In responding to T&T’s most recent quadruple-murder episode—which began in Gonzales, Belmont, and ended on the steps of the public Port-of-Spain General Hospital—Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley once again lamented the lack of cooperation on anti-crime measures from the Opposition and called on the population to share information on criminals with law enforcement.
Dr Rowley also referred to a growing number of people who “display a total disregard for laws, life, communities,” who can only exist in T&T “because those who choose these destructive pursuits have no real trepidation over consequences and also have little expectation that they will be identified, arrested, convicted, and ultimately properly incarcerated.”
The accuracy of the Prime Minister’s analysis that the “growing number” of murderers among us have no fear that their actions have consequences cannot be challenged.
But what is tragically lacking in Dr Rowley’s analysis is this: what is his administration going to do bring consequences to “those who choose these destructive pursuits?” And, therefore, what is his administration doing to improve the chances that the murderers among us can be “identified, arrested, convicted, and ultimately properly incarcerated?”
To put it plainly, what Government action follows the prime ministerial analysis?
It surely cannot be analysis alone, because if there is no action by all of the arms of law enforcement, the gun-toting killers will only be emboldened to escalate their reign of terror on the population of this country.
There are examples of countries that have managed to get a handle on the criminal gangs who murder with impunity, as they gain ever more power and money from their illicit trade in guns, drugs, trafficked women and by extorting money from businesspeople and state-sponsored contracts.
In this hemisphere there is El Salvador, where President Nayib Bukele declared war on the gangs in March 2022 by calling a state of emergency, which allowed the incarceration of tens of thousands of gang members and their facilitators.
The impact of the measures unleashed by the Bukele administration led to a drastic decrease in gang murders, to the point that El Salvador’s murder rate is now among the lowest in the Western Hemisphere, according to a report in the March 20, 2024 edition of Foreign Affairs magazine.
Given the unconstitutionality of some of the measures implemented by Bukele, what was done in El Salvador is not likely to be replicated here.
And Prime Minister Rowley is on record, as recently as January this year, as describing the August 2011 limited state of emergency declared by current Opposition Leader Kamla Persad-Bissessar as an “abject failure.”
But if Dr Rowley is not prepared to reverse his opposition to a state of emergency, and he is not prepared to reinstitute, in a serious way, the army-police patrols, what action is he prepared to take to save the country from the escalating onslaught of murders?
At what point will enough be enough in attempting to get a handle on the murders?
At this stage, the country is fed up of ponderous and pious platitudes, however well crafted, that are devoid of any real sense of how murders, home invasions and robbery with violence have distressed and disrupted daily life in this country.