DA­REECE PO­LO

Se­nior Re­porter

da­reece.po­lo@guardian.co.tt

Min­is­ter of Home­land Se­cu­ri­ty Roger Alexan­der yes­ter­day re­mained silent on the killing of 11-month-old Jay­den Sut­ton and his fa­ther Joseph Sut­ton, even as the State of Emer­gency (SoE) con­tin­ues.

The two were shot and killed at their St James home around 1 am on Tues­day, push­ing the na­tion­al mur­der toll to 89. A sep­a­rate killing in Laven­tille ear­ly Wednes­day morn­ing has since raised the fig­ure to 90.

The deaths have sparked out­rage on so­cial me­dia, with many ques­tion­ing the Gov­ern­ment’s in­ac­tion amid es­ca­lat­ing vi­o­lence.

Com­ment­ing on CNC3’s Face­book thread un­der the sto­ry of the mur­ders, Ver­lyn Roberts asked, “Where is Mr in­tel­li­gent?” in ref­er­ence to Alexan­der.

An­oth­er user, ‘Nalin Nali­ni,’ wrote: “Crime is at its high­est and the UNC sup­port­ers doh have a prob­lem with that be­cause YEL­LOW IS D CODE.”

Guardian Me­dia ap­proached Alexan­der for com­ment as he en­tered Par­lia­ment yes­ter­day, seek­ing his re­sponse to the mur­der of the young fa­ther and his in­fant son, and whether the Gov­ern­ment con­sid­ers it a mat­ter of con­cern.

The min­is­ter replied: “I love you all.”

When asked whether the Gov­ern­ment would re­con­sid­er in­tro­duc­ing a cur­few to the SoE, Alexan­der walked away, dis­ap­pear­ing be­hind the Par­lia­ment en­trance with­out re­spond­ing.

In­de­pen­dent Sen­a­tor Court­ney Mc­Nish de­scribed the mur­der of the Sut­tons as a “sad state of af­fairs.”

How­ev­er, fel­low In­de­pen­dent Sen­a­tor Fran­cis Lewis said the SoE’s ef­fec­tive­ness has waned and warned it does not build the in­sti­tu­tion­al tools need­ed to tack­le se­ri­ous crimes, in­clud­ing mur­ders.

“An SoE can help in cer­tain cir­cum­stances but its ef­fec­tive­ness ap­pears, and this seems to be in­ter­na­tion­al, ap­pears to di­min­ish over time. In oth­er words, you have a prob­lem, you use some­thing very se­vere to ad­dress it, it can ad­dress it but you can’t re­ly on that as your pri­ma­ry pre­scrip­tion,” he said.

“It does not lend it­self to on­go­ing work. What an SoE does is that it is re­mov­ing, on one hand, civ­il rights guar­an­teed to all our peo­ple un­der the Con­sti­tu­tion. On the oth­er hand, par­tic­u­lar­ly if it’s ef­fec­tive, it then does not al­ways en­cour­age the de­vel­op­ment of the tools that we need for deal­ing with crime and deal­ing with mur­der.”

Mean­while, Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment deputy leader San­jiv Bood­hu, speak­ing ahead of the de­bate on the Pro­ba­tion of Of­fend­ers (Amend­ment) Bill, crit­i­cised Gov­ern­ment’s han­dling of na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty, say­ing the SoE has not stemmed the surge in mur­ders.

“This Gov­ern­ment seems to be in­ca­pable of man­ag­ing var­i­ous sec­tors of gov­er­nance all at once,” Bood­hu said.

“The Gov­ern­ment is blow­ing hot and cold. On the one hand, they have a State of Emer­gency that is com­plete­ly in­ef­fec­tive and we’re here to­day ar­gu­ing a bill that seeks to al­low con­victs to go free ear­li­er. That’s what the pur­pose of this bill is. So, where is the pol­i­cy di­rec­tion of this Gov­ern­ment as it re­lates to the most im­por­tant fac­tor, na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty?”

He al­so ques­tioned whether Sut­ton was a wit­ness in a mur­der case and crit­i­cised the ab­sence of leg­is­la­tion to pro­tect state wit­ness­es.

“How are we ex­pect­ing to fight crime re­al­is­ti­cal­ly if your or­der of busi­ness to­day, in the midst of the sec­ond state of emer­gency in 12 months, is to come to Par­lia­ment to say ‘let’s fig­ure out how to let go crim­i­nals, con­vict­ed crim­i­nals, a lit­tle bit ear­li­er.’”