Joshua Seemu­n­gal

Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley has la­belled the coun­try’s crime sit­u­a­tion as “un­usu­al­ly hor­ren­dous,” ad­mit­ting the coun­try has se­ri­ous so­cial dif­fi­cul­ties.

Ad­dress­ing a post-Cab­i­net news con­fer­ence at Diplo­mat­ic Cen­tre, St Ann’s, yes­ter­day, Row­ley said the crime sit­u­a­tion re­quires sev­er­al in­ter­ven­tions. He said while there are cur­rent­ly in­ter­ven­tions avail­able, they aren’t enough.

“I can’t re­call a pe­ri­od of time, in a pe­ri­od of weeks, such vi­cious­ness of crime and fre­quen­cy of crime in, and among, fam­i­ly mem­bers out on the street. It was just a while ago that I made a com­ment that we are a vi­o­lent so­ci­ety and ap­par­ent­ly there are peo­ple at­tempt­ing to prove that state­ment true,” Dr Row­ley said.

“Some of the crimes com­ing to us on an hourly ba­sis, you have to ask your­self, what are these peo­ple think­ing?”

Dr Row­ley said he re­cent­ly spent time meet­ing with young stu­dents in his con­stituen­cy and he’s al­ways amazed by their in­no­cence.

How­ev­er, he lament­ed that some chil­dren lose their in­no­cence as they get old­er and find them­selves in crime.

“The ques­tion I come away with is what hap­pens to these an­gels by a time they get to a par­tic­u­lar age? Where is the an­gel­ic be­ing? Some­thing is wrong be­tween then and there.”

Asked if he be­lieved enough is be­ing done to com­bat crime at the high­est lev­els, Row­ley said the coun­try could nev­er do enough as long as such vi­o­lent crimes con­tin­ue to take place.

He ad­mit­ted that much more needs to be done.

“There’s no­body in this fight against crime. No­body is get­ting a pass. If you know your fam­i­ly mem­bers have a gun, you’re not get­ting a pass from me. If you know your friends on the block who you spend the day with and are not look­ing for a job, but plan­ning the next crime, you’re not get­ting a pass,” he said.

Ac­knowl­edg­ing that the pan­dem­ic and its cor­re­spond­ing pub­lic health mea­sures in­creased men­tal health is­sues in the coun­try, he said it was still not the cause of the coun­try’s vi­o­lent na­ture.

He said it may have ex­ac­er­bat­ed it, but it ex­ist­ed be­fore COVID-19 ar­rived in Trinidad and To­ba­go.

“The ones that hurt the most are in­tra-fam­i­ly vi­o­lence be­cause house­hold and fam­i­ly, that is the cas­tle,” he said.

“When did we cre­ate the peo­ple who say they have a rea­son for what they are do­ing be­cause they didn’t get this or get that?”

There have been more than 202 homi­cides in Trinidad for the year.

Of that fig­ure, the Trinidad and To­ba­go Po­lice Ser­vice’s Homi­cide Bu­reau es­ti­mat­ed that around 38 per cent has been gang-re­lat­ed, 17 per cent were drug-re­lat­ed, 13 per cent rob­bery-re­lat­ed and 15 per cent were as a re­sult of do­mes­tic vi­o­lence/al­ter­ca­tions.

The TTPS al­so es­ti­mates that there are more than 12,000 il­le­gal guns in the coun­try.

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