For all our own crime challenges and the questions that continue to be raised as to whether our law enforcement is up to keeping those challenges in check, it is difficult for us not to look over our shoulders at fellow Caribbean Community member country Trinidad and Tobago where there exists the widespread feeling that the term ‘killing fields’ is altogether appropriate to sum up the contemporary crime situation there.
Trinidad and Tobago, the country that had long come to be seen as a regional frontrunner in matters pertaining to regional growth and development, now offers a blood-stained crime tapestry manifested by a mind-boggling number of multiple murders and the proliferation of assault weapons. These days, we have had to grow accustomed to reports from the twin-island Republic of the occurrence of the application of such weapons in what has become the shocking perpetration of grisly crimes that sometimes spare neither infants nor the infirm. It is the pattern of ruthlessness and intensity employed in the perpetration of these ‘wars’ which, from media reports, often descend to the level of the macabre, that is most shocking.
Reportage suggests that some of these ‘throw-downs,’ pit ‘family’ against ‘family’ bearing distinct marks of reprisal, and retaliation and dragging everyone, from the innocent to the infirm into what, frequently are confrontations that are gut-wrenching in their perpetration. There have been instances, quite a few of them, according to official reports, in which violence in T&T linked to either robberies or gang-related confrontations appear to target entire families in a manner that is intended to ‘send messages’ and leave indelible marks.
Here, while this editorial lacks the credentials to comment with any measure of profoundness on just how effective law enforcement has been in getting ‘on top’ of the carnage, the indicators that law and order appears to stand decidedly ‘back-footed’ by the violent onslaught are clear. Frankly, what often very much appears to be the case is that the criminals are possessed of a monopoly of force and ferociousness and that the police are more on the defensive as a result of the sheer intensity of the crimes.
Whatever the reason why Trinidad and Tobago may now appear to have come to be seen as the ‘crime capital’ of CARICOM, it would appear that the situation has now become sufficiently serious for it to find its way onto the agenda of such regional law enforcement ‘machinery’ as may exist within CARICOM. This, in order to determine whether some measure of collective contemplation might not throw up measures that could serve as a response to what, in effect, now appears to be a crisis. Here, it should be said, that such machinery as exist within the CARICOM family for keeping tabs on crime in the region, as a whole, ought to be a good deal more pro-active than appears to be the case at this time. This, one might add, comes at a time when the current wave of positive international attention that the region is now attracting is almost certain to become decidedly eroded. This is going to impair the developmental aspirations of the region in a multiplicity of ways.
The challenge which Trinidad and Tobago now faces, one from which Guyana is by no means exempt, is that watchers are almost certainly weighing such investment and other pluses that the country has to offer against the backdrop of the taint of what, these days, appears to be a tsunami of bloody criminal behaviour in Trinidad and Tobago, on the one hand, and a seeming considerable difficulty on the part of law enforcement to reverse the ‘trend.’
The continually unfolding circumstance that obtains in Trinidad and Tobago is one from which, Guyana, particularly, can learn at this time. The constituent elements of an emerging world class economy, clear indications of criminal behaviour that seek to challenge the status quo and a Police Force which often appears to be hobbled by a palpable lack of law-enforcement capacity to match the needs of a society in transformation all point to the need to pay increasing attention to enhancing the capacity of law enforcement to ‘hold the line,’ so to speak, against the emergence of a criminal culture that can threaten to distort, even palpably undermine the country’s oil-driven development ambitions. Up to this time there has been no real official signs that government has wrapped its collective mind around what, going forward, may well be the greatest challenge to such exalted ambitions as the country might have.
