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