Ali­cia Llanos

The Prime Min­is­ter and her Cab­i­net have run out of cards to play and have had to re­sort to dra­con­ian mea­sures to con­trol crime. That was the opin­ion of Port-of-Spain may­or Louis Lee Sing re­gard­ing the Prime Min­is­ter's de­ci­sion to call a lim­it­ed state of emer­gency in crime hot spot ar­eas, en­forc­ing a 9 pm cur­few. The Prime Min­is­ter an­nounced the cur­few on Sun­day, as a way to con­trol crime and tar­get spe­cif­ic ar­eas where there is known crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ty. Lee Sing said the Gov­ern­ment fo­cused all its time on "num­bers," count­ing the crimes and mur­ders in­stead of de­vel­op­ing cre­ative in­ter­ven­tions to pre­vent them. He said with the cur­few in ef­fect, law-abid­ing cit­i­zens were be­ing "pun­ished."

Lee Sing said the Gov­ern­ment al­so had opened the door for "cor­rupt in­di­vid­u­als" to se­cret­ly car­ry on busi­ness dur­ing the cur­few. He said if the Gov­ern­ment was se­ri­ous about fight­ing crime it would fo­cus on ini­tia­tives that pulled the "would-be gang­ster away from the gang" or the "would-be drug deal­er away from the drug deal­ers." Lee Sing said that was why he had ad­vo­cat­ed so hard for com­pul­so­ry na­tion­al ser­vice.

He said the cur­few was an ex­am­ple of the Gov­ern­ment's "tun­nel vi­sion." Lee Sing spec­u­lat­ed whether that was a mech­a­nism where­by the Gov­ern­ment was try­ing to si­lence the Op­po­si­tion and hold on to pow­er in­def­i­nite­ly.