Jessie Ramdeo

At­tor­ney Gen­er­al John Je­re­mie on Fri­day led de­bate in the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives on a mo­tion to ex­tend the State of Emer­gency (SoE) for an­oth­er three months, say­ing the mea­sure re­mains a vi­tal tool in the State’s ef­forts to dis­man­tle crim­i­nal gangs and dis­rupt or­gan­ised crime net­works.

Je­re­mie said the SoE should not be viewed as the gov­ern­ment’s crime-fight­ing plan, but as a tar­get­ed re­sponse de­signed to sup­port law en­force­ment agen­cies en­gaged in sen­si­tive an­ti-gang op­er­a­tions. He ex­plained that se­cu­ri­ty agen­cies had re­quest­ed the ex­ten­sion to main­tain the mo­men­tum of on­go­ing op­er­a­tions, warn­ing that end­ing the emer­gency mea­sures pre­ma­ture­ly could un­der­mine months of in­tel­li­gence-gath­er­ing and en­force­ment work.

While ac­knowl­edg­ing that mur­ders have de­clined since the SoE was de­clared, Je­re­mie cau­tioned against por­tray­ing the emer­gency pow­ers as a cure for vi­o­lent crime. He de­scribed the re­duc­tion in homi­cides as an in­di­rect but pos­i­tive out­come of a wider se­cu­ri­ty ap­proach.

Op­po­si­tion MP for Port of Spain South Kei­th Scot­land ques­tioned the gov­ern­ment’s fail­ure to pro­vide ev­i­dence or da­ta to jus­ti­fy the ex­ten­sion. He ar­gued that cur­rent op­er­a­tions aimed at tack­ling gangs and dis­man­tling net­works formed part of nor­mal polic­ing, mak­ing the SoE un­nec­es­sary.

Scot­land said the gov­ern­ment can­not be trust­ed in its words or ac­tions and warned that the ab­sence of ev­i­dence for main­tain­ing the SoE sig­nalled a move to­wards au­thor­i­tar­i­an­ism and away from democ­ra­cy.