An­na-Lisa Paul

Se­nior Re­porter

an­na-lisa.paul@guardian.co.tt

As­sis­tant Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice (ACP) Rishi Singh says crime in To­ba­go is large­ly be­ing fu­elled by mis­guid­ed young peo­ple.

Re­veal­ing this dur­ing yes­ter­day’s me­dia T&T Po­lice Ser­vice brief­ing at the Po­lice Ad­min­is­tra­tion Build­ing in Port-of-Spain, he con­firmed that the mur­der toll had con­tin­ued to slow­ly inch up­wards, while there had been an in­crease in Se­ri­ous Re­port­ed Crimes (SRCs) on the is­land.

De­spite this, he said de­tec­tion rates had in­creased.

He ad­mit­ted, “To­ba­go is ac­tu­al­ly the on­ly di­vi­sion in the coun­try where we had a one per cent in­crease in SRCs dur­ing this pe­ri­od.”

The pe­ri­od un­der re­view was Jan­u­ary 1 to date.

Ac­knowl­edg­ing the in­creas­es, Singh said the planned es­tab­lish­ment of two mi­cro po­lice units at Good­wood and Ply­mouth was ex­pect­ed to bring re­lief to the un­ten­able sit­u­a­tion.

He said the pri­or­i­ty lo­ca­tions were se­lect­ed based main­ly on ge­og­ra­phy, pop­u­la­tion num­bers and prox­im­i­ty to ex­ist­ing po­lice sta­tions.

Singh con­ced­ed that the rise in SRCs, cou­pled with the in­creased mur­der toll, was the re­sult of “psy­cho-so­cial changes that are oc­cur­ring in all our spaces, To­ba­go be­ing no dif­fer­ent.”

How­ev­er, he was quick to point out that, in a sim­i­lar fash­ion, de­tec­tion rates were al­so in­creas­ing.

He said, “We are de­liv­er­ing in the con­text of ap­pre­hend­ing more per­sons de­spite the fact that we have much more crimes.”

Re­veal­ing that they had been part­ner­ing with oth­er stake­hold­ers in a bid to ad­dress some of the un­der­ly­ing so­cial is­sues, such as youth delin­quen­cy, Singh said this was an area with the “great­est vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty.”

“The crimes we are see­ing are large­ly com­mit­ted by young per­sons and our strate­gies are fo­cused on pre­ven­tion through in­ter­face with them.”

He added, “We are a work in progress.”