Once again the coun­try faces re­ports of mul­ti­ple killings in the last cou­ple of days, with five be­ing re­port­ed yes­ter­day alone.

As po­lice in­ves­ti­gat­ed the grue­some dis­cov­ery of two men who were killed, chopped up and dumped in garbage bags in Mon Plaisir, res­i­dents of Pica­dil­ly Street were scam­per­ing for safe­ty as dri­ve-by shoot­ers claimed an­oth­er life.

Not long af­ter, our news­room re­ceived calls of a dou­ble mur­der along Free­dom Street, En­ter­prise, not far from where a nine-year-old boy was shot dead by as­sailants who fired in­dis­crim­i­nate­ly in­to a field on Sat­ur­day evening.

Po­lice sus­pect that these killings were all part of those two words so of­ten used to clas­si­fy mur­ders—gang war­fare.

To this we ask, ‘Does it re­al­ly mat­ter?’

While the brunt of these killings oc­curred in what law en­forcers have deemed as hotspots, the prob­lem is that the en­tire so­ci­ety pays a high price for ram­pant crime re­gard­less of where it oc­curs.

Ac­cord­ing to the World Pop­u­la­tion Re­view, Trinidad and To­ba­go has the sixth high­est crime rate in the world per capi­ta, a de­press­ing sta­tis­tic for a coun­try that was once ranked high among na­tions with the hap­pi­est peo­ple in the world.

Its re­port sug­gests that “the gov­ern­ment faces sev­er­al chal­lenges in its ef­fect to re­duce crime, such as bu­reau­crat­ic re­sis­tance to change, the neg­a­tive in­flu­ence of gangs, drugs, eco­nom­ic re­ces­sion, and an over­bur­dened le­gal sys­tem,” and that “there is a great de­mand for il­le­gal weapons as well, which drug traf­fick­ing and gang-re­lat­ed ac­tiv­i­ties fu­el.”

Ex­ten­sive stud­ies have out­lined the neg­a­tive im­pact that high crime rates, par­tic­u­lar­ly mur­ders, have on in­vestor con­fi­dence.

This coun­try has al­ready reg­is­tered over 470 mur­ders so far this year and trav­el ad­vi­sories from our two biggest mar­kets out­side of the Caribbean—the Unit­ed States and the Unit­ed King­dom—strong­ly warn their na­tion­als about the risks in­volved in trav­el­ling to cer­tain parts of the coun­try.

In Ju­ly this year, pres­i­dent of the Down­town Own­ers and Mer­chants’ As­so­ci­a­tion Gre­go­ry Aboud de­scribed T&T as be­ing in a na­tion­al crime emer­gency and con­tend­ed that the law­less be­hav­iour is be­ing nour­ished by a per­ceived lack of con­se­quence.

He ex­plained that busi­ness­es were leav­ing the city be­cause of the high crime rate there­in and urged au­thor­i­ties to “block­ade those who are at­tempt­ing to lay siege to the coun­try via crim­i­nal en­deav­ours.”

He main­tained that the high crime rate was a re­sult of many years of bad form in our gov­er­nance mod­el —ze­ro per­for­mance man­age­ment, ze­ro ac­count­abil­i­ty, and there­fore ze­ro re­sults.

This is a prob­lem that the Po­lice Ser­vice Com­mis­sion and the Par­lia­ment must solve.

Al­though the Com­mis­sion have strong key per­for­mance in­di­ca­tors and a prop­er ap­praisal sys­tem for Com­mis­sion­ers and Deputy Com­mis­sion­ers of Po­lice, too of­ten it is the po­lit­i­cal shenani­gans that de­ter­mine the se­cu­ri­ty of tenures of those in charge.

The fact that se­nior law en­force­ment of­fi­cers sel­dom face con­se­quences for ris­ing mur­der rates is a ma­jor part of the prob­lem. This sim­ply can­not be ac­cept­able any­more.

Those short­list­ed for the po­si­tion of Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er must know that no num­ber of plans, poli­cies and pos­tur­ing mat­ter to the pop­u­la­tion if there re­main no re­al re­duc­tions in high crime lev­els un­der their tenure.