Geisha Kow­lessar

Act­ing Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er Stephen Williams has iden­ti­fied 188 crime "hot spots" across the coun­try.Williams gave the star­tling sta­tis­tic yes­ter­day when he ap­peared be­fore a joint se­lect com­mit­tee (JSC) in Par­lia­ment chaired by Dr James Arm­strong."We use the term 'hot spot' lose­ly in T&T, be­cause wher­ev­er there is a con­cen­tra­tion of crime we say 'hot spot,'" Williams said dur­ing his ap­pear­ance.

"But 'hot spot' is clear­ly de­fined as a small ge­o­graph­i­cal area. So we call Laven­tille a 'hot spot,' but it is not that, it is a large area, so with­in Laven­tille we can lo­cate some 'hot spot' ar­eas." Williams said the Po­lice Ser­vice had en­gaged the ex­per­tise of Prof Lawrence Sher­man, di­rec­tor of the In­sti­tute of Crim­i­nol­o­gy of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cam­bridge, to do a prop­er sci­en­tif­ic analy­sis of the crime sit­u­a­tion. This, he said, had helped them tab­u­late the num­ber of hot spots.

"At present the work we are do­ing with Cam­bridge...as we were ex­plor­ing vi­o­lent crime com­mu­ni­ties, we were able to iden­ti­fy 188 hot spots of vi­o­lence," he said."This is the first time this has been done for a coun­try–to look at the whole coun­try and iden­ti­fy vi­o­lent crime hot spots."The act­ing CoP's hot-spot fig­ures con­trast­ed dra­mat­i­cal­ly with those giv­en dur­ing the state of emer­gency in 2011. Back then, just un­der 60 ar­eas were giv­en as hot spots.

Williams did not itemise the 188 hot spots yes­ter­day, but said the lo­ca­tions of the ten po­lice sta­tions which had to deal with the most se­ri­ous crimes were Ch­agua­nas, San Fer­nan­do, Besson Street and Cen­tral Po­lice Sta­tion in Port-of-Spain, St Joseph, St James, Ari­ma, Scar­bor­ough and San Juan.He said for the Po­lice Ser­vice to move for­ward it must be sin­gled out as a pro­fes­sion­al en­ti­ty and of­fi­cers must al­so be giv­en prop­er re­mu­ner­a­tion pack­ages.

The way for­ward, he added, was al­so through the use of con­sis­tent sci­en­tif­ic means."Over the next two months we will be run­ning a ran­domised con­trol tri­al, an ex­per­i­ment at the high­est lev­el util­is­ing the in­put of Prof Lawrence Sher­man, who is fa­cil­i­tat­ing train­ing with 200 mid­dle man­agers," Williams said.

"A di­rect fol­low-up to that train­ing is to make some clear de­ter­mi­na­tion of crime and lo­ca­tion, and that will al­low us not to speak in loose terms when asked spe­cif­ic ques­tions."He said there must al­so be sci­en­tif­ic knowl­edge to prove that, thanks to height­ened po­lice ac­tiv­i­ties in one area, or through the use of oth­er fac­tors, crime had dropped.

"We see a clear cor­re­la­tion in what we do and the re­duc­tion in crime. But to make that de­ter­mi­na­tion by way of cause and ef­fect, we need sci­en­tif­ic sup­port and that is what we are do­ing now," he said."We are start­ing a process by util­is­ing the high­est lev­el of sci­en­tif­ic meth­ods and tests to make those de­ter­mi­na­tion."Com­mit­tee mem­ber and Plan­ning Min­is­ter Dr Bhoe Tewarie asked Williams what was need­ed for the po­lice to achieve sus­tained con­trol of crime.

Williams said they would need a com­pre­hen­sive mea­sure which al­so took in­to ac­count crime as a so­cial is­sue, and a broad-based ap­proach of im­prov­ing com­mu­ni­ties was al­so need­ed."And so­cial in­ter­ven­tion must be clear­ly tar­get­ed, be­cause crime is just one fea­ture with­in the so­cial do­main," he said."What we have recog­nised is that young peo­ple be­tween 13 and 35 are the great­est of­fend­ers, and it is im­por­tant for us to change the dy­nam­ics of what peo­ple re­fer to as idle hands."

On ve­hi­cle re­sources, Williams said the po­lice cur­rent­ly had 1, 365 ve­hi­cles, of which 349 were not in op­er­a­tion.He said ef­forts were be­ing made to bring it to a fleet of 1,700 ve­hi­cles.