Eliz­a­beth Gon­za­les

To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly Deputy Chief Sec­re­tary Faith Breb­nor says the gov­ern­ment wait­ed too long to de­clare a state of emer­gency, as mur­ders in Trinidad and To­ba­go have reached record lev­els.

“I hon­est­ly don’t know be­cause it seems like we wait­ed un­til the thing had gone too far be­fore do­ing any­thing mean­ing­ful,” Breb­nor told Guardian Me­dia in an im­me­di­ate re­sponse.

She al­so slammed the Prime Min­is­ter, par­tic­u­lar­ly since he is head of the Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Coun­cil, say­ing, “I guess the Prime Min­is­ter, as head of the Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Coun­cil hav­ing seen the trends from the be­gin­ning of the year, on­ly now re­alis­es that we are in a dif­fi­cult stitch, which is dis­ap­point­ing and it def­i­nite­ly shows a qual­i­ty of his lead­er­ship.”

Breb­nor said she is ea­ger to hear the par­tic­u­lars of what the state of emer­gency ac­tu­al­ly in­volves. “Be­cause again, we are lit­er­al­ly just hear­ing about it. I don’t even know what the pa­ra­me­ters of the state of emer­gency in­clude be­cause it can be a to­tal lock­down, but we can al­so have oth­er vari­a­tions of it,” she ex­plained.

She added, “So I have no in­for­ma­tion about that, so it’s hard to de­ter­mine how it will im­pact on us. With­out un­der­stand­ing what it is, I’m hop­ing that the Prime Min­is­ter and who­ev­er else would come out and ac­tu­al­ly say to the peo­ple what this par­tic­u­lar­ly means so that we can know what to do.”