Senior Reporter
dareece.polo@guardian.co.ttt
Police Commissioner Erla Harewood-Christopher has complained that the Trinidad and Tobago Police Service (TTPS) is facing unfair expectations from a public that demands that it pushes back against criminal elements who should have been better parented.
Speaking at the launch of the 2023 edition of the National Parenting Programme by the Ministry of Social Development and Family Services at the Belmont Community Centre, Jerningham Avenue, Belmont, Port-of-Spain, Harewood-Christopher said parenting remains a root cause or contributory factor to violence and criminality locally. She said it all starts at home and complained that parents’ failings are made the responsibility of law enforcement officials.
“What we are confronted with is an unrealistic expectation that the police can somehow miraculously transform the propensity, the disposition, the behaviours of people with criminal intent. How practical a proposition is that? Policing is not a substitute to parenting,” she said.
“The police as the law enforcement agency has its very definite role of ensuring the laws are enforced and that any infractions are detected and prosecuted. That role in a conscious society will have an effect on deterring and preventing crime but there’s also a very definite and perhaps more important role to be performed by parents and guardians in the nurturing of our young people and this role requires very deliberate actions,” she added.
The Police Commissioner also noted that intolerance, disrespect and insubordination are rampant in schools, culminating in violence among students, towards teachers and security officers. She said this breakdown also occurs within homes where parents appear to be relinquishing their authority to children.
Harewood-Christopher lamented that community elders no longer involve themselves in raising children as they sometimes face “violent objection” from parents. She said adults now avoid reprimanding deviant behaviour in even the youngest of children. The bad behaviour then escalates into offences that are punishable by law.
“Whether the offender survives or ends up dead, the whole of society then cries out to the police to solve the problem. By then it is too late,” she said.
The top cop further urged parents to live by example and to take their task of raising the nation’s future more seriously.
“Your children are learning from what you do. What you do and how you do it makes a difference. Teach your children respect.
Teach them to have a right sense of values. Be involved. We need adults to be involved in their child’s life. Being involved takes time and hard work and may even require a rearranging of your priorities. It frequently means sacrificing what you do for the sake and welfare of your child. When parents become an absentee, or neglect their children, they create a vacancy for someone else to fill and too often it is filled by persons of ill repute with the wrong influence,” she said.
Cox: Gang leaders ‘surrogate dads’
Social Development Minister Donna Cox agreed that absent parents are a huge part of Trinidad and Tobago’s problems, calling gang leaders “surrogate dads” and tablets or cellphones “surrogate moms”.
“In a situation where all of us are longing to belong to something or someone, it is not a difficult leap to see why so many of our young people are now falling prey to lives of destruction occasioned by their surrogate parents - the drug or the gang leaders or the tablet and the phones,” she said.
Cox said despite these issues, the National Parenting Programme offers hope as in the past four years, 1,029 parents have benefited from it.
Meanwhile, at the end of the conference, when Guardian Media attempted to interview Harewood-Christopher about recent crimes, she refused to answer questions, putting her hands up to gesticulate “no” and walking away.