Roger Alexander’s election success, achieved within weeks of his entry into the political arena, followed by his appointment as Minister of Homeland Security, puts him in a workspace that is vastly different from the T&T Police Service (TTPS), where he served for so many years.
Although policing is a major focus of his ministerial portfolio and the expectation is that his decades of crime fighting will be put to good use in his new role, the former senior police officer will have to develop some different skill sets for the assignment he has just taken on.
As a Government minister, Alexander will need much more than the goodwill that led to his victory in Tunapuna, where he shifted a People’s National Movement seat to the United National Congress with a convincing majority.
He faces a steep learning curve as he takes on the challenge of a ministry that, even with a name change and paring down of administrative responsibilities, is a heavy burden to shoulder.
Already set a tight timeline to deliver—Kamla Persad-Bissessar has promised to turn around T&T’s catastrophic crime situation in a matter of six months—Alexander will have to brace for public scrutiny that will be very different from the attention he used to get as a former senior superintendent and one-time co-host of the T&T Police Service’s Beyond the Tape television programme.
Tackling crime at the ministerial level in a country where the murder rate of 26 per 100,000 inhabitants surpasses Colombia and Mexico is a major undertaking, even for a man who spent most of his working life on the frontlines of the battle against crime.
T&T’s location as a transhipment point in the hemispheric drug trade makes this nation an epicentre of violence, where a deadly combination of gangs and guns has inflicted a high human toll.
On the campaign trail last month, Alexander pledged “to remove the dark clouds that are over not just Tunapuna but T&T.” It is now time, however, to translate that talk into action, not with the brute force of a police officer in pursuit of lawbreakers but by facilitating policies and programmes to reverse current crime trends.
To succeed where his predecessors in national security failed, Alexander will have to find the right balance between prevention and control, which means moving away from quick-fix states of emergencies and heavy-handed law enforcement strategies. That previous approach occasionally yielded arrests and drug and arms seizures but also caused an erosion of trust and concerns about extrajudicial violence.
In the search for the underlying causes of T&T’s crime crisis and to mitigate the violence, the Homeland Security Minister will have to pursue collaborations with agencies and groups beyond the law enforcement agencies under his purview. He should also revisit outreach programmes, community policing initiatives and other grassroots advocacy efforts to build trust between the TTPS and citizens.
In other jurisdictions, these kinds of collaborative efforts have been very effective in enhancing public safety and addressing the underlying socio-economic factors that contribute to criminality.
Alongside attorney Wayne Sturge, who has been tasked with other aspects of crime fighting and public safety at the Ministry of Defence, Alexander should work to shift the focus from retribution to rehabilitation, which is not a simple undertaking for a former policeman.
Winning the election was the easy part. Now the real work begins.
