shooting would be. He complained that there was no word from the commissioner of police and no word from the authorities to reassure the public that the matter was in hand. He said Vincentians were unsafe, and afraid to go out to a karaoke spot or to lime. He said it could not continue.
It has continued. Dr. Friday was sworn in as Prime Minister on 28 November 2025. Eight months later, the weekends look much as he described them.
What the numbers actually show
Accountability journalism is worth nothing if it plays loose with figures, so here is the honest arithmetic, including the parts that do not flatter the argument.
| Year | Homicides | Note |
|---|---|---|
| 2024 | 54 | Under the ULP administration |
| 2025 | 40 | 14 fewer than 2024. NDP takes office 28 November |
| 2026 to 24 July | 28 | On pace for roughly 50 by year end |
Two things follow from that table, and they point in different directions.
The first is that 2026 is running hard against last year. St. Vincent and the Grenadines did not reach its 26th homicide of 2025 until 9 September. This year the country passed that mark before the end of July, roughly seven weeks earlier. Twenty eight killings in 205 days works out at an annual pace of about 50, which would be a quarter higher than 2025’s total of 40.
The second is that 50 would still be below 2024’s 54. The violence did not begin in November 2025, the NDP inherited it, and no government turns a homicide trend in eight months. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
But that cuts both ways. The party now in office spent years insisting that the crisis was a product of incompetence and absent political will rather than deep structural causes, and that its own arrival would be the turning point. Having made that argument, it does not now get the benefit of the structural defence it spent a decade rejecting.
The promise that is broken on its face
The New Democratic Party published a crime plan. It is a short document and it made specific commitments. One of them can be checked in a single minute against the Cabinet list, and it fails.
The plan promised a dedicated Minister of National Security in a stand alone role, in the party’s words “giving the role the time and focus it needs”. The argument was that under the ULP the portfolio had been buried inside a Prime Minister’s overloaded brief and starved of attention.
The Cabinet appointed in December 2025 gave the national security portfolio to St. Clair Leacock, who is simultaneously Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Disaster Management and Minister of Immigration. That is not a stand alone role. It is four jobs.
Dr. Friday, meanwhile, holds the offices of Prime Minister, Minister of Finance, Minister of Legal Affairs and Justice, Minister of Economic Planning and Minister of Private Sector Development. The specific structural criticism the NDP made of its predecessor, that senior ministers hoard portfolios until nothing gets proper attention, describes the present Cabinet at least as well as it described the last one.
Promise tracker: the NDP crime plan
- Broken A stand alone Minister of National Security. The portfolio is held alongside the deputy premiership, disaster management and immigration.
- Unverified Investment in police services, more officers on the ground with the technology to do the job. No published figures on recruitment, equipment or budget allocation since December.
- Unverified A gun amnesty, proposed by Leacock as shadow national security minister in July 2023. No amnesty has been announced in office.
- Not seen A specialised unit for tourism related crime, including offences against yacht visitors. Raised publicly again this month by the St Vincent Times.
- Unverified A second emergency shelter for women and improved counselling support.
- Unverified Increased sentences for praedial larceny. No amending legislation has been brought to the House.
Vincypowa News has asked the Office of the Prime Minister and the Ministry of National Security for the status of each commitment. This tracker will be updated as answers arrive.
Where the government deserves credit
One of Friday’s 2023 complaints has been answered, and it would be dishonest not to say so.
He objected that after a shooting there was no word from the commissioner of police and nothing from the authorities to tell people what was being done. That is not what happened this month. Commissioner of Police Enville Williams issued a statement the day after the Chinatown killings, then spoke again at length. He acknowledged public anger, conceded that people had heard police assurances before, and said he would set out what the force knew and what it needed from the public rather than offer another promise.
He described the killings as a serious escalation, announced what he called a new playbook, and warned not only the gunmen but the people driving them, hiding them and storing their weapons. Whatever one makes of the language, the silence Friday complained about in opposition is not the problem in July 2026.
The criticism has instead moved to the response itself. On BOOM SVG on Monday, the lawyer and commentator Jomo Thomas called for the commissioner to be removed. The St Vincent Times has asked in print where the comprehensive crime plan the NDP promised has got to.
The silence that is actually missing
Which points at the real gap. In the week after three men were shot dead in the middle of the capital, and on the morning a fourth man was killed on a public road in Lowmans Leeward, it was the Commissioner of Police who fronted the response.
The Minister of National Security is a politician who spent years demanding that ministers account to the public for violent crime. The Prime Minister built a substantial part of his case for office on the argument that the last government treated killings as background noise. Neither has given the country a comprehensive statement of what this government intends to do differently, in what timeframe, at what cost, and with what measure of success.
Commissioner Williams is a police officer. Setting national security policy is not his job. It belongs to the two men who told Vincentians for the better part of a decade that they knew how to do it.
A force under strain
None of this lands on a healthy institution. The RSVGPF has lost two officers this month, including Constable Kenrick Scott, and has publicly asked the country not to speculate about the circumstances. A force absorbing that kind of internal loss while facing a triple homicide in the shadow of its own headquarters is not one that can be fixed by a press statement, however firmly worded.
That is a resourcing and leadership question, and resourcing and leadership are ministerial responsibilities.
The standard, and the clock
Eight months is not long enough to judge a crime strategy. It is long enough to judge whether one exists.
The NDP did not ask to be measured against a five year horizon. It asked to be measured against the proposition that the previous government lacked competence and will, and that it possessed both. Dr. Friday told Vincentians they should not have to wait each weekend to learn where the next shooting had been. Amir Roberts was killed on a Friday morning. Claude John, Karon Bowens and Giovannie Grant were killed on a Friday night.
The words were his. So is the standard.
Sourcing, method and corrections. The killing of Amir Roberts is reported by One News SVG from an RSVGPF statement. Homicide totals for 2024 and 2025 and the 2026 running count are from iWitness News; the 9 September 2025 comparison point is from WIC News. Details of the 17 July Kingstown killings and the Commissioner’s response are from Searchlight and iWitness News. The NDP commitments are quoted from the party’s own published crime plan and checked against the Cabinet list published by the Government of St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Annualised projections are Vincypowa News calculations from reported counts and are estimates, not forecasts. The remarks attributed to Dr. Friday in opposition are taken from a recorded address supplied to this newspaper; the recording is undated and readers should treat the timing as approximate. Criticisms of the government’s performance are attributed to the named individuals and outlets who made them. Vincypowa News sought comment from the Office of the Prime Minister and the Ministry of National Security before publication and will carry any response in full. If any figure here is wrong, write to editor@vincypowanews.com and we will correct it.