The up­surge in mur­ders over the past few days, some of them brazen­ly com­mit­ted in broad day­light in front of wit­ness­es, on­ly add to pub­lic scep­ti­cism about re­cent claims of a 30 per cent-plus drop in se­ri­ous crimes. This lat­est se­ries of killing start­ed over the week­end with the fa­tal shoot­ing of Bev­er­ly Nurse, wid­ow of mur­dered gang leader Mark Guer­ra. The body count has in­creased over the past 48 hours with a po­lice of­fi­cer, a PH dri­ver and a wheel­chair-bound man among the vic­tims–and their killers all still at large.

It is no won­der that act­ing Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er Stephen Williams is hav­ing such a hard time con­vinc­ing the pop­u­la­tion that the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice has this sit­u­a­tion un­der con­trol.Sta­tis­tics that in­di­cate a down­ward trend in what Mr Williams and oth­er law-en­force­ment of­fi­cials cat­e­gorise as "se­ri­ous crimes" have not eased pub­lic fears, or the wide­ly-held per­cep­tion that crim­i­nals are still out­gun­ning and out­run­ning the po­lice.In fact, it seems even the po­lice them­selves are easy tar­gets for the crim­i­nals, who have now killed 141 peo­ple for the year. Af­ter sev­er­al weeks of calm, the gang wars seem to have re­sumed in Laven­tille and, as is of­ten the case, they car­ry out their hits and reprisal killings with very lit­tle con­cern about be­ing caught and con­vict­ed.

Where are the joint po­lice/army pa­trols launched ear­li­er this year in the wake of an­oth­er spate of mur­ders and gang wars? Were they just re­ac­tionary mea­sures to ap­pease pub­lic con­cerns which have now been aban­doned?What T&T needs is an an­ti-crime sys­tem that can be main­tained over the long term, not oc­ca­sion­al ini­tia­tives that put a strain on lim­it­ed man­pow­er and re­sources but fail to do more than scratch the sur­face of a deeply-root­ed prob­lem.There is over­whelm­ing ev­i­dence of weak­ness­es in sev­er­al as­pects of polic­ing, well be­yond an abysmal de­tec­tion rate. Even when sus­pects are ar­rest­ed and charged, it is al­most im­pos­si­ble to get con­vic­tions be­cause of er­rors in the gath­er­ing and stor­ing of ev­i­dence, so that cas­es fall apart in the courts.

Strate­gies like strength­en­ing leg­is­la­tion and ac­quir­ing high-tech crime-fight­ing equip­ment will not work in the ab­sence of ef­fi­cient and ef­fec­tive ba­sic po­lice work.What is need­ed now is for the Gov­ern­ment to take mea­sures to strength­en man­pow­er with­in the TTPS and en­sure that of­fi­cers are prop­er­ly trained and de­ployed in suf­fi­cient num­bers to car­ry out foot and mo­bile pa­trols. Cler­i­cal and oth­er desk du­ties should be han­dled by civil­ian em­ploy­ees.Pri­or­i­ty must be giv­en to pub­lic safe­ty, tak­ing the crim­i­nals off T&T's streets and main­tain­ing law and or­der. On­ly when these fun­da­men­tal is­sues are ful­ly ad­dressed will it be pos­si­ble to suc­cess­ful­ly in­tro­duce new or amend­ed laws and op­ti­mise the use of ef­fec­tive crime-fight­ing equip­ment.