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Crime
escalation mix, T&T style
Dr
Bhoe Tewarie
How
did we ever get into such a mess? I am talking about crime
and the unholy mess in which we seem to have trapped ourselves.
The first reason is the easy availability of guns. The widespread
access to guns is a relatively recent phenomenon in this country.
To own a gun legally in T&T is a complex matter. Permission
has to be granted by the Commissioner of Police, a licence
has to be issued and the gun permit has to be renewed every
year.
There are only a few stores that can legally sell guns in
the country. You can count all of them on one hand. In other
words, we have more gun control in T&T than most other
places in the world.
Where then did all the illegal guns which are ubiquitous in
this country come from? Did they pass through Customs? Or
did they enter an unmonitored part of our coastline? Is there
any structure, programme, system, plan or project that has
been put in place to monitor, manage, discourage, intercept
and/or prevent the continuing flow of guns into T&T?
The second reason for the upsurge in crime is the politicisation
of criminal elements and their entrenchment in the Unemployment
Relief Programme (URP), their public unveiling and christening
as community leaders, and their installation as supervisors,
foremen and so on.
Reborn now but hardly transformed and politically aligned,
they are not afraid to challenge or confront the police. Yes,
they are paid to do their URP job, but the real perks are
in the number of ghost workers they can create.
A ghost worker is a real person with a T&T identification
card with all the rights of citizenship including the right
to work in URP as well as the right to vote.
The ghost worker does not show up for work on any project.
However, he or she shows up on payday, with ID Card in hand
to collect his or her pay.
The ghost worker retains an agreed portion of the money and
gives the remainder to whoever signed him up as a ghost worker.
Failure of the ghost worker to meet his or her obligation
is almost certain to result in death.
Is anyone monitoring or managing the URP? Does it have anything
to do with completion of useful projects or with productivity?
Or is it meant to be a means of harnessing the criminal element
through political patronage pure and simple?
A third reason for the persistent crime is the existence of
gangs which control drug territories. The territories are
real. You cross a boundary into someone else’s territory
at your own peril. The gangs are real. Each gang is a brotherhood;
the brothers look out for each other, hence the revenge killings.
Where do the drugs come from? Because, after all, drugs are
illegal. The drugs at this level come in from Venezuela, just
like the guns, regardless of their point of origin.
Those who know claim that a pirogue takes about four hours
to make it to the mouth of the Orinoco from the Venezuelan
coast because it is slow travel along the river. Then, it
takes half an hour to shore on the island of Trinidad by speedboat.
The criminals have a good information network and are always
two steps ahead of the authorities. Sometimes the authorities
assist the criminals by being conveniently absent. Sometimes
onshore criminal allies distract police and other law enforcement
officers by simple measures: card-playing, parties, women.
Once on land in Trinidad, the distribution network for drugs
and drug trafficking seems to be flawless.
I was listening to Andy Johnson, a serious person and a gifted
journalist, speaking (on a radio programme) of his dangerous
encounter with drug addiction from which he thankfully escaped.
However, one of his matter-of-fact but absolutely telling
statements during his interview was that all the drug dens
in Port-of-Spain and in Arima, which he frequented in 2002,
and which probably existed for some time before, continue
to exist and continue to conduct business trading in drugs
without any interference whatsoever from the authorities up
to this very day.
Is anyone responsible for dealing with drugs in T&T? Who
or what is responsible? What is their track record? Is it
not about time that we begin to get serious?
Beyond the URP and the drug gangs are the criminal deportees
from the US. Some of these are seasoned criminals, who have
learnt new tricks abroad and have acquired relatively sophisticated
skills in a more complex society and a more challenging environment.
The process of interaction among a variety of criminal types
has for some time been facilitating information sharing and
knowledge transfer and a mutation in criminal behaviour, strategy,
action and method. This is going to be further complicated
by an influx of deportees who have been found guilty of sexual
offences in the US, if we are to believe recent announcements
about deportation policy in the US.
Who receives the deportees? Who resettles them? Who documents
the information details about them? Who monitors them, when
and how? How is this new phenomenon in the crime paradigm
managed?
All of this is further complicated by the fact that there
are corrupt elements in the police service who have been associated
with the illegal entry of drugs and guns; that the police
have consistently adopted a laissez-faire attitude to drug
pushing in this country; (in every community in T&T the
drug pushers and distributors are well known yet remain untouched
by the police).
When we take into account the fact that in every drug bust
a significant quantity of cocaine disappears from the confiscated
amount to find its way back on the street; when we take into
account the persistent accusations that police officers have
been party to kidnapping initiatives as well as part of the
ransom and extortion racket (accusations about police complicity
date back to the Chick Medford kidnapping, one of the first,
and became vociferous during the kidnapping of the Nath brothers
from Sangre Grande, one of the few kidnappings which led to
charges actually being laid against police officers), what
is being done to clean up the police force of corrupt officers?
What is being done to professionalise policing? What standards
of performance have been identified as important? How is performance
monitored and reviewed? Do rewards and sanctions exist and
are they linked to performance? And who is responsible for
the performance of the police service as a whole?
So now you have some, but only some, of the essential elements
in the crime escalation mix. Illegal guns. Drugs. The Trinidad-Venezuela
connections. URP and the legitimisation and politicisation
of criminal elements. Deportees from the US. Corrupt elements
from the police service. And, of course, the absence of will,
the paucity of means and the seeming absence of intelligence
and imagination to develop a sustainable strategy to effectively
manage, contain, control and suppress crime.
Dr Bhoendradatt Tewarie is principal at the St Augustine
campus of the University of the West Indies
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