Trinidad and Tobago on Brink
Assault on Our Right to Safety and Security
It has become fashionable these days for Government Ministers with security responsibilities and top Police officials in speeches, media releases, interviews and social media posts to now speak of 'protecting' or ensuring the 'right to safety and security' or the 'safety and security of our citizens.'
Why fashionable? Because until the discussion on the savagery of the 'runaway' murderous criminality has begun to be framed in the context of the Right of All citizens to Safety and Security and the duty of the State to give a guarantee to that Right, as with all other of our fundamental Rights, the discussion was being framed by officialdom as a 'law and order' issue, a public health emergency, etc.
Now, we come to the nana of the matter. Every citizen, by our Constitution, our society's highest law, is to be guaranteed certain fundamental Rights, Safety and Security, like Health being uppermost since without Life we can enjoy no other Right.
Crime and violent crime are now rampant. The perpetrators are increasingly brazen and acting with impunity, no longer even bothering to hide their faces and daring, with no cover of darkness sought.
The media conferences and photo ops following every new outrage; the 'gun talk' and threats via traditional and social media by the top cop or her senior executive and police spokespersons -- "We Are coming for you" or "Don't come back in this area" have all become too commonplace and like the brazen acts of savagery are received with little or no reaction by a population numbed by the regularity and the realization that "nowhere is safe."
"Keep safe" have now become the customary parting words at the end of every social encounter by beleaguered citizens who see no light at the end of the tunnel but can only contemplate our descent into anarchy.
At his media conference yesterday, on his return from his assignments abroad, the Prime Minister was forced to address the "issue" of crime and in particular, the news report of some police having brokered a peace treaty among named gang leaders in the capital city.
Gang activity is criminality, he retorted.
We have the Anti-gang laws, he said.
Well, we have laws against murder, shooting with intent, illegal possession of weapons including high-powered automatic guns, illegal drugs, trafficking in persons, extortion, home invasions. Our statute books are well populated with criminal statutes defining a myriad of offences and even of late, explaining your wealth legislation.
Yet, for all this law, there is no order.
The Prime Minister repeated that the principal agency for fighting crime and ensuring that those who break all those laws are 'brought to account' is the Police, up to recently it was also fashionable to speak of some nebulous 'law enforcement.'
So, if we have so many laws, if we have a police service as primary crime fighting force, why are we still not having our Right to Safety and Security guaranteed.
Well, the PM reassured us that we are buying more police vehicles to carry police whose ranks are to be increased by 1,000 in 2024 and soldiers who we have called out for four months as part of 'providing all the support' that is the Government's duty to do.
But, what of the efficiency and effectiveness of the work of the Police and the other apparatus of security fighting against the 'runaway' crime?
In the world of measurement of performance of either individuals or organizations, modern performance management uses several tools to quantify and analyze, efficiency and effectiveness and an important standard of performance measurement is to begin with identifying Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and setting targets.
In measuring the efficiency and effectiveness of the performance of the police in combatting crime, important KPIs are the Detection and Conviction Rates -- how many of the reported offences are detected (i.e., arrests and charges made and laid) and how many of those detected end in convictions in the criminal justice system?
The Police have repeatedly told us that policing is intelligence-driven and almost daily tell us of crimes and detection "compared for the same period last year" and so on.
The Police keep or are required to keep the numbers daily and there is even a branch responsible for compiling the statistics and they are further reported in the statistics presented by the Central Statistical Office (CSO) providing us with a panoramic view of the crime and detection rates from 1975 to present.
The last Manpower Audit conducted into the Police Service includes those KPI statistics for 1994 -- 2022.
What Do the Statistics Show
The tables can be found on the CSO website here.
Crimes Reported 1975-2022
Look at the total serious crimes reported and murders as a proportion of that total.
Serious crimes reported have increased from less than 10,000 in 1975 to a high of over 20,000 in 2007-2009 but have never returned to the 1975 levels.
Murders (shown in red in graph below) have increased continuously and more so since 2000.
However, while murders are of most concern to the population and despite the record annual murder tolls up to more than 600 in 2022, murders remain a relatively small proportion of total serious crimes for each year.
Here is a running time series from the CSO based on police statistics of the murder tolls since 1975 to 2022.
The annual murder tolls have never returned to below 200 since 2002, for 21 years.
In the last two decades, more than 500 citizens have been murdered in seven of those years including this year, 2023 and more than 600 in 2022.
There have been more than 400 murders per year in 13 of the last 20 years.
Between 2002 and 2022, 20 years, a total of 8,607 citizens have been murdered in this country.
Detection Rates (%) -- 1975-2022
Now to the comparison of crimes reported to crimes detected and the detection rates and how they have varied over the last 48 years.
Between 1975 and 2022, the detection rates for all serious crime have remained almost steady from 20.7% in 1975 to 16.4% in 2022 with a low of 0.4% in 2007.
The detection rate (percentage of reported crimes detected) has never returned to the 1975 level in 47 years.
Between 1975 and 2022, the detection rate for murders has plummeted from 88.3% in 1975 and a high of 94.6% in 1981 to less than 20% since 2012 and a low of 13.1% in 2022.
When viewed over the long-term, the recent concern expressed by the National Security Minister for the low detection rate for murders seems to come at least two decades too late, murder detection rates have never returned to anywhere near the 1999 rate of 72%.
These statistics over a period of almost five decades paint the picture that:
- Serious crime has escalated in the mid-1980s and has never been reduced to pre-1980 levels.
- Serious crimes (reported) have exceeded 15,000 per year for every year between 1987 and 2014.
- The detection rate for all serious crimes has never exceeded 20.7% since 1975.
- The crime scourge has been a very serious issues for at least 35 years and is not a recent development.
- Between 1975 and 2002, the annual murder toll never exceeded 200 and since 2003 record murder tolls have escalated reaching 600+ in 2022 and crossing 500 six (6) times including 2023, the current year.
- 11,223 citizens have been murdered since 1975, more than 9,000 since 2001.
- The detection rate for murders has plummeted from more than 50% up to 2001 to 13.1% in 2022.
What this shows is that the efficiency and effectiveness of the Police Service in combatting the explosion of crimes of all types, and more so the wanton slaughter of citizens by murderers, leaves a lot to be desired, to say the least.
The suggestion that somehow the explosion of serious crimes and of murderous criminality was caused by the 1990 coup attempt cannot be supported when one takes the long view of the facts recorded since 1975.
Apart from the obvious need to step up the efficiency and effectives of the Police Service in detecting and preventing crime, it is obvious that the clichéd pronouncements about bad parents, sinful nature of man, blaming the youth, blaming the gun manufacturers and so on cannot explain the causes of the scourge of criminality and murderous criminality that is plaguing our society, for decades now.
Without determining the root causes, there can be no effective "war on crime," and "law and order" measures will not provide any guarantee for the Right of Safety and Security for all citizens.
This article was published in
Volume 53
Number 12 - December 2023
Article Link:
https://cpcml.ca/Tmlm2023/Articles/M5301220.HTM
Website: www.cpcml.ca Email: editor@cpcml.ca