Even as se­ri­ous crimes have re­port­ed­ly been on the de­crease dur­ing the cur­rent COVID-19 pan­dem­ic in T&T, the mur­der rate con­tin­ues to rise with the count reach­ing 159 as com­pared to 151 for same pe­ri­od last year up to Wednesday.

Speak­ing dur­ing Wednes­day’s dai­ly me­dia brief­ing host­ed by the Min­istry of Health, Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Stu­art Young said the de­crease in se­ri­ous crimes had been as a re­sult of the min­istry “im­ple­ment­ing a lot of op­er­a­tions to deal with it”.

“I can as­sure you that a lot of work is be­ing done to keep that crime and crim­i­nal­i­ty down. The mea­sures are very spe­cif­ic mea­sures to deal with COVID-19 in try­ing to make Trinidad and To­ba­go a safer place,” Young said.

Ac­cord­ing to sta­tis­tics sent to the Guardian Me­dia by the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice’s (TTPS) Crime and Prob­lem Analy­sis Branch for the month of March this year, the to­tal re­ports of se­ri­ous crimes stood at 741, with a 29 per cent de­tec­tion rate, as com­pared to 1,135 with a 33 per cent de­tec­tion rate over the same month last year and 1,191 with a 37 per cent de­tec­tion rate in 2018.

How­ev­er, March’s mur­der count stood at 35 as com­pared to 38 last year and 36 in 2018. Of the 35 mur­ders last month, po­lice were on­ly able to make an ar­rest and lay charges in one of them.

Out of an over­all to­tal of 741 se­ri­ous crimes last month, 35 were mur­ders, 48 shoot­ings and wound­ings, 29 re­ports of rape, in­cest and sex­u­al of­fences.

Rob­beries al­so de­creased sig­nif­i­cant­ly last month in com­par­i­son to March last year. The num­ber of rob­beries stood at 189 last month, in com­par­i­son to 260 in March last year.

On­ly on Tues­day, po­lice pre­vent­ing of a bur­glary at a jew­ellery store in Tu­na­puna. Ac­cord­ing to a po­lice re­port, of­fi­cers were on rou­tine mo­bile pa­trol along the East­ern Main Road when they saw a group of men run­ning away from the store. The of­fi­cers stopped to in­ves­ti­gate and found sev­er­al bags con­tain­ing tools to break in­to the premis­es. How­ev­er, the sus­pects es­caped.

Last week, the po­lice al­so start­ed ran­dom road­block ex­er­cis­es to en­sure that peo­ple who did not need to be out­side to con­duct busi­ness or were not es­sen­tial work­ers stayed off the na­tion’s roads.

On March 18, Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er Gary Grif­fith al­so ad­vised cit­i­zens that of­fi­cers would ramp up the en­force­ment of the coun­try’s loi­ter­ing laws over the com­ing weeks in an at­tempt to keep peo­ple from as­sem­bling in large num­bers dur­ing the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic.

Grif­fith said this is be­ing done in line with the re­quest of Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley that the pub­lic prac­tis­es so­cial dis­tanc­ing at this time.

How­ev­er, the CoP said while a large sec­tion of the pop­u­la­tion has ad­hered to the re­quest, he an­tic­i­pates that few would refuse to com­ply. Still, he said he hopes there would be no need to en­force the laws re­lat­ing to loi­ter­ing and as­sured that over the com­ing weeks, the TTPS will in­crease its pa­trols across the coun­try.