Wes­ley Gib­bings

A Unit­ed Na­tions study, which was launched in Port-of-Spain yes­ter­day, re­ports that on­ly 25 per cent of the pop­u­la­tion ei­ther feel se­cure or "very se­cure" in Trinidad and To­ba­go, while just un­der 53 per cent have con­fi­dence in the po­lice to con­trol crime. These are among the find­ings of the Caribbean Hu­man De­vel­op­ment Re­port 2012 pub­lished by the Unit­ed Na­tions De­vel­op­ment Pro­gramme (UNDP). Both the "se­cu­ri­ty per­cep­tion" and po­lice con­fi­dence scores for this coun­try were among the low­est cit­ed in the study which spanned sev­en Caribbean Com­mu­ni­ty (Cari­com) coun­tries-An­tigua and Bar­bu­da, Bar­ba­dos, Guyana, Ja­maica, Saint Lu­cia, Suri­name and Trinidad and To­ba­go.

Of­fi­cial fig­ures cov­er­ing the pe­ri­od 1990-2010 place this coun­try sec­ond in per capi­ta homi­cide rates (35.2 per 100,000 and de­clin­ing, ac­cord­ing to the UN Of­fice on Drugs and Crime), be­hind Ja­maica (al­so de­clin­ing at 52.1 in 2010) and ahead of Saint Lu­cia (25.2), which is trend­ing up­ward. A team led by Di­rec­tor of the UWI (Mona) In­sti­tute of Crim­i­nal Jus­tice and Se­cu­ri­ty, Prof An­tho­ny Har­riott sur­veyed 11,555 per­sons in the sev­en coun­tries and held con­sul­ta­tions with 450 ex­perts in 2010 to come up with the find­ings of the re­port. Of­fi­cial sta­tis­tics were al­so used as part of the analy­sis. An overview of the re­port sug­gests "the el­e­vat­ed rates of vi­o­lent crime in the Caribbean may be tak­en as ev­i­dence of so­cial in­equal­i­ties that re­strict the choic­es to large sec­tions of the vul­ner­a­ble pop­u­la­tion." "Crime may thus right­ly be re­gard­ed as be­ing a pro­found­ly de­vel­op­men­tal prob­lem," the re­port says.

As a con­se­quence, the re­port pro­pos­es a va­ri­ety of mea­sures which ac­knowl­edges that "hu­man de­vel­op­ment, hu­man rights and cit­i­zen se­cu­ri­ty are in­ter­de­pen­dent." The UNDP Cit­i­zen Se­cu­ri­ty Sur­vey found that a re­gion­al av­er­age of 46 per cent of cit­i­zens ei­ther felt se­cure or very se­cure. Bar­ba­dos led with 79 per cent while Trinidad and To­ba­go trailed with 25 per cent. Among the youth, the re­gion­al "se­cu­ri­ty per­cep­tion" av­er­age was 40 per cent and the sur­vey re­ports that as many as 19.4 per cent of them had been vic­tims of some form of crime over the past ten years. Caribbean con­fi­dence in the po­lice to con­trol crime av­er­aged 66 per cent. In Trinidad and To­ba­go, 52.7 per cent ex­pressed "some amount of con­fi­dence" in the po­lice and 4.6 per cent said they had "a great deal of con­fi­dence." The sur­vey find­ings on "self-re­port­ed crim­i­nal vic­tim­i­sa­tion" placed this coun­try fourth in the list of coun­tries, with 10.2 per cent of those sur­veyed claim­ing they had re­port­ed crimes com­mit­ted against them. The lead­ing coun­try in this area of con­cern was An­tigua and Bar­bu­da with 11.2 per cent.

Sec­ond was Saint Lu­cia with 10.9 per cent and Bar­ba­dos, which scores high on its so­cial in­ter­ven­tion pro­grammes, was third with 10.8 per cent. This gen­er­at­ed some sur­prise among re­searchers in­volved in the project, giv­en Ja­maica and Trinidad and To­ba­go's high pro­file for vi­o­lent crime. The main rec­om­men­da­tions pro­posed by the re­port in­clude ac­tions to re­duce vic­tim­i­sa­tion, re­duce risk and build youth re­silience, con­trol street gangs and or­gan­ised crime, trans­form the po­lice, re­form the jus­tice sys­tem and build ca­pac­i­ty for "ev­i­dence based pol­i­cy.