SHAR­LENE RAM­PER­SAD

The Homi­cide Bu­reau of Po­lice Ser­vice says mur­ders have been on the in­crease since 2011 with an av­er­age of 428 peo­ple killed every year.

At a me­dia brief­ing Tues­day, pub­lic in­for­ma­tion of­fi­cer ASP Sheri­don Hill said the TTPS has no ev­i­dence that there was any spike in mur­ders since for­mer com­mis­sion­er Gary Grif­fith’s term came to an end ten weeks ago.

Re­spond­ing to a me­dia re­port ear­li­er this week, Grif­fith said there were 55 mur­ders in the ten weeks since his con­tract ex­pired, say­ing there was a spike in mur­ders.

But when asked yes­ter­day, Hill de­nied this.

“We have no in­for­ma­tion re­gard­ing that up­surge in crime re­lat­ing to the for­mer com­mis­sion­er, we have no ev­i­dence of that,” Hill said.

Homi­cide Bu­reau su­per­in­ten­dent Rishi Singh pre­sent­ed da­ta show­ing the in­creas­ing trend from 2011 to 2019.

“For this pe­ri­od, the low­est per year was 352 in 2011 and the high­est was in 2019 at 539. There was a gen­er­al up­ward trend from 2011 to that peak in 2019,” Singh said.

He said there was al­so an in­crease not­ed in the third quar­ter of 2021, from Ju­ly to Oc­to­ber.

“The TTPS ob­served that the num­ber of mur­ders be­gan trend­ing up­wards, for the month of Ju­ly in 2020, we had 33, in 2021, there were 38. For Au­gust 2020, there were 23, in Au­gust 2021, there were 35, in Sep­tem­ber 2020, there were 24, in Sep­tem­ber 2021 38 and in Oc­to­ber 2020 there were 34 with 58 in 2021,” Singh said.

He said the po­lice ser­vice has tak­en ‘de­ci­sive ac­tion’ to deal with these in­creas­es and they were con­fi­dent those mea­sures would bear fruit.

Singh said po­lice no­ticed a Venezue­lan as­pect to homi­cides, with Venezue­lans be­ing record­ed as vic­tims and per­pe­tra­tors in some cas­es.

He said the da­ta has al­so shown a new as­pect of or­gan­ised crime dri­ving mur­ders.

“The or­gan­ised crime dy­nam­ic tra­di­tion­al­ly was in fact with­in the drug and firearm do­main, our re­cent analy­ses with re­la­tion to or­gan­ised crime we are ob­serv­ing that pock­ets of in­di­vid­u­als see great wealth in the il­le­gal min­ing sec­tor and what this is do­ing is caus­ing per­sons to want to dom­i­nate that mar­ket niche,” Singh said.