Ralph Maraj
As her administration ended its first year in office, Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar told the nation, “Crime is going down across the country. Trinidad and Tobago is safer today because of your UNC Government.”
The PM pointed to a decline in murders by 42 per cent in 2025 and a 30% fall in serious crimes in 2026 thus far. She highlighted several of her Government’s initiatives to beef up security and improve police effectiveness.
Dealing with crime is no easy task. Last Saturday, four suspects were killed by police while attempting yet another home invasion. The next day, on one newspaper front page, Minister of Homeland Security Roger Alexander advised young criminals to “choose life over crime.”
The Government clearly recognises the critical need for social regeneration to deal with our troubling levels of criminality. One of the PM’s first acts was legislation to increase the legal age limit of alcohol consumption, marijuana use and gambling, to give young people “a fighting chance to prosper and be protected from destructive vices.”
Doctors, political analysts and religious leaders agreed “this would be instrumental in calibrating the societal change her Government wants for making T&T a better place.” A regenerated society.
As I say, not an easy task. For ten years, I told the last administration we must “arrest the rampant social decay” manifesting itself in domestic violence, dysfunctional homes, degenerating community life, “epidemics” of teenage pregnancies, cultural decadence, hooliganism and violence in schools and much more. Here is your crime incubator, folks, the volcanic underbelly of the society that surfaces ominously and in frightening proportions with increasing frequency. The late Professor Selwyn Ryan warned of “a coming anarchy.”
And our schools must prevent this horror, not breed it. Education Minister Dr Michael Dowlath says “between 2022 and 2025, over 22,000 student suspensions were recorded nationally.
Drugs, weapons and vaping products” remained significant in schools. Sounds familiar? Remember 2013, when in just six months, 3,411 students were suspended for violence, drugs, alcohol, and alarming sexual promiscuity? One student stabbed another to death at Waterloo Secondary!
But for ten wasted years, the last government did little or nothing. Under this administration, armed police officers have been placed at some of the 50 high-risk secondary schools and police patrols at 20 others.
Absolutely necessary to avoid scenes like in 2018 at Signal Hill Secondary, 2019 at Siparia West Secondary, and 2020 in Barataria/San Juan, when four teachers called for protection from their “war zone of combatants”.
A student was raped. A female student vengefully shattered the windscreen of a teacher’s vehicle. It took COVID to bring peace in 2021 by closing schools! Any surprise the Prime Minister wants legislation to hold parents legally accountable for their children’s violent/criminal behaviour in schools?
And Minister Dowlath has revised the National School Code of Conduct (NSCC). He says, “We must strengthen classroom management training, reinforce structured routines, provide teachers with de-escalation skills. Sustained improvement in teaching and learning require order, safety and discipline in our schools. Discipline is foundational.”
But improved schooling is only the start. The nation is plagued by dysfunctional home and community life. Recently, the Sunday Guardian revealed over 33,000 domestic violence reports in 14 years from 2010-2024. How many thousands more go unreported? And what has been the emotional and psychological damage, especially to children witnessing this horror? Don’t environmental influences push children to become violent teenagers and criminals in adult life?
The question pertains even more to the Children’s Authority records. Since its inception in 2015, we have had up to 5,700 cases of child abuse reported annually to the authorities. Over 50,000 in ten years.
Thousands also go unreported. And this includes children sexually abused by adults in the home, most perpetrators are males and known to the victims. Children are also offered to other adults for sexual gratification in exchange for money. Heavens!
We also have “child mothers” from an epidemic of teenage pregnancies, almost one thousand a year, many girls unable to identify the father of the coming child.
Who assumes “responsibility” for this offspring in a country where community and family life have declined disastrously? What do these children become? It therefore shouldn’t surprise us that court records over a four-year period revealed 1,771 criminal matters against children ages 7-18 for possession of firearms, robbery with aggravation, shooting with intent, larceny, domestic violence, drug offences, even kidnapping, manslaughter and murder.
This is our decaying immensity, folks. Perpetuating itself with each succeeding generation. Producing our crime crisis and so much more. The Government recognises the need for social regeneration in addition to law enforcement to deal with crime. They therefore sought to introduce, as in Jamaica, Zones of Special Operations (ZOSOs) which, in addition to collaboration between the army and the police in crime suppression, include, by law, “social transformational initiatives in communities affected by high crime rates.”
The ZOSOs have been very successful in Jamaica in uplifting communities and significantly reducing crime. It is, therefore, extremely unfortunate, indeed tragic, that the Government did not get the required parliamentary support for the ZOSO legislation. It is truly no easy task to deal with crime in this country.
