Gaslighting citizens

Trinbagonians aren’t fools. Murder and robbery are now routine in our daily lives. And when most of us are killed or robbed, there are no arrests. Our property does not come back. That is what we know. When police are discourteous or ravenous to us—and even when they violate fundamental rights—apologies don’t happen, and redress is at best rare. And long in coming. In communities that we share with gangs and bandits, lawlessness breeds police abuse. Not only does this fail to protect us, it ensnares us as well, sometimes fatally.

On the whole, TT’s systems of redress or justice for social injury are at best inefficient. A bureaucratic insistence on form over outcomes across our society and government retards even simple solutions. And even if there is reason for hope that new investments and imaginative leaders can reinvent policing and the courts, or offer new mechanisms for dealing with old issues, our experience of the multiple failures of both—and demonstrable flaws and arrogance on the part of those pioneering change—breed deep cynicism.

We are also smart enough to recognise how power and patronage work. And we know as a fundamental fact that, despite nice talk about merit, fairness and equality, that people of influence receive different treatment than others. They have different access: they skip lines and humiliating waits. They are given the benefit of any doubt: judged by a different set of rules. They are often exempt from punishment. They get opportunities through networks and relationships others do not. And those in government or connected to parties in power are demonstrably among those who benefit.

In times of economic hardship, when people are called on to make national sacrifices, when literally thousands lose jobs, credibility become most important in leadership. Big decisions with deep economic and social impact, like the closure of the Petrotrin refinery, are being made with little sense of listening or public involvement. People are most likely in times like these to lose all faith in those in office. And to disbelieve those in power, even when they are not trying to deceive.

Most of us know if someone splashes muddy floodwater in our direction—and certainly if it happens in east Port of Spain—police officers aren’t going to make arrests or bring charges. When our iPhone is stolen in a robbery, it is exceptional that police track it down, let alone recover it. I’m eager to find a reader who has called the tip number Gary Griffith offered the public, intending to report police discourtesy, who got through, or got a response.

It’s less the recent incidents themselves involving three Cabinet ministers and their family—Colm Imbert, Fitzgerald Hinds and Robert Le Hunte—that stoke a sense of fury and scorn. It’s the pretence that these ministers and their relatives were treated like ordinary citizens. We’re not that dumb. We’d sooner put up with those in power abusing it than them trying to gaslight us that it’s just our imagination.

It’s also a matter of priorities. That is why I was baffled that, in the wake of palpable public and media cynicism about police action to rescue a phone from the Beetham, two other ministers and the honeymooning Commissioner of Police have picked the battles that they have. Why so flagrantly rub salt in the wound of an already smarting public?

And the answer is the same one I arrive at over and over. We are obsessed with authority.

While violence rages, the seabridge remains broken, and we are bracing for the hard lash of reforming Petrotrin, Fitzgerald Hinds made it his priority to pursue a case that police prosecuted in court to exact a $400 fine for a splash. What was the cost to the nation in time he would have spent in his ministry, and to the court? The time police would have spent making sure vehicles aren’t re-stolen from under their noses.

And it’s $300, actually; $100 of it was for the cuss. In 2018, using words in the Oxford English dictionary and the pages of books on many storeshelves, including ones by local authors, remains an offence we are still charging people with. Or at least people from misrepresented communities we want to politically harass.

Did intervening with officers on the street on a Sunday in response to a call from a government minister, who was treated the way ordinary citizens are by police every day, convince anyone that the new commissioner cares about how police treat us. If he wants to make an impression about police accountability, next time police shoot and kill a cockroach running away from them, show up to teach police there a lesson.