Ot­to Car­ring­ton

As calls con­tin­ued for his re­moval as Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter, Fitzger­ald Hinds de­clared yes­ter­day that he will not be dis­tract­ed.

“I am now fit and ready for this fight. I will not be moved,” he said in an ad­dress at a Ro­tary Club lun­cheon.

“I will do as min­is­ter what you want me to do and I’m con­fi­dent that with your help and with the greater ef­fi­cien­cy of all the agen­cies that we’re work­ing through, we to­geth­er can treat with it,” he said.

In his ad­dress, Hinds fo­cused on crime and im­mi­gra­tion is­sues. He re­vealed that there are more than 70,000 Venezue­lan mi­grants in T&T— much more than the 16,000 who reg­is­tered to live and work in this coun­try in 2019.

He said when Gov­ern­ment of­fered “com­fort in a mi­grant reg­is­tra­tion frame­work, some came for­ward, some did not.”

“Notwith­stand­ing that, anec­do­tal­ly I’m be­ing told we have about 70,000 of them around here. That’s some­thing we have to man­age and they come with their usu­al cul­tures too, so we in Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty are see­ing el­e­ments of an­ti­so­cial and oth­er be­hav­iours in­side of that, so that is the is­sue to deal with as well.”

Ac­cord­ing to Hinds, there are ap­prox­i­mate­ly 274 il­le­gal points of en­try that are used by hu­man traf­fick­ers and to smug­gle guns and drugs in­to the coun­try.

On the is­sue of crime, with more than 200 mur­ders al­ready record­ed for the year, the min­is­ter said Gov­ern­ment is work­ing to in­crease the de­tec­tion rate.

“We grad­u­at­ed, I think, about 79 crime scene in­ves­ti­ga­tors. These are the peo­ple you will see in white com­ing on the crime scenes to try to im­prove the po­lice’s de­tec­tion and solve rates for these mur­ders,” he said.

“As I told them this morn­ing, if you don’t solve the crime, a num­ber of im­pli­ca­tions flow from that. One of them is that the crim­i­nals feel em­bold­ened and in the sick crim­ino­genic mind, be­cause peo­ple do have crim­ino­genic ten­den­cies, minds, and fea­tures, spurred on by the things they read, the movies they watch, the mu­sic they lis­ten to and I said that re­cent­ly.

“The oth­er prob­lem we have is every time you try to do some­thing that your in­tel­lect, your du­ty and the ex­perts even sug­gest that you do, rah, rah, rah, rah, this is a very noisy place, a lot of dis­trac­tions and one has to be able to ig­nore a whole lot of stuff and stay fo­cused on what is in front of us.”