While ac­knowl­edg­ing the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty of the Gov­ern­ment in tack­ling crime, Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley al­so called on the pub­lic to do their part by steer­ing at risk youths away from crim­i­nal­i­ty.

Row­ley made the re­marks dur­ing his fea­ture ad­dress at a grad­u­a­tion cer­e­mo­ny at the Uni­ver­si­ty of the South­ern Caribbean (USC) yes­ter­day morn­ing.

While com­mend­ing the 800 grad­u­ates on their aca­d­e­m­ic suc­cess, he al­so not­ed the in­flu­ence they wield­ed and in­vit­ed them, to­geth­er with wider so­ci­ety, to share the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty of fight­ing crime at its cause.

Re­fer­ring to the re­gion­al sym­po­sium to treat crime as a pub­lic health cri­sis host­ed by this coun­try, in 2022, Row­ley said the prob­lem of crime de­mand­ed the par­tic­i­pa­tion of all seg­ments of so­ci­ety, in­clud­ing young pro­fes­sion­als and chal­lenged them to join the Gov­ern­ment in stop­ping crime at its source, with­in homes, church­es and the com­mu­ni­ty.

“Can you per­son­al­ly con­tribute by vol­un­teer­ing to the men­tor­ing of at least one young per­son in your house­hold, in our schools, our com­mu­ni­ties, in our church­es?

“The fight against crime is one that is best fought to­geth­er, we need you, our best and bright­est to use your sphere of in­flu­ence to join the Gov­ern­ment and rest of the na­tion in this ef­fort.

“This is­sue tran­scends pol­i­tics, eth­nic­i­ty, ide­ol­o­gy, na­tion­al­i­ty and ge­o­graph­ic lo­ca­tion, it strikes at the heart of Trinidad and To­ba­go and the Caribbean re­gion,” the Prime Min­is­ter said.

Re­fer­ring to Gov­ern­ment’s ex­pen­di­ture of an es­ti­mat­ed 10 per cent (ap­prox­i­mate­ly TT$6 bil­lion) of the na­tion­al bud­get on ed­u­ca­tion, Row­ley said this was a tes­ta­ment to his ad­min­is­tra­tion’s pri­ori­ti­sa­tion on skills train­ing, adding that ed­u­cat­ed peo­ple were less in­clined to fall in­to crim­i­nal­i­ty.

He added that de­spite fi­nan­cial dif­fi­cul­ties, the need for an ad­e­quate­ly re­sourced ed­u­ca­tion sec­tor was need­ed to op­ti­mise this coun­try’s hu­man re­source ca­pac­i­ties.

Not­ing the var­i­ous chal­lenges T&T and the re­gion faced, Row­ley stressed that the Caribbean should unite to ad­dress their is­sues as a com­mu­ni­ty, call­ing on com­pe­tent young pro­fes­sion­als to do their part.

“Gone are the days when our teach­ers, lawyers, ar­chi­tects, doc­tors, nurs­es, and tech­ni­cians had to come from some so-called de­vel­oped world.

“The Caribbean has, for many years, through the con­tri­bu­tion of the Uni­ver­si­ty of the South­ern Caribbean has been sup­ply­ing our­selves with pro­fes­sion­als of the high­est or­der,” he said.

Dur­ing his ad­dress, USC pres­i­dent Col­wick Wil­son re­port­ed that there was a slight in­crease in the num­ber of grad­u­ates in the class of 2024, with a grow­ing num­ber of stu­dents from the San Fer­nan­do cam­pus.

Wil­son added that there was al­so a 12 per cent in­crease in the num­ber of peo­ple grad­u­at­ing with first and sec­ond-class ho­n­ours com­pared to last year, adding that he was proud of these mile­stones achieved giv­en the uni­ver­si­ty’s hum­ble be­gin­nings.