In our lead story in Tuesday's Guardian, we reported on armed gangs terrorising the Santa Rosa community in Arima. And, within hours of the residents' concerns being highlighted, police patrols were passing at regular intervals through the neighbourhood, as noted in Wednesday's follow-up story.
But is this anything more than a public relations response? The Santa Rosa Heights development has about 1,800 houses and the upsurge in robberies started about two months ago. Two recent incidents, where both victims were Chinese nationals, happened within sight of the Pinto Road police post. Assistant Commissioner of Police Surajdeen Persad told the Guardian that mobile patrols in the area had been increased and the police were investigating the gang. Up to the time the Guardian broke the story, however, these investigations had clearly had no effect.
According to the residents, one group of bandits in Santa Rosa works in collusion with another gang from Pinto Road. The bandits ride around on bicycles and monitor the movements of residents and business owners during the day, then pass on the information to the second gang, which carries out the robberies.
Now if this is indeed the modus operandi of the gangs, then tracking and catching them should be a relatively simple exercise. If criminals are targeting a particular community, they must establish a pattern and it should be possible for the police to set up an operation to hold them in the act.
Instead, the police have opted for visible patrols, which the residents had, admittedly, been calling for. But will this accomplish anything in the long term?
As long as the police are patrolling Santa Rosa Heights, the gangs will lie low. But the bandits know well that the police will not keep up this number of patrols, since vehicles and officers have to be deployed according to priorities. And, as soon as the crime rate declines, Santa Rosa ceases to be a priority, allowing the criminals to resume their robberies and assaults.
Moreover, even if these particular gangs decide that the area no longer offers sufficiently easy pickings, they will just move on to terrorise some other neighbourhood. That is why regular patrols are just a plaster on this particular sore.
Indeed, the fact that the hierarchy of the Police Service decided on this particular response suggests that their aim was never to actually catch the perpetrators–unless, of course, ACP Persad was being tight-lipped about the investigation because arrests are imminent.
Why this has not happened yet is anyone's guess, but presumably the police by now understand that not merely being reactive is essential to containing crime in T&T. In the absence of effective police action, the residents, like many other citizens in other neighbourhoods, have started taking additional security precautions, ranging from burglar-proofing to cameras to simply limiting their movements outside. But, even if self-imposed, such measures abrogate citizens' rights to freedom and security.
The continual failure of the authorities for the past decade to make any real inroads into blunting the effects of gangs have emboldened the criminals, to the extent that more police officers are being wounded and killed in the line of duty. From that perspective alone, the strategists of the TTPS should avoid using the tried and failed tactics and start to see innovation as a life-saving approach.