Open let­ter to Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Jack Warn­er: Your ini­tial com­ments, once again, give us great hope and im­mense ex­pec­ta­tions from you and your min­istry. I am par­tic­u­lar­ly en­cour­aged by your can­did state­ment about con­sul­ta­tion with all stake­hold­ers and your will­ing­ness to lis­ten to new and in­no­v­a­tive ideas. It is in this con­text that I am propos­ing an idea which I strong­ly be­lieve will as­sist in the pre­ven­tion and de­tec­tion of crime. It is a sim­ple and ef­fec­tive strat­e­gy and, most im­por­tant­ly, will not re­quire any cap­i­tal ex­pen­di­ture by the State nor place a fi­nan­cial bur­den on tax­pay­ers.

Tech­nol­o­gy has now en­abled video sur­veil­lance sys­tems for home/busi­ness and is quick­ly be­com­ing a com­mod­i­ty. So­phis­ti­cat­ed home mon­i­tor­ing sys­tems are now with­in the bud­get range of the av­er­age home or busi­ness own­er. I am sug­gest­ing that as part of the crime plan the Gov­ern­ment en­cour­ages cit­i­zens to in­stall these sys­tems in their homes or busi­ness places by re­mov­ing the im­port tax­es and du­ties on home video sur­veil­lance sys­tems and com­po­nents. This plan is sim­i­lar to one im­ple­ment­ed by a pre­vi­ous gov­ern­ment in re­mov­ing the im­port tax­es and du­ties on per­son­al com­put­ers. This strat­e­gy had a tremen­dous­ly pos­i­tive im­pact on the lev­el of IT aware­ness and will con­tin­ue to keep T&T in the com­pet­i­tive are­na of IT and telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions. The same im­pact could be ex­pect­ed in the fight against crime.

Carl Ra­jack

St Au­gus­tine