Shane Su­perville

Se­nior Re­porter

shane.su­perville@guardian.co.tt

ACP North East Curt Si­mon says a de­crease in the num­ber of peo­ple be­ing charged with gang of­fences does not re­flect a fail­ure on the part of the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice (TTPS) to dis­man­tle gangs.

Da­ta col­lect­ed by the po­lice Crime and Prob­lem Analy­sis branch showed that on­ly sev­en peo­ple were charged with gang of­fences be­tween Jan­u­ary 1 to Ju­ly 28, com­pared to 13 for the same pe­ri­od last year.

From this year’s fig­ures, four peo­ple were charged for be­ing gang mem­bers, while two were charged for be­ing gang lead­ers and one was charged with pro­mot­ing a gang.

Con­tact­ed for com­ment yes­ter­day, Si­mon said gang in­ves­ti­ga­tions were usu­al­ly very lengthy, not­ing that a “quick” in­ves­ti­ga­tion in­to a gang usu­al­ly took 18 months to com­plete.

He said giv­en the se­ri­ous na­ture of the gang ac­tiv­i­ties be­ing in­ves­ti­gat­ed, “metic­u­lous” fo­cus was re­quired to com­plete en­quiries thor­ough­ly.

“When you find you have al­ready made some cas­es, you would have touched on some ar­eas where you can’t re­turn and add any­thing to that case,” he said.

“So you’ll find that there are a num­ber of new gang in­ves­ti­ga­tions go­ing on and we’ll just have to go with the ev­i­dence, as the ev­i­dence presents it­self to en­cour­age and per­haps guide us on how we pre­fer charges.

“I am con­fi­dent we are mak­ing the right moves and mak­ing the right steps even in that area of gang in­ves­ti­ga­tions and be pa­tient with us.”

Si­mon al­so not­ed that while mur­ders were gen­er­al­ly trend­ing down­wards, this was due to the in­tro­duc­tion of two State of Emer­gen­cies (SoEs), not­ing it was “pleas­ing to the eyes,” but con­tin­ued work from law en­force­ment was need­ed to en­sure con­tin­ued suc­cess.

“We had some sig­nif­i­cant achieve­ments in the first SoE and what we put in place al­lowed law en­force­ment to re­main in the as­cen­den­cy to con­tin­ue achiev­ing the down­ward spi­ral,” he said.

“The trend will con­tin­ue as long as the TTPS and law en­force­ment per­sist in the plan we had in the first SoE and we will see what lessons we had to learn in this SoE, but I do ex­pect we will con­tin­ue to see this de­crease.”

Con­tact­ed for com­ment yes­ter­day, for­mer po­lice com­mis­sion­er Gary Grif­fith said the drop in the num­ber of peo­ple be­ing charged for gang of­fences was not a re­sult of in­ef­fec­tive polic­ing but leg­is­la­tion that did not prop­er­ly treat with gang ac­tiv­i­ties.

Grif­fith said un­like an­ti-gang leg­is­la­tion abroad, it was dif­fi­cult for po­lice to pros­e­cute crim­i­nals for be­ing mem­bers of a par­tic­u­lar gang un­less they ex­plic­it­ly stat­ed their mem­ber­ship.

“It’s not like these peo­ple are go­ing up and pro­mot­ing them­selves as be­ing gang mem­bers, so the law is made in such a way that it strength­ens the de­fence of the gang mem­bers not to be in­car­cer­at­ed than giv­ing the op­por­tu­ni­ty for the po­lice to have them in­car­cer­at­ed,” Grif­fith said.

“This has very lit­tle to do with in­ef­fec­tive polic­ing, it has more to do with the laws be­ing so wa­tered down and so dif­fi­cult for the po­lice to pin­point in­di­vid­u­als to have them la­belled as gang mem­bers.”