Shane Su­perville

Se­nior Re­porter

shane.su­perville@guardian.co.tt

Days af­ter a three-month ex­ten­sion to the State of Emer­gency (SoE) was an­nounced, 16 pre­ven­ta­tive de­ten­tion or­ders were is­sued for peo­ple iden­ti­fied as be­ing part of or­gan­ised crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ty, as crime-fight­ing ef­forts con­tin­ue na­tion­wide.

Dur­ing a sit­ting of the Low­er House on Fri­day, a mo­tion to ex­tend the SoE for a sec­ond time was passed with 27 gov­ern­ment votes in favour and 12 op­po­si­tion votes against.

The SoE was de­clared on Ju­ly 18 and an­nounced by Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er Al­lis­ter Gue­var­ro, who at the time said in­tel­li­gence sug­gest­ed that crim­i­nal gangs had formed an al­liance to tar­get gov­ern­ment and law en­force­ment of­fi­cials.

The SoE was first ex­tend­ed dur­ing a spe­cial sit­ting of Par­lia­ment on Ju­ly 28 and was ex­pect­ed to end by the close of Oc­to­ber.

Of the 16 de­ten­tion or­ders is­sued, two gangs were iden­ti­fied by name, while oth­ers were said to be­long to an un­named Or­gan­ised Crime Group (OCG).

Sev­er­al men iden­ti­fied in the de­ten­tion or­ders were sus­pect­ed of plan­ning vi­o­lent at­tacks on ri­val gangs, while oth­ers were ac­cused of “con­spir­ing to com­mit kid­nap­pings for ran­som to raise mon­ey for le­gal fees and bail of their as­so­ciates”.

One de­ten­tion or­der iden­ti­fied a Diego Mar­tin woman as a “hon­ey trap” for a gang, mean­ing she was ac­cused of lur­ing men in­to am­bush­es staged by oth­er mem­bers of the gang.

When con­tact­ed for com­ment, ACP Richard Smith of the Crim­i­nal Di­vi­sion and the Spe­cial Op­er­a­tions Unit said it was crit­i­cal to con­tin­ue tar­get­ing sus­pect­ed gang mem­bers us­ing de­ten­tion or­ders to pre­vent any flare-ups in vi­o­lence.

As of yes­ter­day morn­ing, there were 315 mur­ders com­pared to 534 for the same pe­ri­od in 2024.

Smith said iden­ti­fy­ing and de­tain­ing these fig­ures was crit­i­cal to the suc­cess of the SoE, even with such a sig­nif­i­cant drop in mur­ders.

“Some of these peo­ple, when you take your eyes off of them, that’s when they de­cide to act up, then we will have to be re­ac­tive, so this is a proac­tive ap­proach to try and main­tain the crime sta­tis­tics as they are right now, be­cause you’re see­ing re­duc­tions in all cat­e­gories of se­ri­ous crimes.

“Any­time we rock back and get com­pla­cent and we ease off on the pres­sure, that’s when we’re go­ing to face prob­lems.

“Peo­ple will be mon­i­tor­ing the po­lice en­force­ment ac­tiv­i­ties to see when they’re go­ing to get the op­por­tu­ni­ty (to com­mit crime), and once peo­ple re­alise that there’s an op­por­tu­ni­ty, they will take that and do what they have to do.”

Mean­while, crim­i­nol­o­gist Dr Randy Seep­er­sad said da­ta pre­sent­ed by the TTPS showed no­tice­able drops in dif­fer­ent cat­e­gories of or­gan­ised crime and that there were some ben­e­fits to the tem­po­rary de­ten­tion of crim­i­nal fig­ures.

“Law en­force­ment agen­cies have a very good sense of who the key play­ers are, and quite of­ten these things are wide­ly known in com­mu­ni­ties, but the dif­fi­cul­ty they tend to face is when it comes to ac­tu­al­ly be­ing able to pros­e­cute such per­sons, we en­counter a lot of dif­fi­cul­ty.

“For ex­am­ple, you may have some­one who is a gang leader or some­one who has com­mit­ted a lot of mur­ders be­ing wit­nessed by peo­ple, yet no­body will ever come and tes­ti­fy, so it means if you can de­tain these peo­ple for a cer­tain pe­ri­od of time, if it is in fact that these peo­ple are en­gaged in a high lev­el of crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ties, the end re­sult is there will be a drop in crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ties.”