Jensen La Vende

One every 16 hours. That is the rate at which in­ten­tion­al homi­cides were be­ing com­mit­ted, up to press time last night.In the un­like­ly event that the cur­rent mur­der rate con­tin­ues un­abat­ed, 2014 will see 547.5 mur­ders,the high­est since 2008, when the count to­talled 547.

Nor does the 2014 toll of 72com­pare favourably with last year's fig­ure for the same pe­ri­od, 55.

Along with the high toll, there is the is­sue ofde­tec­tion. Of the 46 mur­ders record­ed in Jan­u­ary 2014, on­ly five have been solved, ac­cord­ing to sta­tis­tics post­ed on the Po­lice Ser­vice web­site.Head of the Homi­cide Bu­reau ACP Wayne Dick in a tele­phone in­ter­view with the T&T Guardian yes­ter­day said while oth­er arms of the po­lice ser­vice are re­spon­si­ble for pre­vent­ing mur­ders, his 60 of­fi­cers are tasked with solv­ing them.Spe­cial train­ing is need­ed to help his of­fi­cers boost the de­tec­tion rate, DIck said.

"I have done much train­ing since com­ing to the Homi­cide Bu­reau in April last year and I am pur­su­ing fur­ther train­ing that would be ben­e­fi­cial to my of­fi­cers," Dick said.

The spe­cial­ist train­ing will have a pos­i­tive ef­fect on his of­fi­cers and boost their morale, Dick said.

Sim­ply send­ing his men to North Amer­i­ca for train­ing so that they can copy and paste what they learnt is not suf­fi­cient, he said. His of­fi­cers would have to find ways to cus­tomise for­eign tech­niques to the Trinidad and To­ba­go con­text. He said he would rec­om­mend six of­fi­cers be trained at a time, so that they could then train their coun­ter­parts.He com­mend­ed his of­fi­cers high­ly for demon­strat­ing deli­gence in spite of not hav­ing the de­sired train­ing.

Ac­cord­ing to da­ta on the coun­try's 2008-2013 mur­der rate, col­lect­ed by open jour­nal­ism source Bul­let Points, the month of Feb­ru­ary could see a de­crease in the amount of blood spilled.Over that six-year pe­ri­od, the lead-up to Car­ni­val saw a de­crease in mur­ders in all but two years. In 2009, 49 mur­ders were record­ed in the first month with sev­en more oc­cur­ring in Feb­ru­ary. In 2013, Jan­u­ary saw 38 peo­ple mur­dered, 47 the fol­low­ing month.

How­ev­er, the cor­re­la­tion be­tween the T&T Car­ni­val sea­son and the na­tion­wide de­crease in mur­ders may not be a causal one.