To the chil­dren left be­hind af­ter their par­ents have been killed by a ban­dit, there is not much any­one can say to of­fer com­fort. Crime is with us and it is not a T&T thing. Through­out the world there are bad peo­ple, re­al­ly ter­ri­ble peo­ple who are in­tent on a crim­i­nal way of life. This is not a po­lit­i­cal par­ty prob­lem, it is a prob­lem of mod­ern so­ci­ety. Crime's root is like that of a fi­brous root as op­posed to a tap root. The var­i­ous con­trib­u­tors are drugs, tele­vi­sion, vi­o­lent video games, poor par­ent­ing, lack of spir­i­tu­al di­rec­tion, ed­u­ca­tion, peer pres­sure, eco­nom­ics and much more. How we deal with this will de­ter­mine our abil­i­ty to grow as a na­tion or de­te­ri­o­rate to the lev­el of crime-rid­den states like Mex­i­co City. We are for­tu­nate in that the first steps to­wards curb­ing crime are al­ready in place: there is a po­lice sta­tion in al­most every dis­trict. The oth­er steps are miss­ing how­ev­er.

We need to now place ad­e­quate ve­hi­cles at these cen­tres to pa­trol the dis­tricts. This must be fol­lowed up by plan­ning all the pa­trol routes and en­sur­ing that there are ad­e­quate po­lice to pa­trol the ar­eas.

The pa­trols must then be mon­i­tored by GPS tech­nol­o­gy. Civil­ians, prefer­able those with le­gal train­ing, should be the ones at the sta­tion tak­ing state­ments and an­swer­ing phone calls, prepar­ing doc­u­ments for cer­tifi­cates of good char­ac­ter, tak­ing fin­ger­prints and oth­er cler­i­cal du­ties. This should free up more po­lice per­son­nel to man the pa­trol ar­eas. This sin­gle el­e­ment (struc­tured po­lice pa­trols) will have the great­est im­pact on crime and re­store a sense of calm and con­fi­dence to our cit­i­zens.

The mur­ders last week may not have been pre­vent­ed if there were a po­lice pa­trol in the area, but there is a very like­ly pos­si­bil­i­ty that the per­pe­tra­tors would have been caught. There sim­ply is no way to es­cape plac­ing po­lice pa­trols in a struc­tured way in our com­mu­ni­ties. There are in­di­ca­tions that the Gov­ern­ment is se­ri­ous­ly look­ing at im­ple­ment­ing this type of pa­trol in the fu­ture. The soon­er the bet­ter. It is my hum­ble view that noth­ing else would have the kind of im­pact that dai­ly pa­trols in all our dis­tricts can have. My wish for all of T&T is for 2011 to be a year when we see po­lice pa­trols in our com­mu­ni­ties and once again feel a sense of se­cu­ri­ty in our na­tion. God bless T&T.