Leah So­rias

The lives of 506 peo­ple were snuffed out last year, ac­cord­ing to da­ta from the Min­istry of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty. But, while not­ing that re­duc­ing crime was the min­istry's main agen­da for 2010, Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Mar­tin Joseph said T&T had al­ready seen a 7.6 per cent re­duc­tion last year. He point­ed out that in 2008, there were 548 mur­ders, 42 more than than the fig­ure for 2009. He said be­cause of the Gov­ern­ment's in­vest­ment in law en­force­ment "tan­gi­ble re­sults" were be­ing seen. Joseph added that apart from the re­duc­tion in mur­ders, there was an in­crease in the rate of solved mur­ders–from 18.1 per cent in 2008 to 26.3 per cent last year.

It was on­ly on Wednes­day that act­ing Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice James Philbert high­light­ed that out of the 547 mur­ders in 2008, on­ly 20 were solved. He not­ed that there were no mur­ders this Christ­mas hol­i­days, un­like pre­vi­ous years. Joseph list­ed his main ob­jec­tives for next year which in­cludes:

1. en­sur­ing pub­lic safe­ty;

2. bring­ing more crim­i­nals to jus­tice;

3. pro­vid­ing the tools re­quired to fight crime; and

4. re­view­ing leg­is­la­tion to change the way we ap­proach crime-fight­ing.

"I am ded­i­cat­ed to build­ing on the good work that has be­gun in 2009," Joseph said. "Our top pri­or­i­ty for 2010 is to do every­thing to dri­ve down the mur­der rate and re­store con­fi­dence in our law en­force­ment agen­cies by the qual­i­ty of our ser­vice."