Since ear­ly 2009, the lo­cal and in­ter­na­tion­al me­dia have pro­duced a flood of ar­ti­cles por­tray­ing T&T as the "mur­der cap­i­tal of the Caribbean," all of which have been flat out wrong in their la­belling of T&T. A Google search on the In­ter­net of the phrase "T&T mur­der cap­i­tal of the Caribbean" will pro­vide the surfer with many of these ar­ti­cles dat­ing back to ear­ly 2009. The rush by the lo­cal and for­eign me-dia to at­tach this la­bel to T&T is based on the in­crease in mur­ders from 391 (2007) to 547 (2008)-the same year Ja­maica to­talled 1,611, or 30 mur­ders less than three times T&T's to­tal.

This ar­ti­cle at­tempts to set the record straight and put this mat­ter to rest with the aid of em­pir­i­cal da­ta from pub­licly-avail­able sources through­out the Caribbean and es­ti­mat­ed pop­u­la­tion fig­ures from the World Bank for the pe­ri­od 2000-2009. The ar­ti­cle comes in the wake of the re­cent video clip, "Trinidad: Guns, Drugs and Se­crets," by British jour­nal­ist Seyi Rhodes in his cov­er­age of the re­cent state of emer­gency (SoE) and cur­few, in which the la­bel of T&T was again re­peat­ed.

T&T and Ja­maica over the decade

To be­gin, let us get the num­bers right. For the pe­ri­od 2000-10, the an­nu­al num­ber of mur­ders and the mur­der rate per 100,000, us­ing World Bank es­ti­mat­ed pop­u­la­tion for T&T and Ja­maica, have clear­ly shown T&T to have the low­er num­bers and rates (see top ta­ble). In­ter­est­ing­ly, mur­ders be­gan to de­crease in 2009 (down from 547 to 506 in 2009 and 472 in 2010), and this trend has con­tin­ued-even in the pe­ri­od in 2011 pre­ced­ing the de­c­la­ra­tion of the SoE and cur­few, when com­pared with the cor­re­spond­ing pe­ri­od in 2010 (see bot­tom ta­ble).

As at Au­gust 31, there were 77 less mur­ders than the cor­re­spond­ing pe­ri­od in 2010. With a pop­u­la­tion of rough­ly twice that of T&T, Ja­maica over the pe­ri­od 2000-10 has av­er­aged ap­prox­i­mate­ly three times the to­tal num­ber of T&T's mur­ders on four oc­ca­sions (2006, 2008, 2009, 2010), and every oth­er year has been at least four times at best. So the ques­tion of which coun­try has the high­er mur­der rate per 100,000 is not even de­bat­able-Ja­maica has clear­ly been high­er every year.

The ori­gin of the ti­tle

So how did the lo­cal and in­ter­na­tion­al me­dia ar­rive at the ti­tle "Mur­der cap­i­tal of the Caribbean" for T&T in 2009? The an­swer lies in the to­tal and the per­cent­age "in­crease" in 2008, as Ja­maica in­creased from 1,583 (2007) to 1,611 (2008) while T&T jumped from 391 to 547. How­ev­er, had jour­nal­ists analysed the da­ta from the per 100,000 peo­ple per­spec­tive-the pre­ferred method­ol­o­gy of the in­ter­na­tion­al agen­cies such as the World Bank and Unit­ed Na­tions Of­fice on Drugs and Crime-they would have ar­rived at a dif­fer­ent con­clu­sion: the cor­rect one.

The flaw in the method­ol­o­gy and the re­gion­al con­text

But is it fair to la­bel T&T the "Mur­der cap­i­tal of the Caribbean" based on the ba­sis of the in­crease alone, and not the to­tal num­ber or the rate per 100,000 peo­ple in any giv­en year? This is like say­ing that if coun­try A has a pop­u­la­tion twice the size of coun­try B, and coun­try B in­creas­es from 100 to 200 mur­ders, but coun­try A, which is av­er­ag­ing 500 mur­ders, in­creas­es from 500 to 525 mur­ders, then coun­try B is worse. De­spite the in­crease in coun­try B, coun­try A re­mains undis­put­ed­ly high­er. If we were to take this ar­gu­ment to its log­i­cal con­clu­sion, then St Kitts-Nevis, which in­creased from 16 mur­ders in 2007 to 23 mur­ders in 2008 (44 per cent)-com­pared to T&T's 391 to 547 (40 per cent)-must al­so be con­sid­ered for this ti­tle. More­over, with an es­ti­mat­ed pop­u­la­tion of 49,190 peo­ple in 2008, St Kitts-Nevis had a high­er mur­der rate than T&T and was sec­ond to Ja­maica that year.

Even if we were to stretch St Kitts-Nevis's pop­u­la­tion in 2008 to the cur­rent pop­u­la­tion of 51,900 (ac­cord­ing to the Cari­com Web site), we would still ar­rive at a mur­der rate of ap­prox­i­mate­ly 44 per 100,000 peo­ple-still high­er than T&T. And, as we will ob­serve lat­er on, many oth­er coun­tries had high­er an­nu­al in­creas­es than T&T over the same pe­ri­od.

• Cont'd to­mor­row

Sheri­don Hill

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