Antoine: careful it backfires

PROF Rose-Marie Belle Antoine yesterday warned that hardline action against criminals will likely backfire and cause an escalation of crime.

The outspoken dean of the Faculty of Law, University of the West Indies, St Augustine, made it clear she is not against the police, who have their job to do, and amongst whom she counts many of her former students.

She spoke to Newsday after making a recent post on Facebook in the wake of police shooting dead five individuals at Trou Macaque, Laventille including two boys aged 15 and 16. While the police said the five were killed in a shoot-out in which an officer was grazed by a bullet, relatives of the deceased claim the men were trying to surrender when they were shot dead.

The public reaction on social media had been varied, with some chiding and others lauding the police action. Antoine expressed deep concerns about democracy, inequality and injustice, warning that a short-term and shortsighted approach will always lead to spiralling violence.

“While at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, I saw first-hand how this approach in Mexico, Columbia, Honduras and practically every Latin American country led, not to peace and law and order, but the targeting and slaughter of police, witnesses, ordinary citizens and even the judiciary and political officials.”

She had similar concerns about the Anti-Gang Bill.

“These are short term routes which offer no real solutions.

“The saddest thing is that the public, due to paralysing fear applaud this in their mistaken hope. Also, we never seem to connect the dots. This is the same approach that the US uses against blacks – shoot to kill the presumed guilty and unwanted. We complain about that, don’t we?”

She urged meaningful long-term remedies for social ills.

Antoine elaborated to Newsday: “The citizenry seem to feel it is okay to shoot people whom they believe are criminals or ...in certain areas. But that is not a good road to go down. What I’m afraid of is, it will just escalate, because you will have the criminal element retaliating and so on and it’s a vicious cycle.

“It’s not something new. It’s not as though we haven’t gone down that road before. In countries in Latin America the army became involved and we know what happened.”

Of the hard line, she warned, “It is not the rainbow’s end that people think.”

Antoine said that like everybody else she wants to see less crime and more law and order, adding, “I myself have been a victim of crime.”

While saying longer-term solutions take more effort, she said hardline remedies have already failed in TT and the wider region.

“We always had a hardline approach. We never had an approach where we sought to look at the issue holistically or deeper issues. It’s always revenge, get tough in particular geographical areas and groups. That’s nothing new.

“Now it is seemingly more rhetoric and upping the ante. I don’t see now as any different from before, but now we say it doesn’t matter if there is collateral damage, because it will bring peace and stability.

“But I don’t believe it will bring peace and stability.”

Antoine noted the deaths of gang leaders after a summit with politicians under the Patrick Manning regime.

“Did crime stop?

“No. New leaders popped up – perhaps more vicious. It’s a vicious cycle. That’s not going to stop. This is my fear. When we think we are different, we are not so different from the other countries around us.”