The pub­lic would have been greet­ed by the en­ter­pris­ing news on Mon­day that the Trinidad and To­ba­go Po­lice Ser­vice had brought down a hu­man traf­fick­ing ring in­volv­ing mi­grants in To­ba­go.

That three fe­male Lati­na mi­nors were res­cued in the op­er­a­tion made it even more im­por­tant to the au­thor­i­ties’ ef­forts to elim­i­nate the scourge of hu­man traf­fick­ing in this coun­try.

But news of this lat­est op­er­a­tion must not be in­ter­pret­ed just yet as giv­ing the im­pres­sion that law en­force­ment of­fi­cers have made any sig­nif­i­cant dent in the de­hu­man­is­ing ac­tiv­i­ty be­ing con­duct­ed with­in Trinidad and To­ba­go shores, even by non-na­tion­als with sig­nif­i­cant links to in­ter­na­tion­al crime or­gan­i­sa­tions.

In­deed, while this lat­est op­er­a­tion caught three for­eign na­tion­als in­volved in the ac­tiv­i­ty, it was but a drop in the buck­et in terms of what is left to be done lo­cal­ly con­cern­ing this crim­i­nal en­ter­prise.

For starters, there will be no con­clu­sion un­til the three ac­cused join the list of peo­ple who have been con­vict­ed un­der the Traf­fick­ing in Per­sons Act, which now, quite shock­ing­ly, on­ly stands at just one in­di­vid­ual.

More im­por­tant­ly, an ini­tial in­ves­ti­ga­tion by Guardian Me­dia re­vealed that the Bethel neigh­bours of the three ac­cused, one Colom­bian man and two women of Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic ori­gin, claimed to be com­plete­ly un­aware of the al­leged il­lic­it ac­tiv­i­ty their neigh­bours may have been in­volved in. It is not past us that some of the cas­es in­volv­ing mi­grant vic­tims fall apart af­ter the al­leged vic­tims refuse to tes­ti­fy.

An­oth­er crit­i­cal as­pect of this lat­est case is the fact that of­fi­cers from the Counter Traf­fick­ing Unit and the Spe­cial In­ves­ti­ga­tion Task Force in Trinidad jour­neyed to To­ba­go, ap­par­ent­ly un­be­knownst to their coun­ter­parts on that is­land, to un­der­take the sur­veil­lance and ex­e­cu­tion of ar­rests them­selves. This prac­tice, of course, is ne­ces­si­tat­ed, in part, be­cause rogue el­e­ments of the TTPS con­tin­ue to ei­ther di­rect­ly or in­di­rect­ly fa­cil­i­tate the crim­i­nal net­works be­hind such ac­tiv­i­ty.

Of course, the stain of An­tho­ny Michael Smith, who was con­vict­ed in ab­sen­tia of five charges, in­clud­ing hu­man traf­fick­ing, af­ter ab­scond­ing while on bail last month, re­mains un­til such time as he is cap­tured and serves time for the acts he was found guilty of.

It is to be not­ed that all this is tak­ing place in the con­text of the fact that T&T re­mains at Tier 2 on the Unit­ed States De­part­ment of State's Traf­fick­ing in Per­sons Re­port Watch List. This es­sen­tial­ly means that de­spite its best ef­forts, the Gov­ern­ment has not yet met the min­i­mum stan­dards of the Unit­ed Na­tions’ Traf­fick­ing in Per­sons Pro­to­col and the US Traf­fick­ing Vic­tims Pro­tec­tion (2000) Act, al­though seem­ing­ly mak­ing ef­forts to achieve cer­tain cri­te­ria.

The lack of con­vic­tions for hu­man traf­fick­ing of­fences would have been a ma­jor rea­son for this coun­try's grad­ing and un­til law en­force­ment makes more ar­rests of al­leged hu­man traf­fick­ers, the coun­try will not get any clos­er to achiev­ing these goals.

Of course, the po­lice are not alone in this ac­tiv­i­ty, since there are mem­bers of the pub­lic who con­tin­ue to turn a blind eye to hu­man traf­fick­ing op­er­a­tions, even in their com­mu­ni­ties -in­clu­sive of so-called high-pro­file res­i­den­tial ar­eas where such op­er­a­tions are not on­ly es­tab­lished but flour­ish.

Need­less to say, just like the con­stant calls be­ing made for ac­tion in oth­er as­pects of crime fight­ing, cit­i­zens can­not con­tin­ue to see such ac­tiv­i­ty go­ing on and ex­pect sig­nif­i­cant counter strides with­out say­ing some­thing about it to law en­force­ment.