An­na-Lisa Paul

Se­nior Re­porter

an­na-lisa.paul@guardian.co.tt

De­spite record­ing sev­en homi­cides over the four days of Car­ni­val cel­e­bra­tions be­tween March 1-4, act­ing Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice (CoP) Ju­nior Ben­jamin has de­clared Car­ni­val 2025 a “gen­er­al­ly safe” one.

Mak­ing the state­ment dur­ing a me­dia brief­ing at the Po­lice Ad­min­is­tra­tion Build­ing, Port-of-Spain, yes­ter­day, he at­trib­uted the suc­cess­ful host­ing of the rev­el­ry to the hard work of law en­force­ment per­son­nel.

He said, “Our of­fi­cers showed up and we were able to have a gen­er­al­ly safe Car­ni­val 2025.”

This, al­though Venezue­lan na­tion­al Irvin Joaquin May­o­ra, 30, died fol­low­ing a shoot­ing at Vi­dale Street and West­ern Main Road, St James, around 5.15 pm dur­ing cel­e­bra­tions on Car­ni­val Tues­day. Prince Charles, 18, of Guaico, San­gre Grande, al­so died af­ter be­ing stabbed once in the chest by a 57-year-old sus­pect dur­ing an al­ter­ca­tion while out with friends for Last Lap.

In both in­stances, the sus­pects were held.

Ex­tend­ing con­do­lences to the fam­i­lies of the sev­en vic­tims—Ben­jamin said with 66 mur­ders to date, com­pared to 95 in 2024, and 111 in 2023 for the same pe­ri­od – this rep­re­sent­ed a 31 per cent de­cline in homi­cides.

Even though he said the num­bers showed that polic­ing strate­gies were work­ing, Ben­jamin said they were not sat­is­fied, as one mur­der was too much. He thanked the pub­lic for part­ner­ing with the po­lice to again make T&T safe.

Echo­ing sim­i­lar sen­ti­ments, act­ing Deputy Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice (DCP), Op­er­a­tions, Curt Si­mon said the pub­lic feed­back had been pos­i­tive re­gard­ing both the host­ing of Car­ni­val as well as the on­go­ing State of Emer­gency (SoE).

He said they ex­e­cut­ed 47 op­er­a­tions over the 48-hour pe­ri­od span­ning Mon­day and Tues­day as part of the SoE, de­scrib­ing this as a “unique” de­vel­op­ment, as of­fi­cers al­so re­mained on Car­ni­val du­ty.

In ad­di­tion, he re­vealed that the au­thor­i­ties had man­aged to se­cure 54 de­ten­tion or­ders for peo­ple in cus­tody, up from 38 last Fri­day.

He said this was an in­di­ca­tion that law en­force­ment of­fi­cials were ramp­ing up ef­forts as the SoE con­tin­ued.

Si­mon al­so agreed that the sev­en mur­ders be­tween Fri­day and Tues­day were dis­heart­en­ing, but as­sured that ad­di­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty lay­ers were be­ing put in place to help curb the mur­der toll.

He said while it was less than what cit­i­zens had grown ac­cus­tomed to, the po­lice were still not hap­py with the cur­rent sta­tis­tics.

Home in­va­sions on the de­cline

Mean­while, the act­ing CoP said the po­lice ser­vice has not­ed a de­cline in home in­va­sions.

He re­vealed, “We have seen a 74 per cent re­duc­tion in terms of our home in­va­sions.”

With 103 home in­va­sions record­ed in 2024 and 27 thus far for 2025, he said, “There is some slight upticks when we look at those stats as it re­lates to the num­ber of home in­va­sions that re­sults in at least, homi­cides. We had three in 2025 and about sev­en in 2024, so it means there­fore that this is some­thing we would want to look at and see how we can do some tar­get hard­en­ing.”

He ap­pealed to land­lords to en­sure more strin­gent checks are car­ried out on po­ten­tial ten­ants.

“We want to en­cour­age per­sons where you might have ten­ants and you have not done a prop­er back­ground check, please, please, we want to en­cour­age you to do prop­er back­ground checks on these ten­ants to en­sure that you know the per­sons that you are at least bring­ing in to your home space. Be­cause as we look at some of these crimes that we are see­ing tak­ing place, we be­lieve that if per­sons con­tin­ue to do that type of back­ground check, prob­a­bly it can even help in en­sur­ing your safe­ty and the safe­ty of oth­ers.”