An­na-Lisa Paul

Se­nior Re­porter

an­nal­isa.paul@guardian.co.tt

Yes­ter­day marked six months since Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice (CoP) Er­la Hare­wood-Christo­pher as­sumed of­fice, tak­ing charge of the na­tion’s main se­cu­ri­ty ap­pa­ra­tus with the promise to bring a re­duc­tion to homi­cides and oth­er vi­o­lent crimes in the short­est time pos­si­ble.

Of­fi­cial sta­tis­tics from the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice (TTPS) yes­ter­day in­di­cat­ed a to­tal of 286 mur­ders had oc­curred for this year thus far, com­pared to 259 for the same pe­ri­od last year, a to­tal of 27 more killings this year than last year.

Mean­while, the com­par­a­tive month­ly mur­der rate was said to be 44 up to 5 pm yes­ter­day, June 30, com­pared to 36 for June 2022.

Hare­wood-Christo­pher could not be reached for her per­spec­tive on the mur­der rate since Jan­u­ary as well as her analy­sis on what crime-fight­ing ini­tia­tives had been in­tro­duced, if they had yield­ed the de­sired re­sults and/or what was lack­ing.

With 27 more mur­ders record­ed in the first six months of this year com­pared to last year, crim­i­nol­o­gist Dr Randy Seep­er­sad ex­am­ined the is­sue on a deep­er lev­el as he ex­plained, “With 605 mur­ders record­ed at the end of 2022, and 259 of them oc­cur­ring in the first six months, there was a high­er pro­por­tion of mur­ders in the lat­ter half of the year.”

Look­ing at cur­rent trends, he said fol­low­ing last year’s record num­ber, this year’s mur­der toll could reach as high as 660 or maybe even more when one com­pared the sta­tis­tics.

Ac­knowl­edg­ing the in­creased num­ber of killings in which two and three lives were be­ing lost at once, Seep­er­sad said, “If you have a high­er propen­si­ty of in­ci­dents oc­cur­ring with mul­ti­ple mur­ders hap­pen­ing, that it­self is a very, very bad sign. This means peo­ple are be­com­ing ei­ther more cal­lous or more vi­o­lent, to the point where they don’t care about the col­lat­er­al dam­age.”

Look­ing back at in­ci­dents be­tween 2022 to present in which chil­dren were killed as gun­men dis­played a dis­re­gard and dis­re­spect for hu­man life, the head of UWI’s Crim­i­nol­o­gy De­part­ment spec­u­lat­ed that this could be a con­tin­u­ing trend go­ing for­ward.

“It’s too soon to say that, but my hon­est guess would be yes be­cause the mur­der sta­tis­tics have been go­ing up and up, that’s the sim­ple fact. And what it sug­gests in the long term is that it is sim­ply go­ing to get worse if we don’t keep do­ing some­thing about crime.”

Seep­er­sad said, how­ev­er, it would be mis­lead­ing to just look at the mur­der sta­tis­tics to de­ter­mine po­lice per­for­mance.

“You have to look at the broad­er range of things that the po­lice are in­volved in,” he said.