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Thursday, July 17, 2025

Ag DCP: Religious leaders influencing people to lives of crime

by

Bavita Gopaulchan
1279 days ago
20220114
Acting Deputy Commissioner of Police Wendell Williams addresses members of the media during the police briefing at the Police Administration building, Port-of-Spain, yesterday.

Acting Deputy Commissioner of Police Wendell Williams addresses members of the media during the police briefing at the Police Administration building, Port-of-Spain, yesterday.

KERWIN PIERRE

There is con­cern that some gang mem­bers are fronting as re­li­gious lead­ers to in­flu­ence young peo­ple in­to a life of crime.

Act­ing Deputy Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er, Wen­dell Williams said these peo­ple are us­ing “false charis­ma” to re­cruit gang mem­bers.

“Some per­sons who in­flu­ence re­li­gion say that they are lead­ers in such and, then de­cide to en­cour­age peo­ple to do crime,” Williams lament­ed.

“The ques­tion in my mind is the one who cre­at­ed us, does he back up crime and evil,” he ques­tioned.

Williams is clear that it is not all re­li­gious lead­ers.

“The thing is, I do not want to sen­sa­tion­al­ize re­li­gious lead­ers but to iden­ti­fy the fact that you have in­di­vid­u­als who pur­port to be hold­ing that which is no­ble yet en­cour­ag­ing peo­ple down paths of just pure evil,” he lament­ed.

While he did not want to iden­ti­fy any re­li­gious group in­volved in such ac­tiv­i­ties, he said, “We have had a his­to­ry of cer­tain things so clear­ly there is ev­i­dence that cer­tain peo­ple use this as a medi­um to in­flu­ence oth­ers.”

“The fact of the mat­ter is we have to get our young peo­ple’s minds fo­cused in the right di­rec­tion and, so it’s not just an is­sue of fo­cus­ing or iden­ti­fy­ing where the sua­sion in gangs ex­ists and deal­ing with that,” he added.

Mean­while, Act­ing Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er, Mc­Don­ald Ja­cob is promis­ing to push back against crim­i­nal gangs and white-col­lar crim­i­nals this year.

This as he out­lined sev­er­al strate­gic plans the TTPS will be em­bark­ing on this year, in­clud­ing max­i­miz­ing the TTPS’ use of the an­ti-gang leg­is­la­tion.

For the past four years, Trinidad and To­ba­go has record­ed mur­ders av­er­ag­ing be­tween 430 and 440 peo­ple per year.

“This demon­strates to us that we need to do more in-depth analy­sis,” Ja­cob ad­mit­ted.

For the year thus far, there have been 25 mur­ders. How­ev­er, Williams said Jan­u­ary tends to be a bloody month with mur­ders av­er­ag­ing be­tween 46 and 60 over the last four years.

“For the month of Jan­u­ary in 2021 we had 25, (in) 2020 we had 46, (in) 2019 there was 40, (in) 2018 we had 60 and in 2017, 52,” he re­vealed.

“I on­ly bring these fig­ures just to say don’t be alarmed even though we are,” Williams added.

The North­ern Di­vi­sion con­tin­ues to be an area of con­cern record­ing the high­est crime rate as such, Act­ing Deputy Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er, Ear­la Christo­pher said a de­ci­sion has been tak­en to di­vide the di­vi­sion in­to two: North­ern Di­vi­sion – North and North­ern Di­vi­sion – North/Cen­tral.

More re­sources are ex­pect­ed to be pumped in­to these di­vi­sions which cov­er 51,000 house­holds.

Christo­pher said the TTPS ex­pects that this will re­duce vi­o­lent crimes over the next three months.

Last year po­lice seized 680 il­le­gal guns and over 12,000 rounds of as­sort­ed am­mu­ni­tion. A to­tal of 976 peo­ple were al­so charged with pos­ses­sion of il­le­gal guns and re­lat­ed of­fences.

Not­ing that there are too many guns in the coun­try, Ja­cob al­so promised to keep an eye on firearm deal­ers, train­ers and ranges. He not­ed that there are gaps in the le­gal sys­tem that need to be tight­en.

The Fi­nan­cial Stan­dards Bu­reau is al­so ex­pect­ed to be play­ing a “very ac­tive” role this year as ac­cord­ing to Ja­cob, there are se­ri­ous is­sues of mon­ey laun­der­ing.

— Bavi­ta Gopaulchan


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