BAVI­TA GOPAULCHAN

bavi­ta.gopaulchan@guardian.co.tt

With the ris­ing cost of liv­ing threat­en­ing to wors­en the coun­try’s crime sit­u­a­tion, one crim­i­nol­o­gist be­lieves us­ing a pub­lic health mod­el is the right ap­proach to tack­le the prob­lem.

On Ju­ly 2, Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley an­nounced he was giv­ing con­sid­er­a­tion to de­clar­ing crime a pub­lic health emer­gency. On Mon­day, he of­fi­cial­ly made the de­c­la­ra­tion, say­ing plans were al­ready in mo­tion.

Since his state­ment, many have been seek­ing clar­i­ty on what Dr Row­ley meant.

How­ev­er, ac­cord­ing to Dr Randy Seep­er­sad, the con­cept is not new to the Caribbean.

“US­AID has put out a call to do an in­ter­ven­tion, ex­act­ly based on the pub­lic health mod­el in four Caribbean coun­tries and US­AID has ac­tu­al­ly put 30 mil­lion US dol­lars on the ta­ble, and they ac­tu­al­ly did an in­ter­ven­tion sim­i­lar not too long ago. In fact, that in­ter­ven­tion fin­ished in 2020, in three oth­er Caribbean coun­tries, and they spend mil­lions and mil­lions of dol­lars. So, en­ti­ties like US­AID, the In­ter-Amer­i­can De­vel­op­ment Bank, et cetera, they give mon­ey to gov­ern­ments, and I’m not talk­ing lend­ing mon­ey, I’m talk­ing giv­ing mon­ey,” Dr Seep­er­sad said.

The mod­el has been used in Ja­maica, Guyana, St Kitts/Nevis and St Lu­cia. Dr Seep­er­sad not­ed that US­AID plans to utilise this ap­proach in Guyana, Grena­da, St Lu­cia and St Vin­cent and the Grenadines over the next five years.

At a press con­fer­ence on Mon­day, Dr Row­ley was asked whether the Gov­ern­ment will seek in­ter­na­tion­al fund­ing for this ini­tia­tive, to which he re­spond­ed by say­ing it was a pos­si­ble av­enue.

Dr Seep­er­sad said yes­ter­day that the pub­lic health mod­el ties in with a re­search piece re­cent­ly com­plet­ed by his team. The find­ings were sub­mit­ted to the Min­istry of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty last week.

“What that par­tic­u­lar re­port ac­tu­al­ly does, is it gives a very de­tailed analy­sis of the coun­try, things like the dri­vers and the crime sit­u­a­tion and the ex­pe­ri­ences of peo­ple in the coun­try. So, you know for a whole range of crime where the prob­lem is more acute; you know what peo­ple’s ex­pe­ri­ences are; you know what some of the dri­vers are; you know when you look at oth­er things like con­fi­dence in the po­lice, con­fi­dence in the courts, con­fi­dence in the reg­i­ment, et cetera,” he ex­plained.

Since the year 2000, Dr Seep­er­sad said crime has been per­sis­tent­ly in­creas­ing and should sig­nal to those in pow­er that its cur­rent strat­e­gy is not work­ing.

De­scrib­ing the cur­rent strat­e­gy as “re­ac­tive”, he said, “There are fac­tors that are un­der­ly­ing and caus­ing the crime. Things like the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem on­ly rarely come in­to play af­ter the crime has hap­pened”.

He warned that crime could wors­en if the price of goods and ser­vices con­tin­ues to climb.

Asked whether more youths are en­gag­ing in crim­i­nal gang-re­lat­ed ac­tiv­i­ties, he said, “Of­fi­cial crime da­ta from the TTPS is that youths are ac­tu­al­ly en­gaged in a very small pro­por­tion - close to 1.5 per cent of all vi­o­lent crimes - and that fig­ure has re­mained con­sis­tent over the last 10 years”.

He in­di­cat­ed, how­ev­er, that school vi­o­lence has been slight­ly in­creas­ing.