"Crime remains our major challenge," Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar noted as she began her comments on that topic during her end of year address to the nation. Criminals chose to raise the stakes in the new year with a murder spree that began just seven minutes into the new year with the murder of 27-year-old Jason King, shot in the chest in King's Village, California. At 12:45, 61-year-old Ella Dial died by fire as her home went up in flames at Coal Mine, Sangre Grande. Investigators were said to be still considering the possibility that the fire might have been started by a Molotov cocktail.
Thirty minutes after that, Anthony Charles, 27 was approached by four men in Straker Village, Laventille, who shot him repeatedly. At around 1:30am, 80-year-old pensioner Rudolph Olivere was found in a pool of blood at his Beetham Gardens home, the apparent victim of a robbery related beating. He succumbed to his injuries an hour and a half later at the Port-of-Spain General Hospital. It seems impossible to add to the many words of advice, and outbursts of irritation, at the apparent inability of successive governments to rally the security forces to stem lawlessness in Trinidad and Tobago.
While Police Commissioner Dwayne Gibbs was able to point to a reduction in crime over the last few months of 2010, that seems little solace for the people who were killed, evidently at will, in the first hours of a new decade. Is it possible, then, that we've been asking for the wrong thing?All of the anti-crime efforts in the past decade have been amplifications of existing and evidently ineffectual systems of managing criminal activity. More roadblocks, more searches, faster response, deeper surveillance, but have these initiatives, where they have been sustained, had any real result? That remains impossible to gauge, particularly since improved response to criminal activities may well have stifled a more outrageous surge in murder and banditry.
In pursuing her dream goal of a country in which "people can walk freely and without fear once again," Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar must think about rallying not just her troops, but her entire Cabinet to the task of anti-crime action. The inspiration for this proposal came from the assertion by Legal Affairs Minister Prakash Ramadhar that crime was directly affecting the cost of food through rises in the cost of security measures. It's likely that Ramadhar is right, not just about the impact on food prices, but about the way that crime touches every aspect of Trinidad and Tobago. And if crime affects every aspect of this country's operations and aspirations, then shouldn't every Ministry be involved in engaging it?
To that end, we propose that the Prime Minister not only place crime on the front burner of her portfolio, but that she should demand that each of her Ministers evaluate the impact of crime on his own portfolios and deliver, with some urgency, plans to respond to it. This initiative should already have been underway at the Ministry of Tourism, which is currently wrestling with the public relations fallout of a vicious criminal attack on the Greene family from the UK and the Ministry of Works and Transport, where procurement failures led to widespread white collar crime over the last two decades. In engaging her Ministers on what is unquestionably job number one for her administration in 2011, the Prime Minister must make it clear that solutions cannot depend on the Ministry of National Security.
In much the same way that private citizens must formulate their own preventive measures to manage localised crime, aware that the police are available as support, Ministries must engage crime with solutions that marshal their resources creatively and effectively. The emphasis must be on discouraging crime through effective deterrence and detection, which is always much more effective than pursuing outbreaks of activity. The Cabinet level engagement must not be about pruning the larger blooms of crime, but about trimming the larger tree of opportunity and attraction to bring its runaway growth under control.