Af­ter record­ing its blood­i­est year in his­to­ry with 26 mur­ders in 2024—in­clud­ing the is­land’s first-ever quadru­ple mur­der—To­ba­go is now see­ing a sharp de­cline in killings, with on­ly three record­ed so far for the first half of 2025.

This is ac­cord­ing to Chief Sec­re­tary Far­ley Au­gus­tine, who said all three cas­es have been solved.

For the same pe­ri­od last year, the is­land had record­ed 11 mur­ders. This rep­re­sents a 72 per cent drop in mur­ders, so far in 2025.

Au­gus­tine said the progress is no ac­ci­dent.

“Yes. Well, I feel good about where we are in com­par­i­son to last year,” Au­gus­tine said dur­ing an in­ter­view with Guardian Me­dia on Mon­day af­ter the THA pre­sent­ed its bud­get at the As­sem­bly Leg­is­la­ture in Scar­bor­ough.

“We ac­tu­al­ly got some no­tice­able shifts from Oc­to­ber last year to present, and it shows that it’s worth the in­vest­ments.”

Au­gus­tine said the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly spent mil­lions of dol­lars help­ing the na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty ser­vices do their job on the is­land.

He ex­plained that last year the THA spent $1.4 mil­lion on ve­hi­cles alone to sup­port se­cu­ri­ty op­er­a­tions de­spite na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty not be­ing un­der its re­spon­si­bil­i­ty in the THA Act.

Au­gus­tine said the As­sem­bly al­so in­vest­ed in ac­com­mo­da­tion for of­fi­cers and up­grades to prison and po­lice fa­cil­i­ties. He told the cham­ber dur­ing a ple­nary sit­ting last year that he was pre­pared to be flagged by the Au­di­tor Gen­er­al for tak­ing up the du­ty of cen­tral gov­ern­ment to keep To­bag­o­ni­ans safe.

At that time he brought a mo­tion to en­ter in­to a MOU with the Min­istry of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty.

Au­gus­tine said the mo­tion brought last year sought to for­malise this ap­proach since “it has been work­ing to our ad­van­tage, I think, and this is a good sign.”

The Chief Sec­re­tary said To­ba­go’s progress in fight­ing crime could be a mes­sage to the rest of the coun­try.

“It al­so is a sign to our friends and fam­i­ly in Trinidad that all is not lost, and that we can, in fact, re­verse a mur­der­ous habit.”

Au­gus­tine said To­ba­go is in a much bet­ter place than it was this time last year. But he’s not cel­e­brat­ing just yet.

“I don’t want us to be­come com­pla­cent at all, be­cause some­times one lit­tle thing could be­come a trig­ger and could cause us to fall back in­to the place where we were at,” he warned.

In­stead, the THA plans to keep in­vest­ing in com­mu­ni­ties and pro­grammes to help pre­vent crime.