Yes­ter­day, Trinida­di­ans were awak­ened to the news that five more cit­i­zens had lost their lives to the crim­i­nal el­e­ment. The killings were stun­ning­ly com­mit­ted in less than 24-hours and were spread across the coun­try’s east-west cor­ri­dor, which, when tak­en in tan­dem with oth­er mur­ders pre­vi­ous­ly, means no com­mu­ni­ty in Trinidad and To­ba­go is safe any­more.

With the State of Emer­gency set to be lift­ed by the Gov­ern­ment to­day, many cit­i­zens are al­so of the be­lief that the crim­i­nal el­e­ment will again un­leash a re­newed reign of ter­ror on law-abid­ing cit­i­zens which the SoE, al­though im­ple­ment­ed to curb the spread of the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic, al­so in­ad­ver­tent­ly brought some re­lief to.

It was thus dis­heart­en­ing to hear Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Fitzger­ald Hinds re­cent­ly make this same as­ser­tion. Sure­ly, even if this is the stark truth fac­ing the coun­try, Min­is­ter Hinds should know con­vinc­ing the pub­lic that the var­i­ous heads of law en­force­ment would keep the crim­i­nals at bay should have been done more vo­cif­er­ous­ly.

Of course, the cur­rent surge in mur­ders is ev­i­dence enough that the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice has lost its han­dle on the killing spree which has been on­go­ing de­spite the SoE mea­sures. In­deed, the killers on the loose have been op­er­at­ing with ap­par­ent im­puni­ty.

How else can one ex­plain the brazen­ness of these re­cent killings and the fact that the per­pe­tra­tors, from sev­er­al ac­counts, are armed with high-pow­ered weapons that would make even the po­lice of­fi­cers tasked with track­ing them cringe?

Yet, one can ar­gue that these crim­i­nals al­so come from com­mu­ni­ties that hold equal re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for help­ing the TTPS to weed them out and bring them to jus­tice.

Hav­ing said that, the killers of two women re­cent­ly, Mon­i­ca Ja­groop and Re­hana Jag­ger­nauth, re­main at large days af­ter their heinous crimes. The probe in­to Jene­ka Guer­ra’s mur­der be­fore them was al­so head­ing down a sim­i­lar path un­til po­lice got a lucky break af­ter in­ad­ver­tent­ly stop­ping men who had been co-opt­ed to as­sist the main per­pe­tra­tor in get­ting rid of her body be­cause they were act­ing sus­pi­cious­ly in the ve­hi­cle they were in.

Some­body in the com­mu­ni­ties where these women’s lives were cut short knows some­thing or some­one who does. Why, there­fore, are their killers still walk­ing free, per­haps to com­mit sim­i­lar crimes on oth­er in­no­cent women? Why isn’t the TTPS get­ting the in­for­ma­tion to catch the per­pe­tra­tors, thus al­low­ing their rel­a­tives some clo­sure in these cas­es?

Those fa­mil­iar with the phrase it takes a vil­lage to raise a child will al­so be aware that in the so­ci­eties which ex­pound this type of ide­ol­o­gy, in­di­vid­u­als are nur­tured along a path of good and crim­i­nals are re­ject­ed. This ac­tion, how­ev­er, is not on­ly be ex­tend­ed to those en­gag­ing in ma­jor crimes but all de­viant be­hav­iour.

It is this per­haps time, there­fore, that T&T re­turns to this mode of think­ing and those cit­i­zens in the vil­lages which are home to a mi­nor­i­ty of peo­ple bent on ne­far­i­ous ac­tiv­i­ty ex­pose them. The TTPS cer­tain­ly can­not do it alone and it may well be that each in­di­vid­ual be­ing their broth­er and sis­ter’s keep­ers could lead us back to be­com­ing a more law-abid­ing so­ci­ety.