Hours af­ter say­ing the State will re­dou­ble all ef­forts in ad­dress­ing crime, Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley met with mem­bers of his Gov­ern­ment and the heads of the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice and T&T De­fence Force.

How­ev­er, fol­low­ing the meet­ing, the Prime Min­is­ter re­fused to give an ex­pla­na­tion about how ex­act­ly the State in­tend­ed to do so or clar­i­fy what the re­dou­bling of ef­forts would mean for cit­i­zens.

Con­tact­ed by phone, Row­ley at first said he was busy, but when pressed for clar­i­ty Row­ley said, “There is noth­ing to clar­i­fy.”

Around 8 am yes­ter­day, Row­ley, in a Face­book post, said, “The State will re­dou­ble all ef­forts to cur­tail these vi­o­lent out­bursts, will hunt down and dis­arm the per­pe­tra­tors and will make op­er­a­tional ad­just­ments so that the state se­cu­ri­ty ser­vices can act with dis­patch against the vi­o­lent co­hort of our na­tion­al pop­u­la­tion.”

He added that the love af­fair and glam­ouri­sa­tion of guns, cou­pled with the wan­ton dis­re­gard for hu­mans had gone be­yond con­cern­ing to the ridicu­lous, adding that the cur­rent vi­o­lent crime spree will not be tol­er­at­ed.

The state­ment came a day af­ter eight peo­ple were mur­dered in three sep­a­rate shoot­ings with­in 24 hours. Two of the three killings were mul­ti­ple mur­ders.

Hours lat­er, Row­ley made an­oth­er post say­ing he was meet­ing with Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice Er­la Hare­wood-Christo­pher and act­ing Chief of De­fence Staff Cap­tain Kem­ba Han­nays, Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Fitzger­ald Hinds, En­er­gy Min­is­ter Stu­art Young, At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Regi­nald Ar­mour and Min­is­ter of Hous­ing Camille Robin­son-Reg­is at the of­fi­cial res­i­dence of the Prime Min­is­ter in St Ann’s.

Guardian Me­dia called and mes­saged oth­er at­ten­dees for an up­date but all at­tempts were un­suc­cess­ful.

Row­ley had a sim­i­lar meet­ing on Ju­ly 16, where he met act­ing Chief of De­fence Staff Brig Gen Dex­ter Fran­cis, the di­rec­tor of the Strate­gic Ser­vices Agency and the ex­ec­u­tive mem­bers of the TTPS.

That four-hour long meet­ing came a day af­ter po­lice said there should be vet­ted units in the po­lice ser­vice that should be paid high­er than their col­leagues fo­cused on weed­ing out cor­rupt of­fi­cers and tack­ling crim­i­nals in im­mi­gra­tion, cus­toms and pol­i­tics.

“One of the prob­lems that we have is that there are too many crim­i­nals in the po­lice ser­vice. So when you’re go­ing af­ter the non-po­lice crim­i­nals, they have their friends in the po­lice ser­vice to tip them off,” Row­ley said of his plan to cre­ate the vet­ted unit then.