Last Sun­day af­ter­noon's ex­e­cu­tion-style killing of three young men in Gon­za­les, fol­lowed a few hours lat­er by the kid­nap­ping of a 44-year-old moth­er of Val­sayn, is an in­di­ca­tion that there has been no sig­nif­i­cant abate­ment in T&T's crime scourge with the late April change of gov­ern­ment.

As it per­tains to mur­ders, the num­bers are clear: In the 118 days be­tween Jan­u­ary 1 and April 28, 2025, there were 126 mur­ders, which is more than one mur­der a day.

In the 74 days be­tween May 3 and Ju­ly 15, 2025, there were 81 mur­ders, which is al­so more than one mur­der a day.

For the year to yes­ter­day, T&T ex­pe­ri­enced a to­tal of 213 mur­ders, which is 34.4 per cent few­er than for the same pe­ri­od in 2024. It is for the new Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice to tell the na­tion the ex­tent to which the im­po­si­tion of the 105-day State of Emer­gency from De­cem­ber 30, 2024, to April 13, 2025, is re­spon­si­ble for the re­duc­tion in the num­ber of mur­ders be­tween this year and the last.

It is clear that nei­ther of this coun­try's two main po­lit­i­cal par­ties can take cred­it for the de­cline in the mur­der rate. And nei­ther par­ty should take cred­it be­cause crime in gen­er­al, and mur­ders in par­tic­u­lar, touch every com­mu­ni­ty in T&T, with crime re­main­ing a ma­jor front burn­er is­sue in this coun­try. Curb­ing crime is sim­ply too im­por­tant an is­sue for it to be kicked around like some po­lit­i­cal foot­ball and for the ad­min­is­tra­tion that scores a goal to claim that it has won the game.

Clear­ly, both main par­ties need to work to­geth­er in Par­lia­ment to craft new laws aimed at re­duc­ing all se­ri­ous crimes. This in­cludes so-called white-col­lar crime, which is of­ten the means by which the coun­try's crim­i­nal gangs laun­der the pro­ceeds of their drug traf­fick­ing, gun-run­ning, pros­ti­tu­tion, ex­tor­tion rack­ets and kid­nap­pings for ran­som.

Al­so, there needs to be a care­ful­ly de­signed in­de­pen­dent re­search project aimed at es­tab­lish­ing whether the cur­rent ad­min­is­tra­tion's two main an­ti-crime ideas—the pro­posed stand-your-ground leg­is­la­tion and the free­ing up of the dis­tri­b­u­tion of li­censed firearms—would re­sult in an ap­pre­cia­ble re­duc­tion in the mur­der rate.

More im­por­tant­ly, the Gov­ern­ment needs to an­swer these ques­tions: Does T&T have an Ar­ti­fi­cial In­tel­li­gence (AI) pol­i­cy for law en­force­ment, such as has been rolled out in most ad­vanced economies and even in many third-world coun­tries? Is there a plan to com­bine AI's pat­tern-recog­ni­tion and oth­er ca­pa­bil­i­ties with cut­ting-edge telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions in­ter­cep­tion tech­nolo­gies and next-lev­el CCTV, so that the po­lice have a tech­no­log­i­cal ad­van­tage over the crim­i­nals?

What is al­so miss­ing from crime fight­ing in T&T is the new foren­sic sci­ence cen­tre, which was the sub­ject of tech­ni­cal co­op­er­a­tion agree­ments signed by the for­mer Min­is­ter of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty and the Am­bas­sador of the Peo­ple's Re­pub­lic of Chi­na in Port-of-Spain in No­vem­ber 2023.

In its man­i­festo for the 2025 Gen­er­al Elec­tion, the Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress (UNC) promised that it would re­duce se­ri­ous crime by 50 per cent with­in five years by un­der­tak­ing the most com­pre­hen­sive over­haul of the jus­tice and na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty sys­tems in decades.

If that promised over­haul is able to com­bine 21st-cen­tu­ry tech­nolo­gies with boots-on-the-ground polic­ing and com­mu­ni­ties that are en­gaged to sup­press crime, the 50 per cent re­duc­tion in se­ri­ous crime with­in five years may be pos­si­ble and would cer­tain­ly be wel­comed.