The T&T Cham­ber is call­ing for col­lab­o­ra­tion and co­op­er­a­tion at the na­tion­al lev­el—an ‘all-hands-on-deck’ alert—to fight crime.

In a state­ment, the Cham­ber said it is, "dis­mayed and dis­tressed by the rate of homi­cides over­all, with an­guish over the most re­cent in­ci­dent in­volv­ing the trag­ic loss of four of our na­tion's young lives."

The Cham­ber stat­ed:

"The re­cent heinous killing of young chil­dren high­lights the ne­ces­si­ty for ur­gent ac­tion by all. Every day, we have heard of in­stances of var­i­ous crimes and acts of vi­o­lence and our mem­bers have al­so been af­fect­ed—some them­selves or their fam­i­lies, friends, or com­mu­ni­ties. Crime does not dis­crim­i­nate—it is a plague be­ing spread by a few peo­ple in our so­ci­ety."

It al­so posed the ques­tion, “What do we do as a na­tion to stop them?”, while ac­knowl­edg­ing crime as an is­sue need­ing a mul­ti-pronged ap­proach for sev­er­al rea­sons, as ar­tic­u­lat­ed by ex­perts.

"TTCIC al­so rec­og­nize there are sev­er­al non-gov­ern­men­tal or­ga­ni­za­tions (NGOs), civ­il so­ci­ety or­ga­ni­za­tions (CSOs), busi­ness ser­vice or­ga­ni­za­tions (BSOs), and oth­ers, who have been do­ing their part to try to as­sist. How­ev­er, it is ev­i­dent that the lead­er­ship of our coun­try needs to col­lab­o­rate and co­op­er­ate as part of the ef­fort, and we look for­ward to their meet­ing," the Cham­ber’s state­ment said.