GEISHA KOW­LESSAR-ALON­ZO

Se­nior Re­porter

geisha.kow­lessar@guardian.co.tt

Go af­ter the big fish.

This is the call from the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty to Gov­ern­ment as it seeks to grap­ple with ris­ing crime woes.

The ur­gent mes­sage came from AM­CHAM T&T’s pres­i­dent Stu­art Fran­co as he de­liv­ered re­marks at the or­gan­i­sa­tion’s Eco­nom­ic Out­look Fo­rum 2024 at the Hy­att Re­gency, Port-of-Spain, yes­ter­day. The event was themed “Adap­ta­tion and Re­silience.”

“We should go fur­ther with proac­tive polic­ing us­ing da­ta an­a­lyt­ics to pre­dict and pre­vent flare ups af­ter ini­tial crimes and to iden­ti­fy and dis­rupt gang ac­tiv­i­ty,” Fran­co said.

“How­ev­er, let’s be re­al­is­tic. We need to have con­cert­ed ac­tion and re­sults tar­get­ing the big fish—the peo­ple who pre­tend to be le­git­i­mate busi­ness­peo­ple but are deeply en­trenched in crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ty. White-col­lar crime and cor­rup­tion are in­sid­i­ous.”

He warned that if no dent is made in ar­rest­ing crime, then the coun­try and its in­sti­tu­tions will wors­en.

“This is de­stroy­ing our coun­try. It’s time for the TTPS to pub­licly state their met­rics and for us all to work to­geth­er to achieve them while si­mul­ta­ne­ous­ly hold­ing each oth­er to ac­count.”

Fran­co al­so ad­vised that law en­force­ment be prop­er­ly out­fit­ted to con­duct their du­ties ef­fec­tive­ly, say­ing there must al­so be state-of-the-art DNA test­ing and equip­ment at the Foren­sic Sci­ence Cen­tre, with the most mod­ern in­ves­tiga­tive tech­niques to com­bat crime.

Ad­di­tion­al­ly, Fran­co sug­gest­ed a com­pre­hen­sive and cen­tralised data­base with DNA pro­files from all con­vict­ed of­fend­ers, sus­pects, miss­ing peo­ple and vic­tims of crime is im­ple­ment­ed to fur­ther beef-up Gov­ern­ment’s crime fight­ing ar­se­nal.

Fran­co fur­ther out­lined how tech­nol­o­gy can as­sist stream­lin­ing the crime fight­ing process to make it more ef­fi­cient and ef­fec­tive.

“We al­so need to en­sure that our dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion jour­ney ex­tends to the TTPS to pro­cure state-of-the-art soft­ware for man­ag­ing the flow and over­sight of in­ves­ti­ga­tions and the use of the hard­ware, soft­ware, and cy­ber­se­cu­ri­ty pro­to­cols to pro­tect case file da­ta, and this should ex­tend to case man­age­ment,” he said.

On the leg­isla­tive front, he said there is ur­gent need to re­form laws as it per­tains to crim­i­nal­is­ing cy­ber­crimes and cy­ber­crim­i­nals, to pro­tect both the in­ter­ests of busi­ness and na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty.

“As the Gov­ern­ment in­cen­tivis­es cy­ber­se­cu­ri­ty in the pri­vate sec­tor, we look for­ward to an up­dat­ed cy­ber­se­cu­ri­ty strat­e­gy for the pub­lic sec­tor, in­clu­sive of train­ing for pub­lic ser­vants and the gen­er­al pub­lic. This will be im­por­tant for build­ing the pub­lic’s trust and in­creas­ing the up­take and us­age of the dig­i­tal ser­vices as more and more be­come avail­able,” Fran­co said.

How­ev­er, he was very vo­cal in re­it­er­at­ing his call to ar­rest the wor­ry­ing crime sit­u­a­tion, as he em­pha­sised that busi­ness­es will be fur­ther neg­a­tive­ly im­pact­ed.

“Let me be clear, if we don’t make in­roads and re­duce crime in 2024, the coun­try and its in­sti­tu­tions will be even more se­ri­ous­ly weak­ened. More in­vest­ments will be halt­ed, more of our pro­fes­sion­als will mi­grate and more lives will be lost,” Fran­co stressed.

Mean­while, for­mer AM­CHAM T&T board mem­ber Gre­go­ry Hill ad­vised the pri­vate sec­tor to do its part in the crime fight by putting re­sources in­to tech­nol­o­gy.

“It’s up to the pri­vate sec­tor to step up and pro­vide CCTV for your neigh­bour­hood, your block, where your busi­ness is lo­cat­ed. If we all do that to­geth­er and we look at all the ma­jor roads, we will build a net­work of CCTV cam­eras that will great­ly as­sist in crime de­tec­tion,” Hill, vice pres­i­dent, Fi­nance and Cor­po­rate Ser­vices of the Caribbean De­vel­op­ment Bank (CDB), added.

TT­TI re­sponds

Guardian Me­dia reached out to T&T Trans­paren­cy In­sti­tute (TT­TI) to com­ment on the ap­peal made by Fran­co to go af­ter the “big fish” and weed out cor­rup­tion.

In a state­ment yes­ter­day af­ter­noon, the TT­TI said cor­rup­tion has be­come part of “our cul­ture” and must be erad­i­cat­ed.

In this vein, it said swift en­force­ment and pun­ish­ment, where nec­es­sary, must be used as a dis­in­cen­tive for en­gag­ing in cor­rupt ac­tiv­i­ties.

“The preva­lence of crime and cor­rup­tion in any coun­try neg­a­tive­ly im­pacts cit­i­zens, while si­phon­ing re­sources need­ed away from pub­lic goods like in­fra­struc­ture, health sys­tems and in­hibit­ing small busi­ness and eco­nom­ic prospects,” the TT­TI said.

It al­so said fo­cus has al­ways been on erad­i­cat­ing cor­rup­tion, in all its forms, from the land­scape of this coun­try, adding that it ful­ly sup­ports ini­tia­tives tar­get­ing this goal - “from the ‘big fish to the wabine (guabine)’.”

In car­ry­ing out and ful­fill­ing this man­date, the or­gan­i­sa­tion be­lieves this re­quires a whole of so­ci­ety ap­proach from strength­en­ing leg­is­la­tion, in­sti­tu­tion­al struc­tures and en­force­ment of laws passed, to cit­i­zens tak­ing de­ci­sive and de­lib­er­ate ac­tion not to par­tic­i­pate in cor­rupt ac­tiv­i­ties.

TT­TI ac­knowl­edged that ef­forts have been made through the pas­sage and im­ple­men­ta­tion of an­ti-cor­rup­tion leg­is­la­tion but not­ed that there is still much that can be done to com­bat klep­to­crats, bribers and mon­ey-laun­der­ers.

“TT­TI once again ap­peals to Par­lia­men­tar­i­ans to quick­ly work on the pas­sage and im­ple­men­ta­tion of whis­tle-blow­er leg­is­la­tion and cam­paign fi­nance re­form which, in our view, ad­dress cor­rup­tion at the high­est lev­els,” the state­ment added.

On Jan­u­ary 30, 2024, the TT­TI will re­lease the 2023 Cor­rup­tion Per­cep­tions In­dex (CPI) un­der the theme Cor­rup­tion and Jus­tice, which it said is time­ly to “the mat­ters af­fect­ing T&T”.