Jensen La Vende 

Se­nior Re­porter 

jensen.lavende@guardian.co.tt 

With the mur­der toll at 408 up to yes­ter­day, crim­i­nol­o­gist Dr Wen­dell Wal­lace says the coun­try is on the path to an his­toric mur­der toll. 

Speak­ing with Guardian Me­dia, Wal­lace said the alarm­ing trend of mul­ti­ple deaths from mass shoot­ings was pro­pelling the fig­ures. 

“In my es­ti­ma­tion, there can be a sit­u­a­tion where we might be break­ing the record that has been set in the last two to three years.” 

The coun­try had the high­est mur­der toll of 605 in 2022, ac­cord­ing to the po­lice ser­vice.

Wal­lace added that if there are more polic­ing ac­tiv­i­ties, not just pa­trols but look­ing at the so­cial as­pect and root caus­es of crime, this would com­bat the in­creas­ing mur­der toll. 

“How­ev­er, the wor­ry­ing is­sue is that you find a lot of the homi­cides are not oc­cur­ring in the sin­gle dig­its,” he said.

“Hope­ful­ly, that will not con­tin­ue. In the years gone by, what would have worked were in­ter­ven­tions, try­ing to get the gangs to stop war­ring among them­selves, so that might be some­thing that we can use to re­duce the homi­cide rate.” 

Com­ment­ing on strate­gies to be im­ple­ment­ed to pre­vent an­oth­er 600-plus mur­der toll, Deputy Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice Ju­nior Ben­jamin yes­ter­day said ad­dress­ing crime is an “all hands on deck” and called on the pub­lic to as­sist the po­lice. He added that with the strate­gies in place, he is con­fi­dent that the mur­der toll will not reach the 600 re­gions. 

“The TTPS, we are very con­fi­dent that, with the strate­gies that we have put in place, based on the Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice vi­o­lent re­duc­tion plan and our op­er­a­tional plan that we will be able to cur­tail the death toll reach­ing such an ex­or­bi­tant, pre­dictable out­come that per­sons might want to say 600.” 

Ben­jamin said the po­lice were tak­ing it “one day at a time” as they im­ple­ment­ed the strate­gies in the crime re­duc­tion plans. He ad­vised that there would not be an in­stant turn­around.

He said the po­lice were do­ing holis­tic in­ves­ti­ga­tions to bring per­pe­tra­tors to jus­tice. 

Ben­jamin said the crime sup­pres­sion and pre­ven­tion strate­gies will help in ad­dress­ing the grow­ing mur­der toll. 

“We want the pub­lic to work with us be­cause once they work with us, we are cer­tain that with our strate­gies we will not reach those records that peo­ple are pre­dict­ing, that seem out­ra­geous at this time.”