DA­REECE PO­LO

Se­nior Re­porter

da­reece.po­lo@guardian.co.tt

The Con­fed­er­a­tion of Re­gion­al Busi­ness Cham­bers (CR­BC) is call­ing for greater ac­count­abil­i­ty from the Gov­ern­ment on the is­sue of fight­ing crime.

CR­BC chair­man Vivek Char­ran yes­ter­day chal­lenged Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley’s claim that the Gov­ern­ment is still will­ing to hold crime talks with the Op­po­si­tion. He said Gov­ern­ment should take greater ac­count­abil­i­ty for the crime scourge and not pass the buck.

“Re­al­ly and tru­ly, the bur­den of the oblig­a­tion of keep­ing our na­tion safe is not up­on the Op­po­si­tion and it is cer­tain­ly not up­on any NGOs out there. It is re­al­ly up­on the Gov­ern­ment it­self, the Gov­ern­ment in pow­er and more par­tic­u­lar­ly, the Min­is­ter of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty and the Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice. They are the ones who are in the hot seat and they are the ones who are hold­ing the steer­ing wheel on this thing,” Char­ran said.

He was re­fer­ring to a state­ment by Row­ley on Tues­day that Gov­ern­ment was open for dis­cus­sion “with our par­lia­men­tary col­leagues” in re­la­tion to the fight against the crim­i­nal el­e­ment. Row­ley made the com­ment in the wake of the mur­ders of four Bel­mont men over the week­end, as he called on the pub­lic to re­view its re­la­tion­ship with the crim­i­nal el­e­ments in the coun­try.

Yes­ter­day, how­ev­er, Char­ran said law­break­ers are not in­ter­est­ed in walk­ing the straight path be­cause it is more lu­cra­tive to com­mit crimes and so­ci­ety no longer be­lieves that crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ty in T&T is the re­sult of pover­ty or lack of op­por­tu­ni­ties.

“I am say­ing that be­cause I don’t be­lieve that at this point in time, in 2024, that crim­i­nals want a job work­ing to de­liv­er box drains, to con­struct box drains. I don’t be­lieve that the crim­i­nals that are pick­ing up guns want food cards. I don’t be­lieve that the young men who are pick­ing up guns want to work an 8 am to 5 pm job at min­i­mum wage. I think they see crim­i­nal­i­ty, once again, as giv­ing them so much more than the straight and nar­row path would,” he said.

Al­so weigh­ing in on Dr Row­ley’s call was Greater San Fer­nan­do Area Cham­ber of Com­merce (GS­FCC) pres­i­dent Ki­ran Singh. He called for tougher penal­ties for peo­ple who flout the laws of this coun­try and plead­ed for the death penal­ty to be rein­tro­duced.

Singh said at­tor­neys are get­ting crim­i­nals off be­fore they even ful­ly en­ter the ju­di­cial sys­tem, so strength­en­ing the laws was nec­es­sary.

“We need stricter laws, the jus­tice sys­tem needs to be ex­pe­dit­ed, we need to have faster tri­als,” he said.

Al­though the death penal­ty re­mains the pun­ish­ment for mur­der, no ex­e­cu­tion has been car­ried out in this coun­try since 1999.

In a Face­book post fol­low­ing the quadru­ple mur­ders that start­ed in Bel­mont and end­ed at the Port-of-Spain Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal on Sun­day, Row­ley ex­pressed out­rage at the at­tack. He said of­fend­ers have lit­tle ex­pec­ta­tion that they will be iden­ti­fied, ar­rest­ed, con­vict­ed and prop­er­ly in­car­cer­at­ed, so they con­tin­ue to com­mit crimes.

Dr Row­ley al­so said mur­der­ers should not be “mol­ly­cod­dled” as that on­ly strength­ens their re­solve and polic­ing will be more ef­fec­tive if cit­i­zens share per­ti­nent in­for­ma­tion that leads to the de­ten­tion of crim­i­nals.

He said the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem must be swifter and Gov­ern­ment re­mains ready to hold crime talks with the Op­po­si­tion “if on­ly they will see it as their job too”.