By allocating the biggest slice of the Budget pie to crime, the new PNM administration has indicated its main priority.
This makes political sense, in that crime was the party's major failure in the 2002-2010 regime led by Patrick Manning. During its eight years in office the Manning administration spent billions on expensive crime-fighting equipment and other measures, to absolutely no avail.
By the time they demitted office, the murder rate was still 300 per cent more than it was when they came in. In the last 2009 Budget of the Manning administration, National Security was allocated $4,731.4 billion. In the 2014 Budget of the People's Partnership, that Ministry got $6.994 billion. Now the Keith Rowley administration has put the highest ever amount into fighting crime, at $1,810 billion.
Prime Minister Rowley has offered an economic rationale, arguing that the crime problem was draining funds from other sectors. But the issue is not so much money, as how it is spent. Dr Rowley emphasised the need to raise the crime detection rate above ten per cent and, while Acting Police Commissioner Stephen Williams has said that the figure is a little higher than that, he revealed in a radio interview last week that the target was a 30 per cent detection rate.
Contrary to common belief, however, a high detection rate is not a panacea for reducing criminal activity and, in fact, can even stymie effective policing. By making detection a key measure of effective policing, police officers are motivated to start paying attention to crimes which are more easily recorded and prosecuted rather than crimes which have more harmful effects.
In the United Kingdom, detection rates for various crimes are between 10 and 40 per cent, yet crime rates are low in that nation. Their murder rate, for example, is below 1 per 100,000 people, as compared to Trinidad's 30 per 100,000 and Tobago's 10 per 100,000.
Even so, UK police have long been dissatisfied with their policing model, and have in recent years begun to follow a new prevention approach called Problem Oriented Policing, which has also been adopted in some jurisdictions in the United States. Commissioner Williams has also been touting this model, but its efficacy depends on re-defining the role of the police and, even more importantly, establishing linkages between the Police Service and State agencies, the private sector and communities.
The Manning administration concentrated on detection, buying expensive Skytowers and blimps and radar systems, as well as the aborted billion-dollar offshore patrols vessels. Some of these technology-oriented measures could have proved useful, but only in the context of policing reforms.
Radar systems for detecting drug traffickers, for example, are useless if officials are tipping them off about the Coast Guard patrols.
Even deeper is the policy question as to whether decriminalising drugs like marijuana would not reduce crime and the pool of potential criminals more drastically and cost-effectively than spending hundreds of millions on prisons, patrols, and police officers.
But the key question in 2015 is, will the Rowley regime re-adopt the policies which proved so ineffectual? Common sense would suggest that the mistakes of the past would not be repeated, but politicians are notorious for doing the same thing while expecting different results.
In the past three years, the TTPS has said that serious crimes except murder had all fallen. But the homicide rate actually increased somewhat under the last Government and, as long as murder is so easy to commit in T&T, citizens will always feel unsafe.
This is the major challenge that the Rowley administration must tackle.
