Thursday's haul of guns and ammunition in Rincon forest, Las Cuevas, was the largest since the state of emergency (SOE) was declared last month. The cache of arms was disturbingly impressive. Two self-loading rifles, one mini Uzi, one Uzi, one Tec9, four shotguns, a nine-millimetre submachine gun and a shocking 10,000 rounds of miscellaneous ammunition were dug out of the ground two miles into the forest, wrapped in plastic and newspapers, greased to resist moisture. Another five disassembled rifles were intercepted at the TTPost facility in Piarco, due to be transshipped to Thailand and declared to be "used motorcycle parts."
There's a temptation to want the strictures of the state of emergency and curfew to result in a wholesale removal of weapons from the hands of gang leaders and their ruthless foot soldiers, but the first instruction of these steady hauls of illegal weapons has been that police work involves the slow and steady business of pursuing leads. No officer, no matter how committed, was going to stumble across this buried arms cache in the Las Cuevas forest, no matter how exceptional his metal detecting equipment. These finds are being fuelled by a population that's demonstrating renewed confidence in the will and capacity of the police to respond to crime and a greater sense of safety in the wake of the national lockdown.
There are not likely to be any movie-friendly warehouse doors being kicked down to reveal neatly stacked cases of shining weapons. The guns being used by criminals will have to be tracked down along the routes that were used to distribute them and seized from criminals either by surprise or hot and recently used. Police work that unearths these weapons from muddy places of rest are a quiet blessing if less exciting than dramatic gunfights. The evidence of the last few weeks of police investigations into arms is compelling. Apart from Thursday's seizure of 15 firearms, officers took a Sig Sauer, a .45 pistol and a .38 revolver off the streets in Couva along with $30,000 worth of cocaine on Wednesday. Return visits to Beetham Gardens, much to the annoyance of most law-abiding residents, have continued to yield small but useful harvests of small arms.
Late Monday night, officers returned to the community centre under construction in the area and found two pistols, a revolver and 21 rounds of ammunition in the ceiling of the building. A raid earlier that day gathered five weapons buried near to the berm constructed to divide Beetham Gardens from the highway and landfill across the road. Four revolvers and a homemade shotgun were unearthed using sniffer dogs and metal detectors near 22nd and 23rd Streets at Beetham. These results should beef up the summary report offered by the Leader of Government Business in Parliament, Roodal Moonilal, during debate on the extension to the state of emergency on Sunday. The Housing and Environment Minister announced then that 33 firearms and more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition had been recovered by the protective services since the SOE had been declared on August 21.
The evidence being, quite literally, unearthed by officers measured in terms of arms finds is unusually instructive. The weapons being displayed after these hauls are not being taken care of particularly well and do not seem to be hidden with any particular care for the capacity of these weapons to offer long-term service. Trinidad and Tobago clearly doesn't need gunsmiths or even murderers with an eye on weapons upkeep to accompany the arms dealers doing such good business here, and deteriorating weapons in wet mud are a reassuring sign that criminals are capable of making mistakes. The Ministry of National Security must press the advantage it's been given by the restrictions of the SOE and do more to encourage tipsters willing to deliver credible leads to weapons in this laudable effort to disarm criminals.