For once, citizens can make a sacrifice to help in the crime fight, about which they have complained to no end for the past 15 years. And yet... No doubt Trinidad and Tobago is plagued by a plethora of problems. The capital floods as soon as you hose down the pavement. Prime ministers' residences rise faster than the President's house falls. And we've got a clown wearing goggles for our most popular "journalist:" the son of a pastor and the brother of a winer girl. But perhaps no other problem is as pronounced as crime.
Crime has been on the front burner and front pages for half my life. There are TV and radio shows dedicated exclusively to crime. We executed nine men in three days for crime. We launched a blimp into the air to fight crime, then grounded it, then bumped it back up, then tried to sell it. We've walked for crime, sung for crime, worn white for crime, even changed our Facebook profile pictures to black–all for crime. And we talk about being the victims of crime, about what's not being done about crime, about those who are responsible for crime, about those who permit crime. We talk about someone needing to "take the country back," for someone to "do something drastic." And now, today, we are given a chance to be that "someone." And yet...
7th highest murder rate
...and yet do we really know what we're talking about in this cacophony of crime conversations?
• More than 3,500 citizens have been murdered in the past decade.
• At its peak in 2008 when the Police Service reported 529 murders (544 according to other sources), only one in nine murders was solved.
• Last year, there were 472 murders, with a detection rate of 14 per cent.
• More young black men die by homicide than by traffic accident, Aids and suicide combined.
• Two-thirds of all homicides occur in just seven police districts: Besson Street, Morvant, West End, St James and Carenage, Belmont and Arima.
• Besson Street has the highest homicide rate: even though it accounts for just three per cent of the population, a quarter of all murders happen there.
• One out of every five persons murdered in 2008 lived in Laventille or Morvant.
• In 2008, ten per cent of the victims were Indo-Trinidadian. The rest were Afro-Trinidadian or mixed.
• In 2010, T&T's murder rate ranked seventh worldwide, 37 per 100,000 people. That's higher than Iraq, Libya, Mexico and Rwanda. We stand right behind Colombia.
And yet, we'd rather not make a two-week sacrifice. It's all over town, all over Facebook. We'd rather complain about it, find fault with it, politicise it and rationalise why it should not even exist. And we'd rather continue with life as normal. Despite this embarrassing, abysmal and terrifying crime situation, about which we can talk no end, our behaviour has changed little. Every year, the face of Ariapita Avenue changes. There are more party promoters, fete groups, and Carnival and J'Ouvert bands than ever before. We drink without restraint, and then we drive home when the sun comes up. We exist in a state of freeness which we think is our inalienable right: to continue doing as we please. And we smugly ascribe this behaviour to our own unique, beautiful culture that makes us distinctively "Trini." We haven't realised that what constitutes "Trini" has changed–and not in our favour.
Crime fight starts with us
In the past 15 years, the incidence and severity of crime have escalated fivefold, much like our economic progress. Today, we have more money, possessions and attitude than before. But maybe, just maybe, with all of this comes not more wantonness but more responsibility. This responsibility entails a behaviour change: that we can't continue as normal given the changing circumstances around us. When the world changes, we have to adapt–change our behaviour to better cope with it. Maybe this state of emergency shows us that fighting crime really does start with us, on the individual level, to be more responsible to ourselves and for ourselves. In all the talk that "someone" needs to do something, that someone today is you and me.
There are indications that the implementation of this state of emergency may be riddled with errors. But that doesn't change the fact that we're still in the situation. And instead of complaining about it like petulant, politically-charged children, we ought to give it a chance. Because maybe this is the drastic measure we've been talking about all this time. Maybe this is the effort to "take the country back." No doubt, our lowly stature as having the world's seventh highest homicide rate won't reverse in two weeks, but this is a start. If we were truly concerned about reducing crime in T&T, we would remember that it's not just the police or the "authorities," the "someone else" who has to take action, it's us as well.