Kevin Baldeosingh
Fighting crime requires both theory and practice. In T&T, the Government and law enforcement has been very good at practice and very bad at theory.
The effectiveness of practice is shown by the money spent by the Government on crime-fighting between 2008 and 2015: over $40 billion. But the poverty of theory is shown by the homicide rate staying at 30 per 100,000 people, even if it is true that serious crimes declined to their lowest rates in 30 years. According to a 2003 paper titled The Economic Cost Of Crime To Trinidad And Tobago, which was prepared by UWI post-graduate students under the supervision of the late economist Dennis Pantin, crime cost this country about $4.5 billion in 2002. Taking this as a baseline figure, this means that crime cost T&T over $30 billion between 2008 and 2015.
In June last year, then police commissioner Stephen Williams boasted that serious crimes had reached their lowest point since 1985. In that year, there were 13,979 serious crimes; in 2014, the number was 12,055. Put another way, the TTPS achieved a 14 per cent reduction in serious crimes and it only took them 30 years. Moreover, this wasn't achieved in a cost-effective manner. Using the 14 per cent reduction as a crude proxy, the Government basically spent $40 billion to save $5 billion.
Of course, crime expenditure isn't premised on economic calculations alone, since there are also social and personal costs to criminal acts. Apart from loss of lives and livelihoods, pervasive criminality unravels the social fabric until instability can threaten every institution and negatively affect the psyche of the average citizen. And it is here we come to theory.
In a lead story published in the Express last Monday, three prominent individuals were asked why people were killing other people over minor matters. Psychiatrist Varma Deyalsingh suggested that it was because children didn't learn patience anymore through sitting for long hours in church; Catholic priest Clyde Harvey focused on the education system which no longer had "Victorian discipline" and also blamed movies and music; and criminologist Ramesh Deosaran said there was a newness emerging in the types of murders that didn't fit into the usual categories.
All of these people are wrong: neither church attendance nor media have anything to do with the rise in crime. And not only have sociologists long-established a category for these kinds of murders, but they are actually the largest category of motives for murder in most societies: defined as "altercation of relatively trivial origin." Psycholinguist Steven Pinker, in his book How the Mind Works explains that, "The combination of maleness, youth, penury, hopelessness, and anarchy makes young men indefinitely reckless in defending their reputation...Among polygynous mammals such as ourselves, reproductive success varies enormously among males, and the fiercest competition can be at the bottom, among males whose prospects teeter between zero and non-zero."
Murder and other crimes can only be fought if the theoretical basis for action is sound. Unfortunately, even the expert policymakers here abjure a scientific approach to this issue. The Citizens Security Programme, for example, has been given hundreds of millions over the past eight years to reduce crime in 22 hotspot communities. And the CSP's directors claim to be successful, reporting that murders in CSP communities dropped by 56 per cent between 2008 and 2013, while the national reduction was 26 per cent for this same period, while wounding and shooting dropped 40 per cent compared to a national decline of merely 12 per cent.
However, another equally valid interpretation of these statistics is that the CSP interventions just sent the killers out to other less violent communities and raised their murder and wounding rates–as indeed, increased crime reports from central Trinidad suggests is the case. Even if this is not so, however, the CSP does not actually know if its interventions had any effects. A 2015 peer review by the United Nations Development Programme concluded that ,"It is important to note that such improvements may have been due to a number of variables, including the CSP interventions. That said, the CSP interventions appear to have supported the transformation within communities through the participation of residents in a range of community actions and resilience building interventions."
But the UNDP reviewers are either being kind or deliberately obtuse. The CSP had four main strategies–training of individuals, parenting support, community outreach, and public education–but did not establish any control groups. This means that they should have used just one intervention in selected communities, none in others, and tracked the outcomes. This would have told them what worked and what didn't work. As it is, the CSP does not know which intervention worked–if, indeed, any at all did, since in the same period the police were also intervening through strategies like increased patrols and surveillance of gang members, which may have been the real cause of the drop in crimes in hotspot areas.
It is this vikey-vie approach to crime-fighting which explains why T&T has flushed $40 billion down the drain with so little to show for it. And that wastage will not change until theory starts to inform practice.
Kevin Baldeosingh is a professional writer, author of three novels, and co-author of a history textbook.