Res­i­dents of Ste Madeleine and oth­er ar­eas in South Trinidad are echo­ing the con­cerns of many com­mu­ni­ties across the coun­try, say­ing crime and the fear of crime is keep­ing some of them awake at night.

The res­i­dents made the com­ment as they met with se­nior mem­bers of the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice on Wednes­day evening at the Ste Madeleine Sec­ondary School, in an ef­fort to ad­dress some of their se­cu­ri­ty con­cerns.

One of the is­sues they had was the slow re­sponse of po­lice, in­clud­ing fol­low­ing calls via the 999 hot­line, and a gen­er­al dis­trust of mak­ing re­ports through the hot­line.

Sergeant An­ge­lene Bas­sarath, who rep­re­sent­ed the TTPS, gave res­i­dents the as­sur­ance that their re­ports would be han­dled with con­fi­den­tial­i­ty. In an ef­fort to fur­ther al­lay their fears, she of­fered her per­son­al mo­bile con­tact.

The role of par­ents came un­der the spot­light, with one res­i­dent say­ing par­ents were fail­ing their chil­dren. How­ev­er, she al­so point­ed out that crimes were not on­ly be­ing com­mit­ted by young and un­em­ployed per­sons.

“Par­ents need to un­der­stand their roles and un­der­stand that they do have oth­er choic­es, be­cause young peo­ple go­ing astray and they are just a per­cent­age of the peo­ple com­mit­ting the crime. We have grown peo­ple that are com­mit­ting the crime be­cause there is cor­rup­tion, and four peo­ple in one fam­i­ly didn’t die be­cause a young boy had his pants be­low his bot­tom, is be­cause some­body made a bad deal some­where and some­body gun­ning down a fam­i­ly, that is the re­al­i­ty of it.”

An­oth­er res­i­dent, who iden­ti­fied her­self as a re­cov­er­ing ad­dict and a moth­er of eight, ad­mit­ted to fail­ing her chil­dren, as she said her ad­dic­tion, as well as her hus­band’s, de­stroyed their fam­i­ly, and led to two of her chil­dren be­com­ing ad­dict­ed to drugs. She agreed that many par­ents were to blame for the delin­quen­cy of their chil­dren.