Nadaleen Singh

Mon­ey should not be an ex­cuse for mis­man­age­ment of crime or in­ef­fi­cien­cy in the ju­di­cia­ry, ac­cord­ing to crim­i­nol­o­gist Prof Ramesh De­osaran.

He said while law abid­ing cit­i­zens fear crime, crim­i­nals fear nei­ther de­tec­tion nor pun­ish­ment. For too long and for too much, he added, there have been ter­ri­ble "wastage, cor­rup­tion and pub­lic mis­man­age­ment all lead­ing to an ap­par­ent free for all spree for crime and crim­i­nals who seem to fear nei­ther po­lice, law or courts main­ly be­cause they feel such in­sti­tu­tions have grown quite in­ef­fec­tive."

De­osaran, who spoke on crime and so­cial is­sues at the T&T Cham­ber's post-Bud­get ses­sion at the Hy­att Re­gency, Port-of-Spain, said Gov­ern­ment should make spe­cial ef­forts to en­sure that the $7.6 bil­lion al­lo­cat­ed for na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty and the $117 mil­lion be­fore that, are ef­fec­tive­ly spent with full and trans­par­ent ac­count­abil­i­ty.

Over a six-year pe­ri­od, he said, the coun­try spent a to­tal of $32.6 bil­lion on na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty.

De­osaran, who was crit­i­cal of the crime ini­tia­tives out­lined in the bud­get state­ment, said: "The min­is­ter touched on white col­lar crime, il­le­gal im­mi­gra­tion and bor­der se­cu­ri­ty. Such crimes as street crimes, steal­ing, house break­ing, rob­bery with vi­o­lence, are of­ten dri­ven by the cor­rupt be­hav­iours at the top, al­le­ga­tions of big-time greed and fraud at some state cor­po­ra­tions, which the min­is­ter said are now out of con­trol."

He said bad ex­am­ples trick­le down­wards help­ing to cor­rupt the moral com­pass of the young.This means a trend has start­ed be­cause "we have a so­ci­ety of two so­ci­eties–one strug­gling to re­main law­ful and pro­duc­tive, the oth­er like par­a­sites and preda­tors rav­aging pri­vate prop­er­ty and at­tack­ing pub­lic safe­ty."

De­osaran called for more bor­der con­trols. He said it has tak­en too long to es­tab­lish the joint bor­der pa­trol agency in ar­eas such as Ce­dros, Car­li Bay, Moru­ga and To­co where "day and night smug­gling of guns, drugs and peo­ple are wide­ly known."

"Is that our se­cu­ri­ty agen­cies are cor­rupt ,or is it just bad gov­ern­ment pol­i­cy? For too long, the au­thor­i­ties have al­lowed law­less­ness to spread like squat­ting, il­le­gal vend­ing."

He said the ex­pec­ta­tion of cit­i­zens is that there should be high­er lev­el of pol­i­cy de­vel­op­ment and im­ple­men­ta­tion which is "more pro­fes­sion­al­ly-dri­ven, and less po­lit­i­cal­ly self-serv­ing."