Act­ing Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice Mc Don­ald Ja­cob says he’s not sur­prised that Trinidad and To­ba­go was ranked sixth amongst coun­tries with the high­est crime rates in a re­port post­ed by the World Pop­u­la­tion Re­view.

The re­port states that “Trinidad and To­ba­go’s Gov­ern­ment faces sev­er­al chal­lenges in its ef­fects to re­duce crime, such as bu­reau­crat­ic re­sis­tance to change, the neg­a­tive in­flu­ence of gangs, drugs, eco­nom­ic re­ces­sion and an over­bur­dened le­gal sys­tem.”

Ad­dress­ing this on Fri­day, Ja­cob said, “I need to see the man­ner in which they did the analy­sis to come up with which placed Trinidad and To­ba­go in sixth place and I be­lieve it is for the first quar­ter (of 2022) and we will ad­mit that in the first four months of this year, we have had high in­ci­dents of crime and I am not a bit sur­prised be­cause last year, we would have end­ed up in ninth place in the analy­sis. But I will need to see who did it and how it was done but it is a good guide for us and if it changes at the end of six months or the year, we will be look­ing for­ward to an­swer sim­i­lar ques­tions on why it moved from sixth place to 15th place or 20th place, we will want the me­dia to al­so fol­low that.”

Ja­cob was speak­ing fol­low­ing an ap­pre­ci­a­tion cer­e­mo­ny for Earnest Con­stan­tine, of Paramin, at the House of An­gos­tu­ra in Laven­tille. Con­stan­tine was her­ald­ed for his hon­esty af­ter find­ing a bag con­tain­ing thou­sands of dol­lars and re­turn­ing it to its right­ful own­er.

Al­so com­ment­ing on the crime sit­u­a­tion at the event, Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Fitzger­ald Hinds said hu­man lives are now be­ing treat­ed by crim­i­nals like “dogs on the road.” He lament­ed the re­cent mur­der of Jim­my Thomas in San­gre Grande for “a dirty lit­tle gold chain.”

He said when a life is tak­en so cheap­ly, it de­hu­man­is­es the na­tion.

“It cost hu­man­i­ty some loss be­cause when you see lives tak­en cheap­ly like dogs, like dogs on the road that some ve­hi­cle would smoth­er, it takes away from our hu­man­i­ty be­cause God could have cre­at­ed us to be any­thing else but he gave us a hu­man spir­it, so every time we see a life tak­en so aim­less­ly and so fool­ish­ly for one dirty lit­tle gold chain, it cheap­ens all of us.”

He added that the crime cost the com­mu­ni­ty of San­gre Grande a friend, broth­er and con­trib­u­tor.

Hinds said crime is a mov­ing tar­get and there is no overnight fix but not­ed the Gov­ern­ment is al­lo­cat­ing the nec­es­sary re­sources to com­bat the prob­lem. How­ev­er, he said a ma­jor fac­tor of crime has to do with so­ci­ety’s lev­els of pro­duc­tiv­i­ty.

“If all of us who are paid to do jobs do them, you will find that the so­ci­ety will be bet­ter or­gan­ised and we will get more done, chil­dren will learn bet­ter in school, their psy­cho­log­i­cal needs will be bet­ter tak­en care of, par­ents will do bet­ter jobs as par­ents, law en­force­ment will do a bet­ter job by be­ing present, so I think and no­body wants to dis­cuss it, but there is al­so a di­rect re­la­tion­ship be­tween our fail­ure to work as dili­gent­ly as we all should and its con­tri­bu­tion to the prob­lems that we face.”

Mean­while, Ja­cob was al­so asked to re­spond to a 2020 Strate­gic Ser­vices Agency an­nu­al re­port laid in the Sen­ate on Tues­day, which said il­le­gal firearms seized by the po­lice from vi­o­lent crim­i­nals are mak­ing their way back in­to the hands of gang mem­bers.

Ja­cob said this was a “long time thought.”

“What I can tell you, with­in the last few years we have tight­ened up things sig­nif­i­cant­ly, so that ques­tion of whether or not the firearms are be­ing re­cy­cled will be elim­i­nat­ed. As you are aware, we have set up a one-stop-shop at our Spe­cial Ev­i­dence Re­cov­ery Unit in Cu­mu­to and we al­so have the guid­ance for the po­lice of­fi­cers that the firearms must reach there in a par­tic­u­lar time. Now, with the open­ing of the Bal­lis­tics De­part­ment, if a firearm came there and it comes again, they will be able to iden­ti­fy it im­me­di­ate­ly and the of­fi­cers will be held ac­count­able.”